How to Deal With Your Trigger Foods

Do you have any trigger foods?

Are you afraid to keep certain foods in your house because you feel like you lose control with them every time you eat them?

There is a very valid reason why some foods feel triggering.

Restriction.

If you’re like most people, your trigger foods are triggering because you are restricting them.

Natural Scarcity Response
Potato chips are a common trigger food, so let’s use them as an example.

Let’s say you love potato chips but you rarely let yourself eat them because you consider them to be a “bad” food and every time you do allow yourself to have them, you feel completely out of control with them.

When you do break down and buy a bag, you can’t stop thinking about them sitting in your cupboard and you keep returning to the kitchen all afternoon for more until the last salty crumbs are licked off your fingers. Once the bag is gone and you’re full of chips and guilt, you decide the safest thing to do is to not eat them at all.

“I can’t be trusted to have potato chips in my house! I’m never eating them again!” you proclaim to your friends who can all totally relate because, thanks to diet culture, they have trigger foods too.

But here’s the thing:

When you don’t let yourself eat potato chips on a regular basis, you create a sense of scarcity and deprivation with them.

The natural human response to scarcity and deprivation is to consume as much as possible of your restricted food when you do allow yourself to eat it.

Basically, your very wise brain is thinking “I never get potato chips therefore I must eat as much as I can right now because I don’t know if I’ll ever have access to them again.”

On top of this, if you’re telling yourself while you’re eating the chips that you shouldn’t be eating them and won’t let yourself eat them again, you are amplifying the threat of scarcity and deprivation, which will further drive you to eat as much as you can right away.

Unconditional Permission to Eat
If you want to stop feeling out of control with potato chips, you need to give yourself unconditional permission to eat all the potato chips you want whenever you want.

This means stocking your kitchen with potato chips and freely eating them with meals, between meals, for breakfast, for dessert, however you desire.

This continuous exposure to your trigger food is called habituation.

The more you eat the potato chips, the more you habituate to them.

In time, their reward value and power over you will diminish and they will become ordinary and neutral—basically, no big deal.

The goal of habituation isn’t to no longer want your trigger foods, but rather to create a trusting and satisfying relationship with them, one that’s free of fear, guilt and shame.

Understandably Feels Scary
Giving yourself unconditional permission to eat your trigger foods can, understandably, feel pretty scary.

It’s so helpful to understand that it’s completely normal to eat a lot of your trigger foods in the beginning of the habituation process because, well, you haven’t habituated to them yet.

This phase of making peace with food freaks a lot of people out, which is why it can be so helpful to get support, whether it’s from an Intuitive Eating counselor, coach, therapist or online community.

When working with my clients, we talk about various strategies that can help them with the habituation process so it doesn’t feel so overwhelming and send them running back to the land of restriction.

Once my clients start habituating to their trigger foods, they start to see that, despite what diet culture wants them to believe, they can trust themselves with any food, regardless of their history with it. And this trust and food freedom is truly profoundly liberating.

Here's what my client Jenny had so say about her experience:

"One of my biggest wins has been being able to have all types of food in my house. Before, I couldn’t have any sweets or baked goods at home otherwise I would just eat them all in one sitting. Having that stuff in my house and not bingeing on it has been a huge positive change. The day I started forgetting it was there was a big day!"

---

*It’s important to note that habituation should be approached differently if you have a food-related health condition, such as lactose intolerance. Of course, you should never try to habituate to a food if you have a life-threatening allergy to it or a condition such as Celiac Disease

What Will You Regret?

This passage from author, activist and wise woman Anne Lamott has long resonated with me:

“Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.”

In the past, I’ve shared how I let my so-called inadequacies and imperfections stop me from fully living.

I let the size of my body dictate the size of my life.

While understandable given the weight-stigmatizing world we live in, it breaks my heart when I think about how much of our life we waste hiding out, berating ourselves for not having the “right body” and obsessing about how to fix it.

I often wonder, if we weren’t thinking about this, what would we be thinking about?

Where would we be putting all our time and energy?

How different would our lives be?

How different would the world be?

My highest intention is to help end all this needless suffering so none of us regrets not going swimming.

If you fear you may regret all the things you didn't do because you were taught your body wasn't good enough, I encourage you to get support.

Life is truly too short to let your body size dictate the size of your life.

Can You Pinch an Inch? The Harms of Body Checking

Can you “pinch an inch?” 

(Please don't try.)

If you were a TV viewer in the 80s, you're likely very familiar with Kellogg’s “pinch an inch” ad campaign. 

And, as the Special K commercials encouraged us to do, you likely tried to see if you could indeed pinch an inch of flesh at your waistline. 

According to the cereal company, pinching an inch or more meant there was a problem with your body. 

But, hey, no worries, they had the solution! If you ate a bowl of Special K cereal every morning, that shameful inch would melt away!

Not only did Kellogg’s body shame millions of people to sell its product, it also taught us, especially impressionable young girls like me, the practice of body checking. 

Body Checking Defined
Body checking means frequently seeking information about your weight, size, shape or appearance by repeatedly engaging in behaviors such as:

• Stepping on the scale to check your weight

• Using skinfold calipers to measure your body fat percentage

• Measuring body parts with a tape measure

• Looking in the mirror and other reflective surfaces (e.g., store windows, display cases)

• Evaluating the fit of your clothing, belts, rings, etc.

• Pinching and squeezing your flesh

• Feeling body parts for fat, muscle or bone

• Wrapping your hands around your wrists, arms, thighs, stomach, etc.

• Comparing your body to recent or old photos and videos of yourself

• Zooming in on various parts of your body in photos and videos

• Comparing your body to other people’s bodies

• Asking other people for their opinion of your body

Escalated With Dieting
While I learned to perform a few body checking behaviors as a pubescent tween, like pinching my waist, my body checking really escalated in my thirties during my most restrictive dieting days.

I’d weigh myself every single morning after working out and before getting into the shower. Sometimes, I’d step on the scale multiple times a day if one was nearby.

When getting dressed, I’d obsessed over whether my clothes felt looser or tighter compared to the last time I wore them. 

Every time I encountered a mirror at home or work while alone, I would turn sideways to check the size of my stomach, often sucking it in to try to make it look flatter. 

Sitting in work meetings, I’d wrap my hand around my wrist under the table to gauge its size. 

And while lying in bed at night, I would perform a routine check of my stomach, thighs and other body parts, feeling each area to see if anything had changed.

Harmful Coping Tool
I didn’t know back then that this constant scrutinizing of my body had a name. I also didn’t realize the harm it was causing. 

I was just trying to do what I thought I needed to do to control my weight, to conform to our culture’s unrealistic body standards, to feel acceptable, worthy and safe in a world that was constantly telling me I wasn’t good enough (including cereal companies!).

If the number on the scale was lower, if my jeans fit looser, if my stomach looked flatter, if I could pinch less belly fat, then I felt relief—albeit temporary—from the body distress I typically felt weighed down by.

My body checking was a way to cope with my uncertainty about who I was and my place in the world. 

It was a way to alleviate my fears and anxiety, to soothe and comfort myself, to reassure myself that I was okay. 

It was also a way to motivate myself. 

If I liked the feedback I received, I was motivated to keep doing what I was doing, to keep undereating and overexercising. If I didn’t like the feedback I received, it motivated me to pull the reins in tighter, to eat even less and exercise even more.

It didn’t matter how my body felt (ravenous! exhausted!). It only mattered how it look.

While I thought my compulsive monitoring was necessary, it kept me overly focused on my body leaving little time, energy and headspace for far more important things.

It caused my mood to swing from elation to despair and dictated how I went about my day and how I interacted with others. 

Although it could momentarily ease my anxiety, it ultimately amplified it. Although I was attempting to feel better about my body, it ultimately increased my body dissatisfaction. 

Life On the Other Side
As I began healing my relationship with my body, I came to understand how harmful my body checking behaviors were, including how they were fueling my disordered eating and exercising.

By working hard to overcome my beliefs and behaviors (including challenging toxic messaging from companies that profit greatly from us feeling badly about our bodies), I was able to eventually cultivate a more peaceful, neutral relationship with my size and shape. 

Looking in the mirror a few times a day to style your hair, ensure your shirt is buttoned correctly, or check for food in your teeth is something most of us do. 

Repeatedly looking in the mirror throughout the day, fixating on the size of your stomach or the shape of your hips, is something none of us should feel the need to do to survive oppressive social constructs that put bodies on a hierarchy.

If you engage in frequent body checking, I encourage you to get support because there’s so much more life to live on the other side of your mirror.