In my experience, most people who come to intuitive eating do so after realizing that limiting the foods they love in the name of weight loss just leads to binge, emotional, and impulsive eating. Over time (and usually many, many failed diets), they begin to recognize that maybe the problem isn’t them, and may actually be the diet itself. They aren’t actually rampant eating machines, but rather suffer from the predictable consequences of dieting and deprivation.
Intuitive eating and other non-dieting approaches teach that physical restriction, or deprivation of specific foods, food groups, or adequate nutrition, fuels a powerful urge to eat, an urge that can only be restrained for so long. If someone can hold back this urge to eat for an extended period of time, it’s almost never without significant physical and mental health consequences—you know, the symptoms of an eating disorder.
However, in addition to physical restriction, there is another type of restriction that can damage your relationship with food and make eating much more stressful than it needs to be. It is said mental restraint, which I sometimes refer to as emotional restraint. While mental confinement is much less discussed, it can be just as harmful as physical confinement and is often something that people struggle with well into their healing journey.
What is Mental Limitation?
Mental restraint is a type of restraint that occurs when a person does not physically refrain from eating a food, but instead tells themselves that they should not eat something or sets mental conditions about it. While you may be physically allowing yourself to eat the “bad” food or a more adequate amount, emotionally, it still feels like you’re doing something wrong. The anxiety and shame created by mental restriction interferes with your ability to have a peaceful relationship with food and eat with confidence.
With mental retardation, you may have stopped dieting, but your brain hasn’t!
Mental restriction occurs in thoughts and feelings around food and eating rather than behaviors. Here are some examples of mental limitation:
“I can’t believe I ate that. I should have eaten something healthier”
“I’ll let myself eat it today, but tomorrow I’ll be better.”
“If I didn’t let myself eat desserts every day, my body wouldn’t be so rough.”
“It’s okay to eat it as long as I get to my training class tomorrow morning.”
“It’s okay to eat this today, but I probably shouldn’t eat it again this week.”
“I could ignore my growling stomach and make it through to dinner. What’s wrong with me that I need a snack?’
For some, the mental limitation may not manifest itself in concrete or coherent thoughts, but rather intense feelings of anxiety or shame when eating certain foods.
Why is mental restraint harmful?
Mental limitation creates a sense of insecurity that certain foods or sufficient amounts of food will always be available. Even if you (conditionally) allow yourself to eat all the foods, your brain doesn’t believe that this will always be the case. Essentially, the mental constraint is saying sure, you can have the cookie today, but it might not be there tomorrow.
Here are some of the effects of mental limitation:
It interferes with your ability to eat with coordination/eat intuitively.
Mental limitation is diet mindset. It creates stress and anxiety that interferes with your ability to listen to your body’s signals and creates mental noise that drowns out helpful thoughts about food and eating.
Mental restriction can lead to overeating, overeating and impulsive eating.
Because mental limitation creates the feeling that a food may not always be available, it keeps you stuck in “last supper” mode.
It’s stressful.
Constantly worrying about what you should eat, what you’ve already eaten, or how to gain or compensate for what you want to eat is STRESS! Regardless of any effects on eating behaviors, stress affects your health by increasing cortisol and other stress hormones and disrupting digestion.
Takes up valuable space.
Mental restraint is exhausting. It uses your precious headspace to try to solve an unsolved puzzle of how you can give yourself yuuuust enough clearance around food to maintain control. There may be, say, five people on this planet who have solved this equation. But as I like to remind my clients with an extremely dated report, you are not Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. You can spend all your waking hours trying to find a way to eat that addresses all your stresses and worries (weight! health! finances! time!), but honestly this seems like something you want to put all your energy into ;
Mental restriction vs bland diet
Some of you may be reading this and wondering what the difference is between mentally restricting yourself and trying to eat healthy. The fact that the mainstream image of “healthy” eating is quite restrictive adds to this confusion.
For me, I think the difference between mental restriction and bland eating is how it makes you feel and what motivates it. Mental limitation is rooted in fear, control and shame. Soft eating is rooted in nurturing, nurturing and does not create a sense of deprivation as mental restriction does. It’s not wrong or counter-intuitive to eat to give yourself flexible boundaries around food if it helps you eat more confidently. However, if these flexible boundaries make eating feel more stressful, then mental restriction is likely. To learn more, here’s a blog post I wrote about distinguishing food police from nutrition ally that might be helpful.
How to overcome mental limitation
Here are some tools to help you overcome mental restriction so you can allow yourself to fully fuel the food:
Notice and name the mental limitation – without judgment!
The first step to overcoming mental limitation is to recognize when you are dealing with it. I find a tool called cognitive diffusion from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) especially helpful here. Instead of getting wrapped up in your thoughts and the feelings they create, simply notice and name the thought. Something as simple as saying to yourself, “I notice myself thinking that I shouldn’t be eating this food” can be enough to break away from it a little. To learn more about cognitive diffusion, here is a helpful blog post.
Unlearning
There is SO much misinformation out there about food and nutrition. If I really believed that eating desserts was going to cause some horrible health consequences, I would also feel very anxious around them! When we work with clients, we spend a lot of time helping them unlearn and reframe the inaccurate, exaggerated, and overly rigid information they’ve learned about food and nutrition through food culture and replace it with gentle, flexible, and most importantly. documented nutritional information.
Challenge and reframing
Once you learn more accurate and useful information about food and nutrition, you can challenge and redefine mental limitation. Here’s a helpful blog post I wrote about challenging eating mindsets and mental restriction, with lots of examples. Try not to approach challenge and reframing as entering into an internal conversation with the food police, but rather respond to these thoughts with compassion, but firmness. That said, with challenge and reframing, it’s very easy to get into an internal back-and-forth, so this next tool is important…
Move forward with values-based nutrition
Thoughts are just thoughts. You you are in control of your actions, and regardless of the chaos in your brain, you can still choose to eat in a way that aligns with your values and goals. Obviously, it’s not that simple – when your brain is screaming a million different thoughts at you, it’s hard to make decisions about what and how much to eat! But it is not impossible. While your brain may be confused about eating a certain food, if you continue to challenge the physical restriction by giving yourself permission to eat foods you like and eat enough food to feel satisfied, over time this will remove mental limitation.
Want a simple tool to make values-based food decisions? Here’s a blog post I wrote with a question you can ask yourself before making a food decision to help you eat more intuitively.
Need more support to let go of mental confinement?
Overcoming mental limitation is one of the hardest parts of building a healthier relationship with food. It’s one of those things that can make eating feel chaotic and stressful, even when you’re far along in the healing process. If you want personalized support, we work with clients across the US and in our Columbia, SC office providing disordered eating nutrition counseling and intuitive nutrition guidance. Click here to learn more about our practice’s philosophy and services, and just get in touch if you’d like more information.
