I Tried to Eat Perfectly. Diet Culture Demanded It.

Recently, I shared how I used to be a chronic overeater and that I still sometimes eat until I’m uncomfortably full.

Thankfully, this doesn’t bother me much anymore as I’ve stopped trying to be a perfect eater. 

Things were much different when I was dieting. 

No Wiggle Room
I was devastated whenever I felt I messed up with my eating. There wasn’t any wiggle room or gray area. I was either eating right or I was eating wrong.

Diet culture, with its black-and-white, all-or-nothing approach, teaches us that to be successful, we must follow its rules and binaries perfectly. Wellness culture often does this, too.

Food is either good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, clean or toxic, fattening or slimming. 

You’re either on the wagon or off it. If you fall off, it’s your fault. 

Rather than blaming diet and wellness cultures’ unrealistic and unsustainable standards, you are blamed for not having enough willpower, discipline and self-control.

I certainly bought into all of this.

Thrived on Perfection
As someone with perfectionistic tendencies, I was especially susceptible to the gold-star behaviors diet and wellness cultures demand.  

I thrived on following the rules, doing it right, being good, earning a perfect score. 

I relished the sense of achievement I felt at bedtime when I thought I had eaten perfectly all day. 

I patted myself on the back for staying on track by eating the right food in the right amount at the right time. 

Naturally, I also loathed the sense of failure I felt when I believed I had eaten imperfectly. 

A “bad” choice would completely derail my day. My mood would turn dark, and I’d become preoccupied with how I would make up for it, which usually meant eating less and exercising more.

I took a lot of pride in being a good eater, a healthy eater, a disciplined eater—all traits our society puts on a pedestal. 

I thought eating perfectly made me a better person (another lie I regrettably believed).

In reality, it just made me miserable and intolerable to myself and those closest to me. 

While outsiders praised my eating, my loved ones had to deal with all the tiresome crap that came along with my rigid food rules and relentless pursuit to eat perfectly.

Permission to Be Human
In order to heal my disordered relationship with food, I needed to learn how to stop viewing it through the perfectionistic, black-and-white, good-or-bad lens I had been taught.

I also needed to relearn how to trust myself, my body’s internal cues and my instincts instead of following external sources and rules regarding the “right” way to eat.

When I threw away all the “eat this, not that” lists and started making eating decisions based on what tastes good and feels good in my body, I became a much more flexible, relaxed and peaceful eater.

Instead of striving to be perfect, I gave myself permission to be human, one who most of the time eats until they’re comfortably full and sometimes eats until they’re stuffed.

The Deeper Work
More than anything, I had to do the deeper work of understanding what drove my desire to achieve the perfect diet and the perfect body. 

To truly change, I had to examine the roots of my perfectionism and anti-fat bias, challenge our culture’s body ideals, and question what being healthy truly means.

None of this happened easily or quickly nor have I reached a final destination (I'm not sure there is one). It's an ongoing process but one that's so worth it.

I Wanted to Stop Overeating. My Solution Was the Problem.

Not long ago, I came across some journaling I had written years prior.

One of my journal entries included a list of things I wanted to change about myself. At the top of my list was: stop overeating.

At the time, I was frustrated by how often I ate until I was stuffed. This mostly happened at dinner. I’d be “good” all day and then blow it at night. 

Repeatedly eating until I was uncomfortably full not only caused me physical discomfort but also a lot of emotional distress. Feeling the aching pain of my straining stomach as I washed dishes triggered feelings of anger, regret, guilt and shame.

My Solution Was the Problem
For the rest of the night, I’d beat myself up, endlessly ruminating on my lack of self-control.

Why couldn’t I get it together and stop overeating? What was wrong with me?!

As I got ready for bed, I’d promise myself I wouldn’t do it again and devise a plan to put an end to it, everything from using a smaller plate to forgoing seconds. 

However, because my plans were driven by my diet mentality, including my restrictive approach to eating, they failed to change anything. I’d still end almost every dinner uncomfortably full and disappointed in myself.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that my attempts to eat less were driving my need to eat more. My solution was the problem!

Unmet Needs
There are always very valid reasons why we do what we do with food. More often than not, we’re trying to take care of unmet needs. 

When I learned to be curious about what needs I was trying to fulfill when I continued to eat past comfortable fullness, things began to shift for me.

I came to understand that my tendency to override my fullness cues was primarily driven by my very human need for nourishment, satisfaction and pleasure.

1/ Need for Nourishment
Although I thought I was being “good” with my eating throughout the day, the reality was that I wasn’t eating enough out of fear of weight gain. 

My nighttime overeating wasn’t due to a lack of willpower or self-discipline. It was my very wise body’s attempt to get its nourishment needs met, to make up for my daytime deprivation and protect itself from future food scarcity, something it had come to expect.

I was stuck in an exhausting cycle of starting every morning with the intent to be "good"—that is, eat very little—to compensate for the amount I ate the night before. Of course, this plan always backfired come dinnertime.

2/ Need for Satisfaction and Pleasure
Because I was so focused on eating low-calorie and “clean,” I pretty much ate the same “safe” foods every day. While I didn’t dislike what I was eating, my rigid diet lacked variety, novelty and deeply satisfying, pleasurable foods.

Satisfaction and pleasure are essential components of the eating experience and when these are missing, it’s natural to seek more food, even if you’re not hungry. 

I wasn’t ignoring my fullness signals because I was out of control with my eating. I kept eating because, in addition to making up for my undereating throughout the day, my bored taste buds were desperately and unsuccessfully searching for the satisfaction and pleasure we humans are naturally wired to pursue.

As I started to fully nourish my body and enjoy a wider range of pleasurable, satisfying foods (including my once-forbidden foods), my chronic overeating eventually subsided. I no longer ate every dinner as if it was my Last Supper. 

Still Stuffed Sometimes
This doesn’t mean I never eat until I’m stuffed. I absolutely do! 

Normal eating includes sometimes eating past comfortable fullness. In fact, I just did it a few nights ago.

The difference is that now when I find myself uncomfortably full, I’m able to compassionately identify the needs I was trying to take care of rather than ruthlessly chastise myself.

The other night, I was really tired. It felt easier to keep eating my dinner than to muster up the energy required to get up from the table and clean the kitchen. By continuing to eat, I was preserving my energy and honoring my need for rest.

Sometimes, I keep eating because the meal is so delicious I don’t want the pleasure to end. This can be particularly true if, for whatever reason, I haven’t experienced much pleasure lately. In this case, I intentionally prioritize my need for pleasure and am okay with feeling some stomach discomfort.

Other times, I find myself eating when I'm no longer hungry to avoid wasting food. This usually happens when it seems like there’s not enough food remaining to warrant saving it for leftovers. 

I grew up in a clean-your-plate household with depression-era parents so understandably food was rarely wasted. Occasionally, my need to honor this deeply instilled value outweighs my physical comfort.

Tending to Your Needs
From undereating, food restrictions and a pleasure deficiency to fatigue, stress, busyness and distraction, there are many different reasons why you, like me, may find yourself eating past the point of comfortable fullness.

When you gain a better understanding of the unmet needs driving your overeating, you can put your attention toward tending to these needs instead of focusing on controlling your food as diet culture teaches us to do.

Thankfully, unlike the days when I wrote that journal entry, these days when I do experience the uncomfortable sensation of being stuffed, I don’t dwell on it.

Instead, I briefly reflect on the needs I was trying to take care of, make myself as comfortable as possible (e.g., put on loose clothes, go on a gentle walk, take an antacid, etc.) and then just move on. 

I Was a Dieter in Disguise. How About You?

After years of jumping from one diet to the next, Valerie hit rock bottom. 

Fed up with the weight-loss roller coaster and obsessing over every morsel she ate, she swore off dieting forever. 

Yet, months after quitting, she still shuns carbs, avoids snacking and seconds, never eats after 6:30 p.m., and runs an extra mile whenever she has dessert.

Valerie is a pseudo-dieter.

She genuinely believes she’s given up dieting, yet she continues to engage in dieting behaviors. 

As a result, she still experiences many of the side effects of dieting, including thinking about food all the time, struggling with intense cravings, feeling out of control with her “trigger foods” (i.e., ice cream and chips), and feeling frustrated, guilty and ashamed when she thinks she’s eaten badly.

Deeply Ingrained
As seen with Valerie, the diet mentality can be so deeply ingrained—or hidden under the guise of “health," "wellness,” "lifestyle" or “biohacking”—that you may not realize you're actually pseudo-dieting and that your restrictive eating behaviors are making you vulnerable to the same physical and psychological damage dieting causes. 

Falling into the pseudo-dieting trap is completely understandable given how prevalent and seductive our diet and wellness cultures are.

Here are some more examples of pseudo-dieting:

• Restricting your eating to include only “clean,” “whole” or “unprocessed” foods.

• Switching from calorie counting to macro counting for weight loss.

• Limiting carb or fat grams regardless of what you want or what your body needs.

• Determining what you deserve to eat based on what you ate earlier or if you exercised, rather than your hunger level.

• Compensating for eating certain foods by doing extra exercise, skipping your next meal or eating less tomorrow.

• Attempting to manage your weight with detoxes and cleanses.

• Allowing yourself to only eat at certain times of the day despite your hunger level.

• Becoming vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc. for the purpose of losing weight.

• Bringing your own food to parties so you aren’t tempted to eat anything else.

• Weighing and measuring your food to limit how much of it you eat.

Do you see yourself in any of these behaviors? I certainly do. My own journey included years of pseudo-dieting. Unbeknownst to me, I was a dieter in disguise!

A Dieter in Disguise
After I stopped focusing on calories in/calories out, I became obsessed with only eating “clean” foods. I also unnecessarily cut out gluten and dairy. I never considered any of this dieting. 

Instead, I claimed my restrictions were all in the name of wellness even though secretly my goal was weight loss. I mean, come on. If I thought eliminating gluten and dairy could possibly lead to weight gain, I would never have done it.

As Christy Harrison, the author of Anti-Diet and The Wellness Trap says, "If it involves restricting how you eat, demonizes certain food and is centered around the size of your body, it’s a diet."

Same Adverse Outcomes
Looking back, I can see how my pseudo-dieting resulted in the same adverse outcomes as my more official calorie-counting dieting. 

I still adhered to rigid food rules, fixated on food, skipped social events out of fear of eating “bad” foods, binged on sweets when I let myself have them, got angry at myself when I felt I ate poorly, overexercised to make up for my eating, and so on.

Releasing the Diet Mentality
Just like bona fide dieting, pseudo-dieting can disconnect you from your body inhibiting your ability to hear and honor the messages it’s sending you. 

And, as was the case with Valerie and me, all restrictive eating, no matter what it’s called, leaves you vulnerable to the pitfalls of dieting, from binge eating and weight cycling to food preoccupation and social withdrawal.

Escaping the dieting roller coaster and experiencing true food freedom requires letting go of your diet mentality and relearning how to nourish your body based on its internal cues versus external rules—that is, eat intuitively.

As pseudo-dieting behaviors can be quite subtle and disentangling from our pervasive, insidious diet culture can be very difficult (but not impossible!), it can be helpful to get support from an Intuitive Eating counselor, therapist, dietician or nutritionist so you can truly let go of dieting in all its various forms once and for all.