Nutrition Adequacy: When Enough Feels Like Too Much
I often ask the following question to my clients:
Who are you with food on the other side of this work we will do together?
A common answer is: “On the other side of this work, I am a person who eats on a regular basis, choosing food based on a combination of preference, budget, time, skill level and informed by health factors. I eat my meal or snack and move on with my day without pre-occupation and guilt. I eat enough so I’m not hungry.”
A peaceful relationship with food has nothing to do with your clothing size, body weight, or BMI. It recognizes the impact of anti-fat bias and weight stigma, but it supports you to eat eat in response to your hunger, your schedule, your food, and your feelings.
For the month of September, I’ve been using the RAVES approach as one (of many) methods of explaining a stepwise process to learn an eating style that is flexible and takes up some of your time and attention but keeps its place as only one of the important areas of your life.
Last week, I wrote about the “R” in RAVES in the blog post Establishing a Regular Eating Pattern.
This week let’s talk about the “A” which stands for adequate. After doing the work to eat at regular intervals, the next step in the work of moving away from dieting and healing from an eating disorder is to learn what enough looks like on a plate and feels like in your body. Even if it’s the same five things at first. Even if it’s only the foods that feel safe. This is about trust and this is about adequacy.
The definition of adequate is sufficient for a specific need or requirement; good enough.
Here’s a fact for you: most humans age 10 and up need a minimum of 2000 calories each day. That’s the MINIMUM. Remember, calories are simply a way of measuring potential energy that could be provided to the human body through food and drink.
The science supports that we probably need to be eating more than we realize since the typical weight loss diet (the rules of which are burned into our brains) recommends we consume less than our bodies need.
So, why does eating enough feel so challenging?
First, our country, in all of its wealth and abundance, has a pervasive problem of food insecurity.
Food insecurity is the disruption of food intake or eating patterns because of lack of money and other resources; it is a form of forced starvation or semi-starvation and disrupts/prevents attuned eating styles.
This article states, “Recent research has discovered that adults who experience significant food deprivation on a regular basis are more likely to engage in several disordered eating behaviors. Compared with individuals who have regular access to food, individuals with food insecurity engaged in more objective binge eating and overeating, night-time eating, purging and other compensatory behaviors (such as exercising harder than usual and using laxatives/water pills), food restriction (such as skipping meals), and dietary restraint.
Second, we live in a culture that encourages us to walk around hungry.
It instructs us to adopt self-induced starvation or semi-starvation behaviors and rewards us with a sense of belonging, safety, dignity, and power for doing so.
Third, we don’t know what to do with the feeling of fullness.
The fear and negative judgement of the feeling of fullness is often a driving force to why many people don’t eat an adequate amount of food. I hear it all the time, “I’m hungry but I can’t stand the guilt and shame of having eaten enough.” Not, having eaten too much, but having eaten enough (adequately).
This week, in my practice, I kept track of (1) how many of my clients were put on a diet as children, (2) how many were rewarded with positive attention, a sense of belonging, safety, and respect from their adult primary caregiver (key attachment figure) for enacting dieting behavior as a child (<18 years of age) and (3) how many witnessed their adult primary caregiver (key attachment figure) enact dieting behaviors. The results of my informal research indicated 100% of my clients experienced all three and 100% of my clients present to my clinic with some level of disordered eating, preoccupation with food, body dissatisfaction, and carry a general sense of shame/"wrongness" about their relationship with food and their body.
Are we so afraid of fatness and seduced by the idea that certain foods have a higher moral standing that we will sacrifice the health, true safety, and sense of self of CHILDREN? Are we so blind to the false gospel of diet culture (thinness = worth, beauty, and acceptability) that we feel safer restricting a child’s intake and shaming their behavior around food?
If your child is in a body that is bigger than you (the pediatrician, the PE teacher, and/or our culture) are comfortable with, I beg of you: PLEASE do not punish your child by restricting their energy intake or judging their food preferences. Restricting a child’s energy intake only does harm.
The act of eating is not transactional (despite what calorie/macro tracking apps tell us) and it is not neutral. Eating is an emotional experience, a fact that can feel like a bitter pill to swallow.
It is not a failure to be full and it is not a failure to experience feelings connected to eating.
We live in a culture that is obsessed with “doing things right”, hence the “need” for tracking apps. We are bombarded with messages about nutrition that change constantly, but share the common thread that we cannot be trusted to eat “right” if left to our own devices. We are conditioned to believe that we must rely an external guideline to dictate choice and measure success/failure (did we eat the correct balance of macros, did we limit our energy intake to the calculated number of calories, are we taking enough steps *oh PUH-LEASE!!).
The bottom line is that if you deprive your body of adequate energy, there are consequences, and sustained weight loss/suppression is not one of them. If you deprive your body of adequate energy, your wise body reacts to a negative energy balance by lowering metabolism (hormonal adaptation) , increasing hunger, increasing food preoccupation, and enhancing hedonic responses to food. Also, there is risk that restrictive eating will start a cascade of internal dominoes, ending in the expression of a once dormant gene, creating the perfect environment for Anorexia Nervosa to find purchase in your (or your child’s) psyche. It’s no small effect that dieting has on our body and relationship with food.
What I want is for you and your children to eat enough. What I want is to sit with you and bear witness to all the factors that make eating enough feel impossible. What I want is to help you find a way forward.
If any of you are parents and find yourself sitting in the discomfort, self-doubt, and confusion that comes with detaching from diet culture and attaching to approaches such as Ellyn Satter's Division of Responsibility and a more permissive/flexible/preference-based eating style with your kids, know this: Your discomfort is paving the way to FREEDOM and true health/wholeness for your children. I promise.
Practices for Moving Away from Dieting:
Some things to try this week
Journal Prompt/Thought Experiment
We aren’t born fearing fullness or hating our bodies. That sh*t is learned. Let’s examine intergenerational attitudes and beliefs around bodies/eating. Put on your anthropologist’s hat (metaphorically, of course. I don’t think there is such a thing as a literal anthropologist’s hat).
Go two generations back and look for signs of dieting mindset, rigid food rules, body-dissatisfaction, fat stigma/fear of fatness, food insecurity, image crafting (even before the age of social media).
What memories do you have of your grandparents/great aunts and uncles making comments about bodies and food choices of strangers, family members, etc.? How did that affect them and their ability to have positive body respect and eating competence? Realizing the impact of these beliefs, how might you disrupt this learned-behavior with how you eat, talk about food, treat your body, and talk about your body?
Community Action for Self-Healing
Would you like to help fight food insecurity in your community? Check out these ideas on how to do so.
Eat the Food
Create a meal plan that is driven by the motivation to eat enough. Need help? Reach out!
Sit with Fullness
Experiment with eating the meals and snacks that satisfy your desires/preferences and bring you to a feeling of noticeable fullness.
Notice any physical or emotional discomfort that is linked to the feeling of fullness.
Notice if you have an impulse to do something about this fullness; examples: plan to restrict your intake later, take a walk/workout to compensate for your eating, purging behavior (if you aren’t sure what this is, reach out and we can chat), berate/criticize yourself internally or to others.
See if you can hold off on these compensatory behaviors. How might you manage distress tolerance to protect and honor your fullness that does not include compensatory behaviors?
Set a timer for 30 minute intervals. At each alarm, check in with your level of fullness to bring awareness to how your body shows you she (he/it) is doing her (his/its) job of digesting and processing the food you consumed. Notice the interval at which hunger cues begin to emerge.
Acknowledge the work of your body. And, if possible, thank your body.