How I Quit My Cookie Binges. It Didn't Require Willpower.

Many years ago, when I worked in the corporate world, I had a weekend cookie ritual.

Every Friday morning, after getting off the train downtown, I would stop at my favorite cookie shop and pick out a bunch of cookies before going to my office.

The cookies were large, dense and utterly delicious. You could smell them baking from blocks away. The peanut-butter chocolate chip and wheat-germ chocolate chip cookies especially made my mouth water.

I liked to arrive at the bakery early so I could save money by purchasing the half-priced day-old cookies before they were sold out (these cookies weren’t cheap!). Sometimes I’d hit more than one location if the first shop I stopped at didn’t have enough cookies to meet my needs.

Before heading to work, I'd quickly hide the big, butter-stained bakery bag inside a darker bag as I feared my co-workers seeing me with such a “bad” food and potentially tarnishing my “healthy eater” reputation. 

I also worried my co-workers would smell the cookies in my office, so I’d bury the bag under my coat. 

Although secretly obtaining these cookies every Friday was a bit stressful, not getting them felt far more stressful. 

Weekends Nights Only
Late each weekend night, I would stuff myself with the cookies, first while sitting in front of my TV and then while standing in my dark kitchen before going to bed.

I was determined to eat them all before the weekend ended, before my time was up.

You see, I had a rule that I could only eat cookies on weekend nights. They were my reward for eating “clean” during the week.

However, because I was restricting my eating throughout the week, including depriving myself of sweets (you know, being “good”), I had a scarcity mindset that drove me to binge on the cookies when I allowed myself to have them. 

What was supposed to be a yummy treat wasn’t so satisfying in the end. I went to bed uncomfortably full and full of guilt and shame. 

The physical discomfort and emotional distress my cookie binges caused convinced me all the more that I couldn’t be trusted with certain foods, that I had to get back on track on Monday, and that I needed a "no cookies ever" food rule.

Once again, I would be “good” during the week—and once again, I'd inevitably head to the bakery at the end of the week. I was obsessed with those cookies and stuck in a vicious restrict-binge cycle. 

Not About Willpower
While I sometimes binged on other forbidden foods, my weekend cookie binges bothered me the most. 

I tried to explain my anguish to my boyfriend who just laughed as he didn’t understand why I, the healthiest eater he knew, was so devastated by my behavior. 

To be fair, I hid a lot of the cookies and my cookie-eating from him, so he didn’t really have a full grasp of the situation. Plus, he had never dieted a day in his life, so he had no idea what it felt like to “fail” at eating.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that my cookie binges did not make me a failure and were not due to a lack of willpower, despite what diet culture had taught me to believe. 

My behavior was a natural human response to food deprivation. 

With the threat of scarcity just around the corner—that is, no more cookies come Monday—my very protective brain told me to eat all the cookies now before they were gone, even if I didn’t really want them or was uncomfortably full.

Plus, I feared if I didn’t eat them all on the weekend, I would be tempted to eat the leftovers on Monday. Doing so would ruin my good-eating plan and mean I wouldn't deserve to be rewarded with more cookies come Friday.

An Unimaginable Solution
At the time, I thought I needed to stop buying and eating cookies. I never imagined the solution was to freely eat cookies.

When I finally hit rock bottom with my disordered eating, I started challenging my food rules and giving myself unconditional permission to eat. 

This included eating cookies whenever I wanted, even on a Wednesday and even for breakfast. Loosening the reins was scary, but to my great surprise, my cookie binges eventually stopped.

Over time, I went from rigidly controlling my cookie consumption and then feeling shamefully out of control with them to freely eating cookies at any time and feeling neutral about it.

Now, I pretty much always have cookies on hand along with many other foods I had once made off-limits.

All these years later, I’m still sometimes astounded by how these foods are no longer a big deal.

The sense of ease and peace I now feel with food is something I wish for you, too.

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.

My Eyes Were Glued to the Candy. Food Controlled Me.

When I worked in consumer marketing years ago, we conducted in-person focus groups to get people’s feedback on things like product names, logos, packaging, magazine ads and TV commercials.

The groups were held at a few different research facilities around the Bay Area. As a facilitator led a group, I sat with my teammates in a dimly lit client lounge and observed the participants from behind a one-way mirror.

While I found the feedback interesting and informative, attending the focus groups was pure agony.

You see, they involved a lot of food—food I had made off-limits.

Focused on the Wrong Thing
The client observation rooms were always filled with heaps of food, from pizza, chips, cheese and crackers to cookies, granola bars, candy and more candy.

I was so preoccupied with all the food surrounding me, I often found it challenging to concentrate on what the focus group participants were saying. 

At the time, I was deeply entrenched in diet culture and had a lot of food rules regarding what I could and couldn’t eat. Unless baby carrots were involved, most of the foods provided were on my forbidden foods list.

Internal Tug-of-War
While my teammates freely enjoyed the food, I struggled with a tug-of-war in my head.

On one end of the rope, my inner Diet Rebel voice was saying “Screw it! Just have a few handfuls! It’s no big deal! You can make up for it tomorrow.” 

Pulling with all its might in the other direction was my inner Food Police voice screaming “Stay away! It’s too many calories! Once you start eating, you won’t be able to stop!”

This internal battle happened not only at focus groups but at any situation involving food I considered bad, banned or risky. 

My food fixation was an all-consuming distraction, one that prevented me from being fully present and engaged with the world around me.

Eyes Glued
At one focus group in particular, I vividly remember eyeing a bowl brimming with M&M’s. My eyes were glued on that colorful candy all night long. I desperately wanted to toss a few handfuls into my mouth but doing so felt like a huge no-no.

Not only was candy frowned upon on my diet, I was also ashamed to be caught eating it in front of my co-workers, who had all at various times complimented me on my seemingly healthy habits, unwavering self-discipline and recent weight loss.

It wasn’t so much that I thought they would make negative comments. I was more worried about them teasing me, perhaps calling me out for cheating on my diet or jokingly saying something like “I can’t believe YOU are eating candy!”

Having what I perceived as an act of weakness witnessed and remarked on by others felt intolerable to me. 

However, once the focus group was over and everyone left the room, I hurriedly dumped a bunch of the M&M’s into my bag and ate them on my way home when no one could witness my transgression. 

I consumed the candy with such a sense of urgency that I hardly tasted it much less enjoyed it. Sneaking it felt more like satisfying an intense need to fill a hole, albeit temporarily, that years of deprivation had dug. 

Restriction Driving Fixation
Afterward, I felt pretty pathetic. Flooded with feelings of guilt and shame, I immediately made a plan to get back on track the next day.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that I didn’t mess up or do anything wrong. That I wasn’t weak or lacking willpower, discipline or self-control. 

I was human. And my behavior was a natural response to food deprivation and scarcity. 

My food restriction was driving my food fixation.

I would have been able to focus on the focus group if I wasn’t denying myself food. It would have been no big deal to eat the foods surrounding me if I wasn’t trying to adhere to a bunch of food rules that ignored my body's needs and desires. 

Control Backfires
Sadly, diet culture teaches us that if your eating feels out of control, you need to pull the reins in tighter and control it more. The opposite is actually true. 

The more you control your food, the more it controls you. 

The more you try to control your eating, the more likely you are to eat in ways that feel out of control and unsatisfying.  

When I ditched dieting and my food rules and started giving myself unconditional permission to eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, I stopped fixating on food.

I no longer feared being in situations where food was involved. Instead, I was able to be present, engaged and enjoy myself, my company—and the food.

I wish the same for you.