Tag Archives: intuitive eating

Stocking

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“I have to get rid of these leftovers or I will eat them all.” Sound familiar? The “them” in question could be leftovers from any holiday celebration that includes food, such as Halloween candy, Thanksgiving pie, Christmas cookies, New Year’s Eve hors d’oeuvres, Easter jelly beans, Memorial Day barbecue, or birthday cake and ice cream.

The aforementioned strategy for dealing with such leftovers sounds logical on the surface and might even seem to work for a little while. If the food is not there, you cannot eat it, right? As the never-ending cycle of holidays continues though, the strategy of avoidance reveals its downsides: stress, anxiety, deprivation, reinforcement of an oversimplified and misleading good/bad food dichotomy, and increased risk for episodes of overeating or outright bingeing.

An alternative does exist, one that takes less mental and emotional energy, allows people the freedom to enjoy holiday favorites without going overboard, and makes peace with food. This alternative is stocking, which is a well-known technique among practitioners who help people with emotional eating, compulsive eating, binge eating disorder, and supposed food addictions.

Stocking is the antithesis of quickly ridding the house of holiday leftovers, and it may initially seem counterintuitive. A full explanation of the technique requires more time and space than would be appropriate for this newsletter, but here are the highlights for your consideration.

Uncouple morality from food and eating behaviors

In order to feel more comfortable with stocking, people need to rid themselves of the good/bad food dichotomy and be able to temporarily put the hard science of nutrition on the back burner. Not all foods are the same nutritionally; it would be ridiculous to proclaim that an apple has the same nutritional value as a Twinkie, and I am not arguing otherwise. What I am suggesting, however, is to strip the moralization away from food. An apple is just an apple; you are not good or virtuous if you select it for your snack. A Twinkie is just a Twinkie; you are not bad, guilty, or weak-willed if you choose it instead. Sometimes your body’s cues will lead right to the apple, other times to the Twinkie, and either outcome is okay.

Establish an abundance of food at home

Identifying what food will feel best in your body means little if you do not have a reasonable shot of providing said food for yourself. Therefore, one of the tenets of stocking is to keep a wide variety at home, including foods that are seen as taboo and can trigger overeating or bingeing.

When our body is asking for a food we do not have on hand, we tend to overeat on the foods that are in the house. This can certainly occur with both adults and children, but we especially see this with teenagers who live in food-restricted households. Well-meaning parents might keep foods high in salt, sugar, or fat out of the house because they think that doing so creates a healthy food environment, but oftentimes it backfires. For example, the teenagers overeat on low-sodium potato chips that never really hit the spot while a small amount of regular chips would have done the trick, or they overeat on Newman’s Own fig cookies when really they just want a couple of Oreos.

Select foods based on intuitive-eating cues

One of the logistical differences between those who practice intuitive eating and those who do not is how food selection begins. Standing in front of the open refrigerator or scouring the pantry and cabinets and selecting whichever foods call to you is an external process that differs greatly from asking internal questions about what temperature, texture, flavor, color, etc., food will feel best in your body at that moment and seeing where it takes you.

These cannot be treated as leading questions. In other words, if you have stocked up on, let’s say, Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, and you are trying to convince yourself that your body does or does not actually want the ice cream, then stocking will not work. Keep an open mind, ask these questions neutrally, and see where your body’s cues take you.

Maintain the inventory of foods at home, especially of triggering foods

Maintaining the abundance of food in the household is an important element of stocking. If the supply dwindles, you might feel like you need to hurry up and eat a particular food while it is still around. Should you ever run out and then buy it again, the food regains its luster. If you are stocking Doritos, for example, maintain a supply of, say, ten large bags at home. As soon as you finish two bags and are down to eight, go out and buy two more.

Be patient and use a neutral voice

Initially, you may find yourself eating certain foods when your body does not actually want them, but as you keep up the practice, eventually your trigger foods will blend in with all of the other foods in your pantry and no longer sparkle the way they do when they are brand new to the house. Until then, abstain from judging yourself harshly for eating episodes that do not go as you would have liked. Remind yourself that you are still in the early stages of the process and you are learning. With a neutral voice, examine what happened so you can respond differently when similar circumstances arise in the future.

Enjoy your new-found peace with food

Imagine how different your experience with leftover Thanksgiving pie would be if you routinely kept slices of pie in your freezer for whenever your body wanted them. Contrast the fretting you feel about the remaining Halloween candy to the relaxed liberation of always having a few bags of peanut butter cups in the pantry year-round.

For the stocking technique to be successfully implemented, foundational work to dispel nutrition myths, break up the good/bad food dichotomy, and uncouple moralization from food choices is necessary beforehand. Because this process takes time, it is probably too late for the stocking technique to be much help for you this Thanksgiving unless you have already been working on these prerequisites.

The cycle of holidays will continue though, so if you get started now, you might find you have a much more relaxing and enjoyable experience with this February’s Valentine’s Day chocolates than you would have if you continued down your current path.

The, umm, “power” of carrot cake

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CarrotCakeOn Valentine’s Day, I surprised Joanne by baking her a carrot cake. Just over one week later, I realized half the cake was still in the refrigerator. Although we liked it, we both felt like we had had enough. The cake was getting old and we did not want to take up freezer space with it, so we pitched the remaining portion.

In posting this, I risk the inherent danger of misunderstanding, so let me be clear: Moralizing foods or eating behaviors is a harmful practice that I do not endorse. Carrot cake is not “bad” or “unclean” or a “guilty pleasure,” nor did I “fall off the wagon” when I baked and ate it. We are not “disciplined” for leaving some, nor would I have been “good” if I had never made it in the first place.

Our carrot cake exemplifies a nutrition strategy that Joanne and I oftentimes use with our patients. We often hear people tell us about their trigger foods, i.e. foods they feel must be completely avoided because a little inevitably turns into a lot. They are addicted to these foods, they say, or perhaps they blame themselves and cite a supposed lack of willpower.

The presumed solution is to abstain from these foods at all costs, but the downsides of this approach include missing out on favorite foods, a low likelihood of long-term success, and reinforcing the notion that these foods are taboo, which only serves to make people want them more.

We find that doing quite the opposite works better: Keep large quantities of said trigger foods on hand at all times and give ourselves permission to eat them whenever we want. Patients sometimes bristle when we raise this idea. If we believe a food has control over us, then having it available in abundance feels scary. Furthermore, giving ourselves permission to enjoy it whenever we feel like it sounds ridiculous and counterproductive to the pursuit of health.

I know, I know, we’re crazy, but think about it: Granting ourselves unconditional permission to eat a particular food does not automatically mean we are actually going to eat it regularly or in vast quantities. We may be surprised to find how sharply our desire for a previously-taboo food can drop off once we give ourselves unconditional permission to consume it.

We couple this approach with building intuitive-eating skills, which involves learning to ask ourselves questions about how hungry we are, what food do we really want at the moment (what temperature/color/texture/flavor/etc. do we really feel like), and what quantity of the identified food do we truly need to feel satisfied. If we ask ourselves these questions in a neutral, open-minded, and non-judgmental fashion, the answer is only sometimes going to be the previously-taboo food.

When it is, then we eat it slowly, enjoy it without guilt, and get on with our day. We stop when we have had enough, not when we are overly stuffed, because we know we can have more if and when we want it. The food, in essence, is demystified. Cookies are just cookies. Potato chips are just potato chips. Bread is just bread. We only experience their power over us when we operate in a paradigm that gives them power. When we remove moralization, judgment, and strict rules from the model, the sham of power is exposed for what it is and supposed addictions resolve. The carrot cake is forgotten as it blends in with all of the other foods in the fridge.

Joanne and I keep lots of play foods on hand, much of which we never touch. We have apple crisp ice cream that I bought this past fall in our freezer and Halloween candy in our pantry. We have unopened trays of Newman’s Own cookies and stashes of frozen pastries I made from scratch. We still have Valentine’s Day candy – from last year’s Valentine’s Day.

And none of that makes us “good” or indicates “willpower” or “discipline,” nor are we “bad” or “weak” or “guilty” when we do enjoy these foods. By having play foods on hand at all times, we find that we actually want them less. Remember, carrot cake is just carrot cake. Sometimes it hits the spot, but other times we might just want, well, a carrot.

Intuitive Eating

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Thanks to a colleague’s tip, one counseling technique I sometimes implement is a one-on-one book club of sorts where a patient and I read a book together that is relevant to his or her care. Recently, I have been reading Intuitive Eating with a patient who is working hard to overcome decades of approaching eating from the vantage point of dieting and to build a new relationship with food.

He has impressed me by how open-minded he is to a new way of looking at eating and by how candidly he has shared the thoughts, questions, and concerns that have come to mind during his reading. Now about a third of the way through the book, he reports that he sees himself in many, but certainly not all, of the case studies that the authors present. However, the idea of not depriving himself feels scary. Specifically, he notes that he loves having dessert, but that he is better off skipping it because one brownie so easily turns into four. Besides, he says, health must come into the picture somewhere, so there must be a “but . . .” caveat to the notion of not depriving oneself. He is waiting for the other shoe to drop.

His concerns are common among people who are at the early stages of putting aside the dieting mentality and learning intuitive eating. He is right that we certainly consider health. After all, I am a licensed health care practitioner. Before we take into account the hard science of nutrition though, we have to address the emotions that affect eating.

Sure, physiological mechanisms exist that yield pleasure when we consume foods that are high in fat, sugar, or salt. You are alive to read this because these mechanisms gave your ancestors an evolutionary advantage and they passed them down to you. However, the reason that one brownie turns into four has less to do with physiology and more to do with the morality that gets attached to them.

When we experience guilt for eating a particular food or virtue for abstaining from it, these emotions block us from being able to truly experience and honor the internal cues that our bodies give us regarding our eating. We eat the first brownie, feel guilty for having done so, and say “screw it, today is ruined” and then reach for three more. In essence, the idea of not depriving ourselves feels scary because in our minds it translates to opening the flood gates. In other words, brownies all day, every day.

In reality, that is not how the body tends to operate. When we strip away the morality of food and see our choices on a level playing field, we discover that the appeal of previously-forbidden foods drops considerably. Some days we may want an apple for dessert, other days we may not feel like dessert at all. And what if we go through the question tree of asking ourselves are we hungry, how hungry are we, what texture/temperature/color food do we want, do we feel like something salty, savory, or bitter, and how much of that food do we really need to be satisfied, and we determine that a brownie will indeed do the trick? Then we find the best brownie we can get our hands on, eat it slowly, enjoy every bite, stop when we are feeling satisfied, and know that we can have another one whenever our bodies are asking for one.

Ideally, the hard science of nutrition comes into play after this sort of relationship with food is established. We can talk about the advantages of one kind of cereal over another, or one kind of yogurt over another, or what have you, but we have to take into account the human element. Whole wheat bread is probably a better choice for someone with high cholesterol than is white bread, for example, but if forcing down the whole wheat because it has a better nutritional profile on paper is going to trigger some sort of overeating in search of satisfaction, then he or she is probably better off just having the white bread in the first place and getting his or her soluble fiber someplace else. On the other hand, if the two breads are pretty much equally enjoyable, then sure, he or she is probably better off with the whole wheat.

Learning to eat intuitively involves taking a leap of faith that we can largely trust our bodies to tell us what and how much to eat. Reestablishing that trust involves dialing down the noise of guilt and virtue that makes our internal signals difficult to hear. If you find yourself consuming piles of brownies, or none at all, consider whether or not you are truly listening to your body.