How to Deal With Your Trigger Foods
/Do you have any trigger foods?
Are you afraid to keep certain foods in your house because you feel like you lose control with them every time you eat them?
There is a very valid reason why some foods feel triggering.
Restriction.
If you’re like most people, your trigger foods are triggering because you are restricting them.
Natural Scarcity Response
Potato chips are a common trigger food, so let’s use them as an example.
Let’s say you love potato chips but you rarely let yourself eat them because you consider them to be a “bad” food and every time you do allow yourself to have them, you feel completely out of control with them.
When you do break down and buy a bag, you can’t stop thinking about them sitting in your cupboard and you keep returning to the kitchen all afternoon for more until the last salty crumbs are licked off your fingers. Once the bag is gone and you’re full of chips and guilt, you decide the safest thing to do is to not eat them at all.
“I can’t be trusted to have potato chips in my house! I’m never eating them again!” you proclaim to your friends who can all totally relate because, thanks to diet culture, they have trigger foods too.
But here’s the thing:
When you don’t let yourself eat potato chips on a regular basis, you create a sense of scarcity and deprivation with them.
The natural human response to scarcity and deprivation is to consume as much as possible of your restricted food when you do allow yourself to eat it.
Basically, your very wise brain is thinking “I never get potato chips therefore I must eat as much as I can right now because I don’t know if I’ll ever have access to them again.”
On top of this, if you’re telling yourself while you’re eating the chips that you shouldn’t be eating them and won’t let yourself eat them again, you are amplifying the threat of scarcity and deprivation, which will further drive you to eat as much as you can right away.
Unconditional Permission to Eat
If you want to stop feeling out of control with potato chips, you need to give yourself unconditional permission to eat all the potato chips you want whenever you want.
This means stocking your kitchen with potato chips and freely eating them with meals, between meals, for breakfast, for dessert, however you desire.
This continuous exposure to your trigger food is called habituation.
The more you eat the potato chips, the more you habituate to them.
In time, their reward value and power over you will diminish and they will become ordinary and neutral—basically, no big deal.
The goal of habituation isn’t to no longer want your trigger foods, but rather to create a trusting and satisfying relationship with them, one that’s free of fear, guilt and shame.
Understandably Feels Scary
Giving yourself unconditional permission to eat your trigger foods can, understandably, feel pretty scary.
It’s so helpful to understand that it’s completely normal to eat a lot of your trigger foods in the beginning of the habituation process because, well, you haven’t habituated to them yet.
This phase of making peace with food freaks a lot of people out, which is why it can be so helpful to get support, whether it’s from an Intuitive Eating counselor, coach, therapist or online community.
When working with my clients, we talk about various strategies that can help them with the habituation process so it doesn’t feel so overwhelming and send them running back to the land of restriction.
Once my clients start habituating to their trigger foods, they start to see that, despite what diet culture wants them to believe, they can trust themselves with any food, regardless of their history with it. And this trust and food freedom is truly profoundly liberating.
Here's what my client Jenny had so say about her experience:
"One of my biggest wins has been being able to have all types of food in my house. Before, I couldn’t have any sweets or baked goods at home otherwise I would just eat them all in one sitting. Having that stuff in my house and not bingeing on it has been a huge positive change. The day I started forgetting it was there was a big day!"
*It’s important to note that habituation should be approached differently if you have a food-related health condition, such as lactose intolerance. Of course, you should never try to habituate to a food if you have a life-threatening allergy to it or a condition such as Celiac Disease
