I’m currently reading Fat by Robert Pool. It looks at the research around weight and obesity going all the way back to the 1800s. He speaks about all the different theories that have come and gone and how our understanding has changed over the last hundred years or so.

(There is a section in the book where Pool talks about experiments with milkshakes and ice creams, something I’ve spoken about before.)

One idea, which was popular for a time, was that the heavier someone was, the more susceptible they were to external cues. That if they saw advertisements about food or food was placed in front of them, those who were a heavier weight, were more likely to eat more.

While this idea showed promise in some early research, over time they discovered it wasn’t actually true. What they did find however, was that the way people think about food, whether that person was light or heavy, does impact on their food choices.

People can roughly be divided into two groups, restrained eaters and non-restrained eaters.

Restrained eaters are those who restrict their eating to some degree. This can be calorie counting, minimising or avoiding certain macros or food stuffs (low carb, low fat, sugar free), or simply eating less than they actually want. So rather than listening to their body, they are using some other method of making food choices and deciding how much to eat.

Non-restrained eaters are those who simply listen to their body and don’t follow dieting. They eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full (at least most of the time). They may have certain foods they don’t eat, but this is because they don’t like the taste or they recognise it doesn’t work for them.

Now you can be a restrained or a non-restrained eater, regardless of your weight. Weight isn’t the determining factor in which way of eating you follow.

But what the research has found is that if you can find some way to interfere with a restrained eaters restriction, the reaction is a wild swing into “oh screw it” land.

So when someone is a restrained eater and they eat something they shouldn’t or more then they believe they’re allowed, the reaction is to eat even more. Or if you use alcohol, and this blocks someone’s desire to restrict, the floodgates can be opened.

The same thing applies to stress. In those who are restrained eaters, stress effectively removes the desire for restraint that they usually put on themselves, and hence the eating then increases, often dramatically.

But for non-restrained eaters, things work differently. Because they are not trying to stick to some plan or using arbitrary reasons to eat in a certain way, their food choices don’t swing erratically.

If they eat some ice cream, they’ll possibly eat less at the next meal. But if this happens, it will be completely unconscious and listening to their body. Having “bad’ foods doesn’t send them into a spiral.

And with stress, food intake usually decreases. The anxiety suppresses their appetite and non restrained eaters eat less.

Now this really stuck out to me because I’d just been listening to a conversation between Isabel Foxen Duke and Christy Harrison (this is the podcast) in which Isabel was saying the same thing.

She mentioned that people who describe themselves as “emotional eaters” and “binge eaters” were always people who participated in some form of restriction or dieting. That outside of this, it rarely happens.

In some senses, this isn’t so surprising. If food takes up a large part of what you think about everyday, it’s then not surprising that this is going to be front of mind when things aren’t working out as you’d hoped. Food becomes the most natural way of comforting or self-soothing, even if this seems paradoxical for someone who spends so much time trying to restrict.

There was a great post on Facebook that I saw and mentioned recently on a podcast. It said something like:

“Mike Tyson said ‘every boxer has a plan til they get punched in the face’. And for normal people trying to eat healthily or follow a plan, their “punch in the face” is stress”

I’d substitute the words “normal people” for “restrained eaters” and then think this is bang on.

There are exceptions to this rule. Those who are restrained eaters who under times of stress buckle down even more and use controlling their food as their way of dealing with this situation.

But except for a tiny fraction of these people, this only works for so long. Maybe it’s a couple of months, maybe it’s a couple of years. But at some point cracks in the restriction start to appear and the “binges” and “emotional eating” begins.

And for the tiny fraction who can keep this up indefinitely, their fate isn’t as rosy as you may imagine. They are often the people who end of with the bodies we think of when we hear “anorexic”. Emaciated, crumbling health with body systems and organs shutting down, but without a body that overrides their ability to restrict.

Healthy food behaviours aren’t dictated by weight and aren’t about willpower. They’re about listening to your body and finding ways that you enjoy and appreciate food, movement, sleep and a whole host of other factors, that have the side benefit of improving your health.

Because the more this is about restriction and restraint, the more time you spend wildly moving along the spectrum of feeling in control and then feeling utterly and completely out of it.

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