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Six years before I started my own “F*ck It Diet,” I read the Intuitive Eating book by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, and decided I was going to heal my eating. I was 18 years old, and I’d already been extreme dieting for over 4 years. I was an extreme dieter, and an extreme binger. My weight violently yo-yo’d up and down every few months. And I was sure I was a food addict.

Reading the Intuitive Eating book was the very first time I had any idea that dieting was toxic, and wired to backfire. It spoke to me. I wanted to heal. But I was young, and desperate, and still stuck in extreme self-objectification. I was about to go to school at NYU for Musical Theater, and I also had a lot of health issues that I’d been trying to heal with my extreme diets. I wanted to heal my relationship with food, but I wasn’t ready. I also didn’t really understand some very important parts of the journey to food and body freedom. Remaining thin was still my top goal, and there was really no way to fully heal while continuing to prioritize weight control.

So over the next 6 years, while I thought I was eating intuitively, I was actually not. I was still dieting, and obsessing over my hunger and fullness cues, and calling it “intuitive eating.”

Then I’d read the books and blog posts from other “mindful eating” gurus, and assume they were continuing my education on intuitive eating, when in reality, they were taking me further and further away from true intuitive eating.

Sometimes people read my work and think I’m ragging on Intuitive Eating and saying it doesn’t work. I promise you, I am not. Intuitive eating is life changing, evidence based, and the dietitian authors of the book are trail-blazing experts who have changed more lives than anyone could begin to count. But people do misinterpret intuitive eating, en masse. A lot of those people become influencers themselves, and water down the intuitive eating teaching.

There are a lot of deeply ingrained diet beliefs that many of us hold, that will keep us from truly eating intuitively, and instead, keep us in a quasi-healed state, where we’re still sneakily micromanaging our food intake, which will inherently still keep us obsessed with food, and feeling out of control around food.

I made a lot of mistakes during those 6 long years, so I’m sharing those mistakes in the hopes that you won’t make the same mistakes I made.

Ready???

1. I thought I had to listen really, really closely to my hunger and fullness cues

Listening to your body is one thing. It’s what we want! But listening obsessively? Not exactly what we want. And not exactly what is gonna lead to a better relationship with food.

Here is the thing: after years of dieting, we usually feel REALLY out of control around food, so it makes sense that we assume that we need to pay extreme attention to every bite we take, and our exact level of hunger or fullness. The problem is, we don’t trust ourselves or our bodies. We are still operating under the belief that our appetite has to be micromanaged. It actually doesn’t.

In the beginning of stepping away from diets, we are often extremely hungry, hungrier than we think is ok or healthy or rational. And we think it’s a sign that we are out of control, and that our hunger needs to be curtailed. But actually, our hunger needs to be fed. Which brings me to….

2. I thought I would immediately eat a small / “perfect” amount of food

Along the same lines, I thought when I started ‘eating intuitively’ – I’d eat small, perfect intuitive amounts of food. But that is still diet culture. That is still making assumptions about how much we “should” need to eat. Guess what?!?! We need a lot more food that we’ve been taught, especially when we are healing from chronic dieting. We need to be FED. And before we can EVER expect to listen to our hunger and fullness, we need to prove to our bodies that we will f*cking FEED IT.

In the beginning, we will eat a lot of food, as is expected after self-imposed famine. Over time, our appetites will normalize, and it’ll be so much more easy to hear what our body wants and doesn’t want. Eventually, it begins to look and feel more like we might imagine intuitive eating to look and feel. BUT! The assumption that we should all be eating tiny amounts of food, from now until the day we die, is incorrect and ridiculous. Feed yourself. Food is life.

3. I still thought I was a food addict

Still along these same lines, I thought I had to micromanage my hunger and fullness because I was a food addict. After all, I acted like a food addict, and had acted like one all my life:  hoarding food, bingeing on food in secret, thinking about food nonstop, going on food benders while I was trying to stick to a diet, etc. I felt completely out of control.

Then, in the beginning of eating intuitively, I felt absolutely ravenous. And I was sure that was another sign of my food addiction. I thought that food addiction was my disease, and intuitive eating would help me “mindfully manage” my food addiction.

No no no no no! I was just chronically hungry! And guess what chronic hunger does to you? It makes you feel addicted to food. It makes you think about food nonstop, binge, and feel out of control around food.

I don’t believe that food addiction is real, food fixation is real (and it feels a whole lot like food addiction), food as a coping mechanism is real. But not food addiction. The cure for “food addiction” is, ironically, more food.

4. I still thought I really shouldn’t eat that many carbs

Another big mistake I made, was assuming that because I had PCOS, I couldn’t really let myself eat what I wanted. I was trying to “eat intuitively” – but curb my appetite. Again… this is not intuitive eating, and what it meant for me, was that I never really stepped out of the restrictive cycle.

5. I was disappointed with myself when I “ate too much”

Because I was still trying to “listen closely to my hunger” so I would eat the smallest amount possible, all of the time, there was still a way to do it wrong and “blow it” by “not listening well enough” to my appetite and “eating too much” – again… this is just a diet in sheep’s clothing.

6. I didn’t understand that bingeing was trying to protect me

I still saw my urges to binge, and my past bingeing, as proof I was a food addict. That was why I was approaching intuitive eating with such an obsessive “I. MUST. PAY. ATTENTION. TO. EVERY. BITE. AND. CURTAIL. MY. URGES.” energy. I didn’t understand how much my bingeing was actually just an attempt to overcorrect my constant dieting. I didn’t understand that eating a lot was healing. I didn’t understand that my body was trying to protect me from myself. I still saw eating a lot as inherently bad- and that was a huge roadblock to true healing, and true trust in my appetite.

7. I didn’t understand how important weight gain was, both physically and mentally

This is really really really important: I was still using intuitive eating as a way to try and eat less, and a way to try and stay small and/or become smaller. This was my biggest mistake, and my biggest misunderstanding. I was using intuitive eating as a diet, and had no deeper understanding of body diversity, weight stigma, or health at every size. I had no willingness to really examine my own prejudices and biases against body size, both other people’s and my own.

I didn’t understand that weight gain had the power to not only help my body trust that it was being fed, but also teach me to accept my body where it wanted to be.

8. I didn’t understand how much of a factor fatphobia played in my dieting, and how much it was blocking my progress with intuitive eating

Along the same lines, I didn’t understand cultural fatphobia, how insidious it is, and how much it was controlling my every thought and every action. I didn’t understand that I needed to examine everything I had learned about health and weight and beauty and worth, and until I did that, I’d stay stuck in a petrified quasi-recovery, afraid of my true hunger, and true body.

9. I still thought that being thinner would “heal me”

One of the big reasons I held onto my attempts at weight control for so long, is because I believed that being thinner would heal me of my health problems. That’s what we are all told, right? “Just lose weight and you won’t have issues anymore!” Our culture is so ingrained with the belief that thinner is always healthier. But guess what?!?! IronicalIy, my decade long attempts to diet and become smaller was actually really fucking bad for me. It took me hearing from people that under eating food and carbs actually messed up their hormones, before I was able to see that something wasn’t right in the way I was approaching health (and happiness).

Before I could heal, and embark on my F*ck It Diet, I had to be ready to uncouple weight and health, I had to understand that my ravenous hunger was trustworthy, I had to be willing to combat the fear I had of weight gain, and the beliefs I had about weight gain and fatness. But honestly, one of the biggest catalysts was that I had to be miserable enough in the diet/binge cycle before I realized that the difficulty of rebelling and healing was worth it. I had to see, first hand, that diets would continue to backfire. Even sneaky, faux intuitive eating diets.

But, I will say, healing is possible. If “Intuitive Eating” didn’t work for you the first time, you may want to re-examine and try again, because healing is so, so worth it.

For more on this you can read my book, The F*ck It Diet, or if you already have, join The F*ck It Diet Club before January 14th 2021!

Of course, also read the Intuitive Eating: 4th edition – and don’t make the mistakes I made!

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Is bingeing the same thing as Binge Eating Disorder? (No, not exactly.)

Does Binge Eating Disorder require restriction to treat? (NO.)

Is bingeing a response to physical and/or mental restriction? (YES.)

Can trauma/emotions/anxiety cause Binge Eating Disorder without the presence of restriction?? (Yes! However it is extremely rare in our culture for restriction/guilt to not ALSO enter the picture after the fact, and therein lies the importance of addressing restriction, even if and when it isn’t the cause.)

The line between disordered eating (bingeing) and Binge Eating Disorder is blurred, just like it is for all disordered eating/eating disorders.

People binge in response to restriction, and they binge in response to trauma, anxiety, or difficult emotions. The important thing to remember though, is even if restriction isn’t the main cause of your bingeing, it is probably a big piece of it, just because of the culture we live in. Addressing restriction is extremely important, along with any other emotional/trauma-based treatment.

Anyone with an active eating disorder should be getting treatment, and The F*ck It Diet is just a supplement.

(Note: This particle post is associated with an episode that I recorded on August 1st, 2020, responding to a disgruntled instagram follower who was angry that I was “ignoring binge eating disorder” in my instagram posts, and saying that I imply that all binge eating disorder is a response to restriction. To get the full drama, (anonymous) angry comments and DMs, the accusations of being unethical and predatory, and my full response, listen to the episode above. For the purposes of this post, I am going to distill it down to discussing the nuance of bingeing vs. BED.)

The first and most important thing I want people to know about bingeing, is that when it is in response to calorie restriction, it is the body’s attempt to protect you against past and future famine. In a very basic sense: it is protective. And if you’ve tried to diet a lot, whether you were “successful” or not it is also going to be a response to diet thoughts. That’s an example of what people mean when they say: “mental” restriction. Restriction doesn’t have to be literal and physical (ie, less calories), it can just be mental guilt, rules, or diet ideation.

A LOT of our collective bingeing is because of our collective dieting, and out collective diet culture. The question then becomes, is that all? Do we binge for other reasons?

To make sure I’ve covered my bases, I consulted Casey Bonano, CEDRD-S to weigh in on bingeing vs Binge Eating Disorder (BED). She is a Dietitian specializing in Eating Disorders, an anti-diet approach, HAES, & Intuitive Eating. You can follow her on instagram here, and find her Food Freedom Guide here.

Here is Casey’s breakdown of the difference between bingeing and Binge Eating Disorder:

“Bingeing is usually based on restriction, and with incorporating all foods, some self reflection, and general coping skills it can be resolved. BED is more complex and will take a deeper dive into the psychological or emotional components, usually requiring mental health professions such as a therapist and a dietitian, but restriction (whether physical or mental) is often a component of BED as well and must first be addressed or ruled out before the emotional work can be done.”

There are people who believe that avoiding binge trigger foods is the way to treat Binge Eating Disorder, along with addressing the emotional/mental components of BED. I do not consider this a full recovery, as it uses restriction as a treatment. This is treating one eating disorder with another eating disorder. This will tend to backfire longer term, or just be manifested as restrictive disordered eating. When people claim that avoiding binge foods is how they “recovered” – I would never tell them that their lived experience isn’t valid, people should do what they feel is working for them, but I would also never recommend that method, or consider that true recovery.

For instance, if someone is in horrible pain from their bingeing, and can’t access or figure out how to remove restriction without living in constant pain from their bingeing during the process, trying to apply restriction and avoiding “binge foods” might feel like the only way to live without constant pain. That is a way of trying to mitigate the symptom. I understand and empathize with being in this position, but I still wouldn’t call it eating disorder recovery. And I would give a fair warning that it may eventually backfire and your body may override your attempts at willpower anyway and lead to more bingeing.

My strong opinion is this: ED treatment that doesn’t address fat-phobia or restriction, (yes, even BED), is unethical.

Here is another tricky part, all of the diagnostic markers of Binge Eating Disorder, are also things that people who binge just in response to restriction or diet culture experience. My own personal binge eating included alllll of the markers of Binge Eating Disorder, but the root cause was restriction.

DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA FOR BED (from nationaleatingdisorders.org )

• Recurrent episodes of binge eating. An episode of binge eating is characterized by both of the following:
  • Eating, in a discrete period of time, an amount of food that is definitely larger than what most people would eat in a similar period of time under similar circumstances.
  • A sense of lack of control over eating during the episode (e.g., a feeling that one cannot stop eating or control what or how much one is eating).
• The binge eating episodes are associated with three (or more) of the following:
  • Eating much more rapidly than normal.
  • Eating until feeling uncomfortably full.
  • Eating large amounts of food when not feeling physically hungry.
  • Eating alone because of feeling embarrassed by how much one is eating.
  • Feeling disgusted with oneself, depressed, or very guilty afterward.
• Marked distress regarding binge eating is present.
• The binge eating occurs, on average, at least once a week for 3 months.
• The binge eating is not associated with the recurrent use of inappropriate compensatory behaviors (e.g., purging) as in bulimia nervosa and does not occur exclusively during the course of bulimia nervosa or anorexia nervosa.

WARNING SIGNS & SYMPTOMS OF BINGE EATING DISORDER

Emotional and behavioral 

• Evidence of binge eating, including disappearance of large amounts of food in short periods of time or lots of empty wrappers and containers indicating consumption of large amounts of food.
• Appears uncomfortable eating around others
• Any new practice with food or fad diets, including cutting out entire food groups (no sugar, no carbs, no dairy, vegetarianism/veganism)
• Fear of eating in public or with others
• Steals or hoards food in strange places
• Creates lifestyle schedules or rituals to make time for binge sessions
• Withdraws from usual friends and activities
• Frequently diets
• Shows extreme concern with body weight and shape
• Frequent checking in the mirror for perceived flaws in appearance
• Has secret recurring episodes of binge eating (eating in a discrete period of time an amount of food that is much larger than most individuals would eat under similar circumstances); feels lack of control over ability to stop eating
• Disruption in normal eating behaviors, including eating throughout the day with no planned mealtimes; skipping meals or taking small portions of food at regular meals; engaging in sporadic fasting or repetitive dieting
• Developing food rituals (e.g., eating only a particular food or food group [e.g., condiments], excessive chewing, and not allowing foods to touch).
• Eating alone out of embarrassment at the quantity of food being eaten
• Feelings of disgust, depression, or guilt after overeating
• Fluctuations in weight
• Feelings of low self-esteem

(End of the excerpt from nationaleatingdisorders.org)

All of those markers of BED above, were things I experienced as a chronic dieter/binger.

People with binge eating OR binge eating disorder need therapy to address emotional components, but also need to eliminate restriction of all kinds, both physical and mental restriction (mental restriction includes guilt or stress over food, as well as food rules and all manifestations of diet culture).

EVEN IF restriction is not the root cause or start of someone’s bingeing or BED, (for instance, when it is trauma or anxiety that spurred bingeing as a coping mechanism) restriction still usually becomes a piece of the bigger puzzle that will make healing difficult, and must be addressed.

Pathologizing food, weight, or eating is never the answer if what you’re looking for is full recovery. The answer is removing all restriction, and addressing emotion/psychological components. You can’t treat bingeing or binge eating with restriction.

Casey Bonano also shared: “In all my years of working in this profession I have NEVER worked with someone who didn’t restrict in some capacity (physical or mental) that then lead to their bingeing. I’ve had people swear up and down they don’t restrict and I’ve also been able to find some kind of restriction. This is likely the lack of awareness around what restriction is and how our culture promotes a lot of restrictive behaviors, and then passes them off as normal.

People can address the restriction and still end up bingeing for emotional purposes. Often I let people know that there are biological and psychological reasons we binge. We first address the biology (ie. don’t restrict, eat all foods, unconditional permission to eat) so that then we can address/pinpoint the emotional.

Often resolving your restriction will decrease your bingeing. Of course bingeing/emotional eating is a coping skill but you can’t really address that until you eliminate the restriction.

For example if you binge because you have trauma, perhaps “eating all the things” isn’t going to solve the core issue, BUT it would still be the first step I would do as a dietitian with that patient.” (- Casey Bonano)

Most people who binge eat, even people diagnosed with Binge Eating Disorder, don’t realize how much of it is caused and perpetuated by restriction.

I don’t often make the distinction between chronic bingeing and BED, because it draws an arbitrary line that implies that people with Binge Eating Disorder need a different approach altogether, and I think that makes the message triggering and confusing. People with BED will most likely require more care and more mental health support to unpack the complexities, but the bigger picture issues are the same: address restriction, and address trauma/emotion/psychological factors. Restriction is the not the answer.

I encourage every single person who is embarking on healing, healing from dieting or disordered eating, to get treatment and therapy, and in the case of active eating disorders, treatment is a non-negotiable.

If you have personal experience with Binge Eating Disorder and the role restriction plays, please reach out with your experience at podcast@carolinedooner.com

Love you all, stay safe and sane, and ….fuck it.

Caroline