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!"

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*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

Why Your Eating Feels Out of Control at Night

Does your eating feel out of control at night?

If yes, you’re not alone.

Many people have shared with me that they feel like they eat “good” all day, yet come nighttime, their eating often feels “out of control.”

There are many very valid reasons why this might be. Here are a few:

1/ Undereating
Most often, feeling out of control with food at night is due to not eating enough throughout the day.

When your nourishment needs aren’t met, perhaps because you’re dieting, restricting certain foods or too busy to eat, your very wise body will do everything it can to make up for this deprivation.

You may find yourself experiencing intense cravings, feeling preoccupied with food, eating faster than usual, overriding your fullness cues and eating in a way that feels binge-like.

None of this is due to a lack of willpower or self-discipline. It’s a normal compensatory reaction; your body’s natural response to physical and psychological deprivation.

2/ Dissatisfaction
Satisfaction is an essential component of the eating experience. If you don’t experience much satisfaction from your meals and snacks, you will naturally seek more food, even if you’re not hungry.

There are many reasons why your eating may be unsatisfying, such as denying yourself what you truly want, a lack of access to the foods you desire, not eating a variety of foods, not having time to enjoy your meals and being distracted while eating.

3/ Pleasure Deficiency
One of the gifts of food is the pleasure it can provide.

As humans, we’re wired to seek pleasure thus if you don’t experience much pleasure during your daytime hours, you may find yourself turning to food at night to fill this void.

This is completely understandable, especially considering how easily accessible and instantly rewarding food can be compared to many other forms of pleasure.

4/ Revved-Up Nervous System
If your life is very busy or chaotic, you may often feel overextended and overwhelmed. The rhythmic act of eating can be very soothing and grounding. It’s a helpful way to calm your revved-up nervous system and center yourself when you feel anxious, stressed or scattered.

5/ Me Time Shortage
Whether it's with your job or your family—or both, if you spend most of your day taking care of other people’s needs, you’re likely short on me time. Enjoying some yummy food, once everyone else is tucked in or logged off, is a way to do something special just for yourself.

Very Valid Reasons
There are always very valid reasons why you do what you do with food and these are just a few of the many factors that might be at play.

By viewing your eating through the lenses of compassion and curiosity, instead of judgment and criticism, you will gain a better understanding of what needs you’re trying to take care of when your eating feels out of control at night.

It's important to also keep in mind that there is absolutely nothing wrong with eating at any time of day or night.

And, despite what our diet culture wants you to believe, it’s totally okay to eat when you’re not hungry, including eating for emotional reasons or for just pure pleasure.

Diet Companies Will Never Tell You This...

We’re already halfway through February yet the New Year’s onslaught of diet ads continues.

If feels like no matter what I watch or listen to these days—and I consume a wide variety of content—I’m bombarded with messages from diet companies claiming to have finally found the solution for successful weight loss (and hence everlasting health and happiness, of course).

It’s Not a “Diet”
In an attempt to be more appealing and acceptable to today’s consumers, especially those who feel they have “failed” with traditional diets (or watched their parents do so), most diet companies are careful to claim their offerings aren’t diets but rather “wellness plans,” “lifestyle changes” or “psychology-based programs.”

Yet, they offer pretty much the same old stuff perhaps with a few new bells and whistles thrown in.

If a program tells you what, how much and/or when you’re allowed to eat, it’s a diet.

If it includes counting calories/points/macros, categorizing food, cutting out foods, logging exercise and tracking your weight, it's a diet.

I want to scream when the dieters/actors in these ads exclaim how easy it’s been to lose X pounds in just X weeks.

The truth is, you can lose weight on almost any diet, no matter what it’s called.

What the diet companies don’t tell you, however, is there is only about a five-percent chance you will maintain your weight loss.

They also don’t tell you it’s likely you’ll regain more weight than you lost as up to two-thirds of dieters typically do.*

So much for the “life-long” or “permanent” results they often promise to deliver!

One has to wonder how they even go about tracking their “lifetime” results.

Warning: Potential Side Effects
In addition to rebound weight gain, following are some of the other potential side effects of dieting you aren’t warned about:

• Leads to harmful food rules, disordered eating and eating disorders

• Increases food obsession and body preoccupation

• Triggers intense cravings and binge-like eating

• Reduces your ability to recognize and honor your hunger and fullness cues

• Makes you scared to eat in situations where you won’t have complete control over the food

• Causes you to miss out on shared eating experiences with family and friends

• Drives you to sneak food and eat in secret

• Makes you afraid to keep certain foods in your house out of a fear of losing control with them

• Brings about mood swings and emotional eating

• Provokes feelings of guilt, shame, anxiety, fear and hopelessness

• Erodes body trust, self-trust, self-esteem and confidence

• Results in weight cycling (yo-yo dieting), which can lead to adverse health conditions

• Slows your metabolism

• Increases your hunger-signaling hormone while decreasing your fullness-signaling hormone

• Raises your cortisol level because dieting is inherently stressful

• Encourages a disordered relationship with exercise

• Consumes most of your time, energy and headspace, while other parts of your life suffer, like your relationships, social life, career and hobbies

If you have a history of dieting, you’re likely quite familiar with many of these outcomes.

It’s also likely you’ve blamed yourself and your lack of willpower and self-discipline when a diet didn’t work.

Please understand this: You don’t fail a diet—a diet fails you!

Never Be Allowed
Imagine if diet companies, like drug manufacturers, had to include all of the potential side effects of dieting in their advertisements.

Here's what the originators of Intuitive Eating, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, have to say about the futility of dieting and the harm it can cause:

“If dieting programs had to stand up to the same scrutiny as medication, they would never be allowed for public consumption. Imagine, for example, taking an asthma medication, which improves your breathing for a few weeks, but in the long run, causes your lungs and breathing to worsen.”

Become Fully Informed
When you’re unhappy with your eating and your body, the success stories promoted in the diet ads can understandably tempt you to try one more diet.

I get it. I’ve been there myself.

The desire to diet and lose weight is completely understandable given our weight-stigmatizing, thin-idolizing culture, our tendency to conflate weight with health, and the illusion of control dieting provides in a world full of uncertainty.

While I am anti-diet, I completely believe in body autonomy including the right to diet.

I also believe people should be made aware of the physical and psychological harm dieting can cause so they can make a fully informed decision about what’s truly best for their overall wellbeing. It’s unethical to do otherwise.

If you’re considering participating in an intentional weight loss program, I encourage you to do your research.

Look for solid scientific data demonstrating a program leads to long-term, sustainable weight loss (i.e., multiple years versus a few months) for the majority of its participants—without causing any adverse side effects or requiring constant self-monitoring.

Don’t be surprised, however, if you discover it doesn’t exist! 

Dieting Won’t Bring You Peace and Wellbeing
If you want a healthy, peaceful relationship with food and your body, despite what the $72 billion diet industry wants you to believe, it can’t be achieved through dieting.

Rather than put all your energy toward depriving yourself for a short-term result with potentially harmful long-term consequences, what if you put it towards healing your relationship with food and your body, reclaiming your ability to eat intuitively, and engaging in weight-neutral self-care so you can truly experience the peace, ease and wellbeing you’re longing for?

*For a deep dive into the research behind these stats, I recommend checking out Christy Harrison’s book Anti-Diet.