Does Your Diet Keep You Stuck at Home?

When I ask my clients how dieting negatively impacts them, they almost always talk about how it adversely affects their social life.

It sounds something like this:

• I stay home a lot on the weekends because I’m afraid if I go to a party I’ll break down and eat a bunch of food I shouldn’t be eating.
  

• Even though I’d like to, I don’t go out to lunch with my coworkers since the places they like don’t serve anything I can eat. Instead, I eat my packed lunch at my desk while scrolling through Instagram.
  

• I skip a lot of family gatherings because there’s always so much food, including many of my childhood favorites. I don’t want to be tempted and fall off the wagon.
  

• Rather than hang out with my friends on the weekends, I spend hours alone in my kitchen preparing my allowed foods for the upcoming week.
  

• I’d really like to meet someone, but dating is hard since I don’t eat after 6:00 p.m.
  

• I get anxious about consuming too many calories/points/carbs when eating out with my friends so I often make excuses about why I can’t join them.
  

• I avoid taking trips if I won’t be able to control what food I’ll have access to. It’s just too stressful.
  

• I skip my company’s happy hours because I don’t need all those cocktail calories.
  

• I bring my own diet-friendly meal to dinner parties, but end up feeling left out when my friends rave about how good the food is they're sharing.

Does any of this sound familiar to you?

Social Life Suffers
When you place a lot of rules and restrictions on your eating, your social life can suffer tremendously.

Following a diet and/or living with a diet mentality makes it really hard to engage fully in your life. 

It's difficult to be flexible in different food situations and eating environments, to go with the flow and be open to new experiences.

Your life becomes very restricted, contracted and small.

If you’re afraid of eating the “wrong” things, losing control with food and blowing your diet, it’s completely understandable why you would want to isolate yourself. You’re simply trying to be good, to protect yourself, to keep yourself safe.

Harmful to Your Health
Yet, the social isolation dieting can cause not only sucks all the fun and joy out of your life, it can also be harmful to your health.

Research shows that a lack of social connections is a greater detriment to health than smoking and high blood pressure and contributes to loneliness, depression and anxiety.

Whereas, strong social connections lead to a 50 percent increased chance of longevity.

Drives Emotional Eating
Many of my clients share that the social isolation they experience when dieting leaves them feeling bored, lonely, anxious and sad.

As a result, they understandably turn to their forbidden foods, especially when alone, in an attempt to fulfill the innate human need for connection, companionship, comfort and pleasure.

Unfortunately, this often provides them with false evidence that they can’t be trusted with food and need to pull the restriction reins in tighter.

Not Inherently Dieters
Human beings are inherently social creatures. We are not inherently restrictive eaters.

We thrive when we regularly nourish ourselves with a wide variety of satisfying, pleasurable foods—as well as deep, fulfilling social connections.

If your diet keeps you stuck at home, afraid of socializing and losing control with food, I encourage you to truly consider if it's worth restricting your life for.

Do You Struggle with Nighttime Snacking?

Do you struggle with nighttime snacking?

If yes, you’re not alone. 

Many people find themselves rummaging through their fridge or cupboards an hour or two after dinner in search of something to nosh on.

While there is absolutely nothing wrong with eating at any time of day or night, it’s helpful to pause and check your intentions so you can ensure your needs are truly being met.

What Are You Really Hungry For?
We rarely snack at night because we’re physically hungry. If you are, by all means, eat whatever your body needs!

There are always exquisitely good reasons for eating. Although it may not seem like it, nighttime snacking is a way of taking care of ourselves. More often than not, we’re trying to nourish a psychological or emotional hunger.

Rather than chocolate, ice cream, cookies or chips (let’s face it, very few of us snack on an apple or carrots at 9 p.m.), here are some things we might really be hungry for:

• Pleasure: Food, especially sweets, provides a quick hit of pleasure, something we crave when we don’t experience enough pleasure during our daytime hours (e.g., unfulfilling work).
  

• Relief: Most of us move through our days pretty wound up. Eating offers a temporary respite from the stressors of our daily lives. Creamy foods, in particular, ease anxiety, which is one reason why ice cream is such a popular nighttime treat.
  

• Grounding: Our busy lives can leave us feeling overextended and overwhelmed. The act of eating is very grounding; it's a way to center ourselves when we feel scattered.
  

• Companionship: Although we’re more connected than ever before thanks to technology, many of us feel quite lonely. When loneliness creeps in at night, we can always rely on food to hang out with us and distract us from our uncomfortable feelings.
  

• Energy: Because we operate in overdrive throughout our day, most of us are completely wiped out and depleted come nightfall. Food, especially sugar, is a fast and easy way to boost our energy.
  

• Satisfaction: When we don’t get much satisfaction from our meals, perhaps because we’ve eliminated foods we enjoy, eat while multitasking, or rush through a meal, we will naturally seek more food later in an attempt to satisfy our taste buds.  
  

• Me Time: Whether at work or home, many of us spend our days taking care of other people’s needs. Enjoying a nighttime snack, once everyone else is tucked in or logged off, is something special we do just for ourselves.

What Will Truly Meet Your Needs?
If you want to bring more mindfulness to your late-night noshing habits, understanding why you do what you do is the first step.

With compassion and curiosity, ask yourself:

What need am I trying to meet with this food?

Will this food truly meet this need?

If not, how might I better fulfill this need?

For example, say you reach for chocolate throughout the night because you’re pleasure deficient. How can you bring more pleasure into your life? Is it as small as reading a good book or taking a post-dinner walk with a pal or as big as changing careers? 

Or, perhaps you dive into a bag of chips because you feel overtaxed and burned out. How can you simplify your life? Can you hire a housecleaner, set work boundaries like not checking email after 6 p.m., or say “no” to others and opportunities more often? (Remember, saying “no” often means saying “yes” to yourself.)

Maybe you’ve identified that you’re seeking an energy boost, something to alleviate your depleted state. If this is the case, you’ll likely benefit more from hitting the hay than raiding the cookie jar.

Deprivation Backlash
If your day includes depriving yourself of what you really want to eat (e.g., ordering a light salad instead of a hearty sandwich) and/or restricting the amount and type of food you eat (e.g., counting calories, cutting carbs), your urge to snack all night is not due to a lack of willpower or discipline.

It’s a compensatory reaction; your body’s natural response to physical and psychological deprivation. The more you ignore your body’s needs and desires, the bigger the backlash and binge.

When you allow yourself to eat what and however much you want throughout your day, you’ll likely feel less compelled to snack the night away.

Please Keep in Mind…
It’s perfectly okay to eat when you’re not hungry, including for emotional reasons. Sometimes, a bowl of ice cream is exactly what you need.

Do You Lick Your Peanut Butter Knife?

I remember years ago watching a weight-loss episode on a popular talk show. One of the calorie-cutting tips given was to never lick your peanut butter knife.

This made me sad. Very sad.

Who doesn’t love to lick their knife clean after making a PB&J sandwich, almond-butter toast, or bagel with cream cheese?

It’s fun! It’s yummy! It’s super satisfying!

Harmful, Not Helpful
Every day, we’re bombarded with messages like these that are often more harmful than helpful.

They cause us to be hyper-vigilant about our eating. They result in pointless food rules, restriction and rigidity. They lead to unnecessary fear, stress, shame and suffering.

If you bought into the “no knife-licking” rule, yet failed to follow it (which, if you’re like me, is highly likely!), your thoughts may sound something like this:

• Licking this knife is a big no-no—you know that!

• I am being bad, and naughty, and reckless.

• I have no willpower or self-control. No wonder I look the way I do.

• What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I follow one freaking simple rule?

• Ugh, I really hope no one saw me do that.

• I can’t be trusted with peanut butter; I’m going to stop buying it.

• I feel guilty and need to make up for this food sin. No dessert for me tonight!

• I really want to double-dip my knife back into the jar and lick it again.

• Screw it. I’ve come this far, I might as well keep going back for more!

• I shouldn’t do this, but licking the knife clean is so much easier than getting peanut butter off my dishcloth!

Does any of this sound familiar?

Challenge Your Food Rules
I spend a lot of time helping my clients identify and investigate their food rules. 

We deconstruct and challenge them, exploring questions, such as: Where did this rule come from? Is it true? Is it reasonable, sustainable and pleasurable? How do you feel and act when you break it? Is it helpful or harmful?

About 99.9 percent of the time, my clients determine their food rules are causing them far more harm than good.

They realize how their rules are creating an unhealthy relationship with food and negatively impacting their physical, mental, emotional and social health.

As my clients start to shed their food rules, a sense of freedom, empowerment, peace and ease surfaces.

Instead of listening to external sources, they begin trusting their intuition, body wisdom and direct experience to guide them.

And they start licking their peanut butter knife again.