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Eating Habits

The self-boundary around what and how we eat – like those around fitness and sleep – is utterly essential for our physical and mental wellbeing. Yet it is a line many people find increasingly difficult to draw.

If you found the section subheading ‘Fitness’ not to your taste, the chances are you will have also felt a strong reaction to seeing the words ‘eating habits’ – perhaps even a judgemental one.

Now is not the time to be swayed off-course. Your dietary needs are important as being well-fuelled is not just an end in itself, it’s vital to establishing all your self-boundaries. Food for human beings is not an option or a luxury.

First, let’s make it plain that when we talk about eating habits we don’t just mean a diet to shed weight. We’re talking about a lifelong healthy attitude towards food and drink, which nourishes as well as pleases.

So what is your initial reaction to food? Tick any of these which apply:

‘I should be on a slimming diet, I shouldn’t eat sugar, I shouldn’t eat meat, I shouldn’t eat bread.’

• ‘I shouldn’t eat on the run, I should eat at a table.’

• ‘It’s my job to feed everyone else. I believe I am always having to cook even if I’m not hungry. I like to feed others.’

• ‘Men need to eat large portions of meat to stay strong.’

• ‘I eat a sandwich at my desk because that’s my workplace culture.’

• ‘I need to stop and eat. I must have three courses.’

• ‘I like keeping chocolate in the house as it tests my willpower and I feel good when others eat it and I don’t.’

• ‘I never allow myself what I would really like – a sticky bun. I’m an expert at counting calories.’

• ‘I’ve done every diet. None work.’

• ‘I don’t like it but I notice what other people eat, and I can’t seem to stop myself judging them in my head.’

Note any you recognise or endorse. Do they sound a little bossy or authoritative?

Other reactions might be more emotional, child-like, compliant, or rebellious:

• ‘I have to eat everything on my plate, I have to have pudding. I need to eat at a certain time. Food is comforting, soothing and/or rewarding.’

• ‘One biscuit isn’t enough. No one will know if I eat more, it’s my naughty secret.’

• ‘I only feel OK if I have chocolate.’

• ‘I don’t like to eat in front of other people.’

• ‘I feel good empty.’

• ‘I feel good full.’

• ‘I’ll happily swap calories in food for calories in alcohol.’

• ‘I toy with my food.’

• ‘I believe I have food intolerances.’

• ‘I get angry if I can’t get what I want to eat or when I want to eat.’

• ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.’

• ‘I will eat what I like and hang the consequences.’

You may have felt any or all of these at some time. So, how can you shift into an Adult, boundaried approach to eating?

BRING IN THE BOUNDARIES:

Your Eating Habits Plan

We’re now going to show you how to make a plan around your eating so you can establish those dietary self-boundaries.

First, ask yourself what statements did you agree with from the examples above? It is likely you will have reacted strongly to one set or the other.

The first set – the Parental-type authoritative or judgemental messages – included: ‘you should do this’, ‘it’s bad to eat like that’. The second set are more emotional child-like messages: ‘I have to eat it all up’, ‘one biscuit isn’t enough’. Or you may be assailed by a mixture of the two. Let’s look at how you can break the cycle of messages and establish a new healthy self-boundary for each of your possible responses.

If you agree with the parental-type messages

First, acknowledge the problem. You may have already realised you cannot ignore those messages. Develop a mantra to use when you hear those voices. For example, ‘I hear you but that’s really not useful to me right now’.

Admit the history of your habit. You may have been eating according to guidelines put in place 30 years ago (e.g., always eat your potatoes first, never eat meat on a Friday). But you can acknowledge that the habit is not relevant for you now and it is time to change. You can take a decision that is right for you today, not as a response to those past messages/beliefs.

We’d like you to think of some strategies and note them down in your Learning Journal; these prompts will help you start:

• Do you know the difference between feeling hungry and thirsty?

• Focus on yourself and not what other people are eating.

• Stop fixating on your own food choices.

• Let others do the cooking; step back at least once a week.

• Having examined your own behaviour, what three small changes could you put in place? Write these down. Now, make a plan of who or what is most likely to sabotage your updated eating habits and how you could stop them breaching your new self-boundaries. Note down every week in your Learning Journal how you feel. Don’t forget it takes a month to change a habit so be patient but consistent.

EXERCISE: Reset the Work Lunch

Did you nod in agreement at ‘I eat at my desk/on the run’? If so, you may be thinking: what’s wrong with that? I can keep working, and my boss sees how committed I am. Or if you are the boss, your employees can see how seriously you take your job.

But consider, where is the enjoyment in what you are eating, or pleasure in having a break? Eating while working will involve gulping down your food – you may not feel full, you may eat for longer than you need, or you may suffer indigestion. You also risk not monitoring how you are feeling as you eat so may well eat more or less than you think.

You are certainly denying yourself a natural break in the day. Is it really your boss’s and co-workers’ expectations that you should eat at your desk every day or are you buying into an unhealthy work culture? Rather than your boss respecting you for your devotion, they may see you as a bit of a doormat – and what happens to doormats? They get walked on.

Draw the Line: don’t let fear or embarrassment get in the way of caring for yourself. You cannot support others until your own foundations are truly secure.

Acknowledge that you are not caring for yourself either physically or practically in terms of your career with this action. Note that it will feel uncomfortable to change this behaviour. It is going to take a while to feel OK.

Week One: make a contract with yourself. For the first five days, decide to leave your desk for 30 minutes at lunchtime – and set the time you will do this. It might be 12.30 p.m., 1 p.m., or 1.30 p.m. depending on what suits your work. You need to get up and walk away from your desk, taking your lunch with you, or going to another place like the canteen, a local café, or a bench in the park. Accept that you will feel uncomfortable but that sensation will change as you persist.

Week Two: it may have been a bit bumpy (people might have wondered where you were, phones may have gone unanswered, but the world of work has not fallen apart) so now you need to firm up that boundary – and give yourself 60 minutes. It may help to note the benefits at this point: you get to recharge your batteries, you talk to different work colleagues in the canteen, you notice you no longer get heartburn in the afternoon, you see other colleagues develop the confidence to do the same, and you realise your boss may respect you more.

Week Three: walking to get your lunch is becoming part of your fitness regime. You concentrate on what you eat and therefore take a healthier portion. You may find yourself losing weight and sleeping better. Your self-boundaries are working in harmony and supporting each other.

Bear in mind for this to be maintained long term, it has to be within the parameters of reality. You know what your job demands and when the busy periods are. If you’re in a customer-facing position, your lunch may have to come at 2 p.m. or even 3 p.m., but it can still be a ring-fenced time and a much-needed break.

Week Four: make sure you notice the longer-term positives. These might be: better-quality lunches, improved relations with colleagues, a feeling of freshness in the afternoon and a renewed enthusiasm towards your job.

If you agree with the Child-like messages

If your dominant messaging around food is Child-like, how can you begin to eat in a more Adult fashion?

To start with, when you sit down to a meal, take a moment to register how you feel. Your Child-like attitudes are emotional, not cerebral. Give yourself some space to let those feelings float up to the surface so you can acknowledge them.

Again, using your Learning Journal to make notes, decide on several changes and see how that makes you feel. For example, you could practice leaving food on your plate once you reach the point of fullness (not forcing yourself to ‘eat it all up’). Avoid hoarding sweet treats, and explore your diet. You don’t have to eat the way you always have – you can choose from now on.

Stop and consider why you are moving towards the fridge/cupboard – ask yourself if you really are hungry, and what has just triggered this thought/action?

When one biscuit isn’t enough – an end to binge eating

Is this you? Notice what you feel in acknowledging this.

Scientists are particularly interested in the way our brains seem to support comfort- and binge eating instead of preventing it. According to a team led by Kay Tye, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, in research published in the journal Cell in January 2015, there are specific neural pathways which transmit feelings of reward when we overeat sugar, developed perhaps to encourage consumption in times of famine when food became transiently available.

Tye says: ‘We have not yet adapted to a world where there is an overabundance of sugar, so these circuits that drive us to stuff ourselves with sweets are now serving to create a new health problem.’ Does that mean overeating is inevitable? Not at all. The brain’s natural plasticity – its ability to re-draw its neural pathways – means we can embed new messages of reward and support through behavioural change.

These old pathways were important to our ancestors, but in our modern times of consistently plentiful food (indeed over-supply), we need to analyse our motivations for eating too much. Ask yourself what is the trigger for the first biscuit? Perhaps you are having coffee with a friend and enjoying some biscuits; there is nothing wrong with that. What we are talking about here is the ‘closet-eater’ – the one who consumes a packet of biscuits or a family-sized bar of chocolate at a time. If this is you, are you aware of any feeling of secrecy or hoarding around food, whether you live alone or not? How else does it make you feel? Comforted, happy, full, sad, sick, guilty, or full of self-loathing? The fact that you may feel any of these emotions regardless of whether you live in company or alone is a good indicator of why this is a self-boundary that needs work.

If you want to stop binge eating, you need to identify the triggers that inspire this behaviour. It may be certain tasks that take you to the biscuit tin, like dealing with paperwork or relationships. If you think back over the past week, look at a time when you know you have done this and consider what had happened just before. You might be at the biscuits not because you feel hungry, but because you had a row with someone close. So, what might be a different response to the row?

It could be that rather than opening the biscuit tin, you open your heart and compose a ‘no-send’ letter expressing how you are feeling. ‘No-send’ is the important part. Once you have written that letter – ideally by hand – stand up, take some breaths, get a drink of water, and re-read it. What action could you take now? Do you need to talk to this person? Do you need to confide in someone else?

Is it a repeating pattern of feelings that are not being expressed out loud that is sending you to the biscuit jar? Beware of swallowing difficult feelings with food. You can’t escape from those feelings. When the biscuits have gone, the problem will remain and you will now have increased the discomfort. Ask yourself how often you overeat through sheer happiness? You may have a celebratory glass of fizz or a slice of cake, but happiness rarely seems to drive the need for regular overconsumption.

Being aware of the trigger can help establish that self-boundary (and we look at how to deal with difficult relationships and boundaries with others in a later step).

Mixed messaging

Some people reading the lists at the start of the food section will have agreed with statements from both lists. The dialogue across your internal debating table might look like this:

‘Food costs a lot of money, you need to eat what you’re given.’ (A Parental voice.)

‘Yes, I’ll eat everything on my plate.’ (A Child-like response.)

You need to think about all the messages equally in order to get to an Adult place. So, you could reframe those statements this way:

‘The food costs a lot of money but I know what I can afford and I stick to that budget.’

‘I use that food to prepare a portion size that is appropriate to my needs.’

These statements come from a healthy Adult place where your eating habits are decided by sensible here-and-now arguments, not historic feelings or orders.

Aspirational eating

Why does food have to be good or bad? Proponents of the new healthy eating – often displayed on an Instagram post and hash-tagged #cleaneating, #purefood and #fitfood – seem to be defending a non-processed food diet. At a time of obesity (where manufactured food is sometimes associated with high salt and sugar content) what’s unreasonable about that? Shouldn’t we all try to eat more like our ancestors did – wouldn’t that end the obesity crisis?

Many dieticians would agree that food with fewer additives can only be better for you. However, the trend towards eating in an aspirational way seems to be more complex and we have a different goal than simply improving nutrition.

There is even a named condition – orthorexia nervosa – to indicate an unhealthy obsession with eating healthy food. Orthorexia was defined in 1997 by Dr Steven Bratman, who intended the name to be a parallel with anorexia nervosa. He says: ‘I originally invented the word as a kind of “tease therapy” [a way of using gentle humour to highlight a concern] for my overly diet-obsessed patients. Over time, however, I came to understand that the term identifies a genuine eating disorder.’

Although orthorexia is not an officially medically recognised term, Dr Bratman, a general practitioner based in San Francisco, believes it covers those for whom eating healthily has become ‘an extreme, obsessive, psychologically limiting and sometimes physically dangerous disorder, related to but quite distinct from anorexia’.

‘Often, orthorexia seems to have elements of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), as does anorexia. Some people with orthorexia may in fact additionally have anorexia, either overtly or covertly (using pure food as a socially acceptable way of reducing weight). But orthorexia is usually not very much like typical OCD or typical anorexia. It has an aspirational, idealistic, spiritual component which allows it to become deeply rooted in a person’s identity. It is most often only a psychological problem in which food concerns become so dominant that other dimensions of life suffer neglect.’

Aspirational eating aficionados have more in common with followers of other restrictive diets – whether that limit is sugar, animal products, calories, wheat, or whatever. The pleasure seems to lie in the denial not in the physical effect – and is clearly competitive. Witness the hundreds of thousands of posts on Instagram by fans. But medical experts are warning of the long-term health risks of such restricted diets. A recent study, published in Eating and Weight Disorders in June 2017 on the connection between social media use and an obsession with eating healthily, concluded that high levels of orthorexia could be found in populations who take an active interest in their health and body and often occurs with anorexia nervosa.

Its results suggest that the healthy eating community on Instagram in particular shares a high level of orthorexia symptoms, with greater Instagram use being linked to increased symptoms. The team led by Dr Carmen Lefevre, a research associate at University College London (UCL), said their results may also have clinical implications for eating disorder development and recovery.

So, ask yourself – do you get more pleasure from posting a photograph of beautifully presented food than you do from eating it? Would you be as interested in eating this way if you didn’t get rewarding affirmations from strangers on social media backing your food choices?

It’s interesting to note that many progress from one form of limitation (e.g. gluten-free foods despite no specific medical problem with gluten) to another (water-only days) to find the emotional satisfaction they crave. Too little it seems can never be enough.

Neither end of the spectrum brings about a feeling of being OK long term. Denial is coming from that Parental voice in your head; the overindulgence is you at your most Child-like. Neither is you making food choices as an Adult having taken into account all the information available.

Age-appropriate diet

Like it or not, our metabolism slows down as we age and most of us need gradually fewer calories to maintain the same weight or size. Yet it can be very difficult to see that gentle change happening until we wake up one morning and that favourite pair of jeans or work shirt simply won’t do up.

You may feel 18 on the inside but if you are 55 in reality, your body will have very different nutritional needs. Part of establishing healthy self-boundaries around your diet means being realistic about portion sizes and types of food.

If you grew up helping on your parents’ farm, you may struggle to lose the mindset that you need constant fuelling. Likewise, the 24-year-old junior account executive, who no longer plays sport as she did at school or university, will have to reconsider whether she needs high-carbohydrate meals to fuel her eight-hour shift sitting down. Ask yourself – and make a note in your Learning Journal – am I eating for my present lifestyle or one from my past?

What does an Adult relationship with food feel/sound like for you?

‘I don’t worry about what I eat; overall, I’m confident my diet is balanced.’

‘Sharing meals with friends is a pleasure.’

‘I know what is healthy and make sure I eat enough of that.’

‘I feel OK with how I look.’

‘One biscuit doesn’t equal a downfall.’

‘I never punish or comfort myself with food.’

‘I don’t fight or ignore hunger – I take it as something to be attended to.’

‘Food is essential fuel, but it can be fun too.’

Having healthy self-boundaries around food means adopting this balanced attitude or approach. Humans need to eat, so denial is just as inappropriate as over-indulgence. Turn to your Learning Journal and make a note of what self-boundaries you are going to put in place regarding your eating habits.