If you missed the previous episode, go back and listen to it so you get the idea of what we’re talking about when I say food limit reactivity.

In a nutshell, food limit reactivity is when we have intense, negative reactions to even the slightest limit on what or how much we can eat. It causes a lot of distress, can lead to binge eating, and gets squarely in the way of losing weight or adjusting your diet for medical reasons.

Food limit reactivity is a modifiable entity. It can go up and it can go down over time. It also can be higher one day and lower on a different day for the same person, depending on the context and the person’s emotional state.

To help us understand food limit reactivity better, and how we can help decrease it, let’s look at two related psychological ideas.

First, food cue reactivity. It sounds similar, but instead of talking about responses to food limits, this is about how people respond to food cues.

Food cue reactivity is a term used in research to describe physical and psychological responses that happen when a person is exposed to a stimulus associated with eating. Often, the sight or smell of food is the stimulus, but it could be walking through your kitchen, or hearing your spouse rip into a bag of chips in the other room. The responses include psychological changes like activation of appetite and motivation to eat, as well as physical events like salivation and secretion of gut hormones.

People display differing levels of food cue reactivity. Some people salivate more and have a strong increase in desire to eat when cued by the sight or smell of food, (a high level of food cue reactivity) while other people show less of this effect. Some research has linked higher food cue reactivity with higher BMI. Brain imaging studies have indicated that greater activation in the brain areas linked to reward and motivation can actually predict weight gain in the future.

This seems pretty plausible to me - if some people’s minds are wired to give them greater motivation to eat and seek reward every time they see tasty food, I can see that creating a greater likelihood of weight gain. It has been shown that higher food cue reactivity leads to more eating in the absence of hunger, and eating above a person’s energy needs.

Well, one thing we know drives up food cue reactivity is being physically hungry. If your stomach is growling, the rustle of someone opening a bag of chips is much more attention grabbing and tempting that it would be if you’ve just finished a meal.

Second, being on a diet makes us react more strongly to food cues. When we have limited access to food, it takes on a much higher reward value to our brains.

Third, individuals vary. Some people are not very sensitive to food cues most of the time, until they get hungry. Then, their sensitivity to bakery smells or the sound of a coworker eating spikes. Other individuals have more stable reactivity to food cues regardless of hunger or satiety state. I bring this up, because I think it can help us be more compassionate with ourselves, if it seems like other people aren’t experiencing the same thing as you, it’s completely possible that they aren’t. It doesn’t mean you or they are broken, you simply have different levels of this attribute at the moment.

The second concept I want to touch on is control aversion, because it also has similarities to food limit reactivity, and may help us better understand why we want to eat like crazy at the very thought of holding back.

Psychologists refer to acting out against perceived control from others as "control aversion”. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, you could think of it as protecting your autonomy to make your own choices, or a “don’t tell me what to do” attitude. But it can cause trouble if it leaves you unable to take directions from your employer, follow the advice of experts, or even comply with the law. A recent paper explored how control aversion impacted people’s cooperation with coronavirus-related health protective measures.

When it comes to handwashing or wearing a mask, control aversion shows up when people think “yeah that’s a good idea” when it’s recommended, but feel markedly less agreement with it if the behavior is mandated.

Typically, people feel more control aversion to things that are highly personal. For example, if the town wants to conserve water and prohibits everyone from watering their lawns, I’m probably not going to be as annoyed as I would be if they told me they were going to place a monitor in my home to see how many minutes I spent in the shower.

It’s not hard to see some parallels here between wanting to rebel against being controlled by your boss or the government, and wanting to eat a whole pizza on the way home from your first weight watchers meeting, the phenomenon of food limit reactivity. Someone described her issues with control aversion and food limit reactivity like this :

I do also get really uncomfortable or irrationally angry when: someone tells me I can't do something, if I get cut off in traffic, if my work supervisor wants to me to do something I don't want to do, if someone I care about tells me there's something wrong with me/my behavior, if I am hyper-focused on a project and I have to stop for any reason (ex. someone asks me a question or my baby needs me). I will either get really defensive, look for excuses, or my anger will swell up so big I can't perceive anything else.

So, the all important question is how do we help reduce our client’s (or our own) food limit reactivity, so we can make good choices for ourselves?

First we notice it. It doesn’t matter one bit what you call it - the important concept is to look at the situations and emotions that trigger you to feel an urge to overeat or binge. For most people who work with us in the Breaking Up with Binge Eating program, food rules are setting off binge cycles for them, so we encourage people to drop the food rules and stop dieting, until we can resolve the reactivity.

Second. Be compassionate with yourself about where this came from. Your reactivity, just like other disordered eating behaviors, is trying to keep you safe. This is your mind trying to help you avoid suffering. If you feel like something triggers you emotionally or sets off urges to engage in disordered behaviors, try not to blame yourself. You didn’t choose this, and it’s not your fault.

Third. Over time, work to Reframe how you think about food choices. Recognize that you are in the driver’s seat and are allowed to eat any food at any time - it’s not illegal. One of the important things to grasp is that just because you CAN eat something, doesn’t mean you want to. The process of breaking up with binge eating or emotional eating takes months of learning how to make those decisions. Embrace the idea of deciding do I want to eat this, instead of can I eat this.

Fourth. When it comes to making those choices, about when, how much, and what to eat, develop the habit of foresight. Consider the after-effects of your food and drink selections. Some are positive and some are negative. Some food or drink choices might result in you feeling energetic, proud, and satisfied, while other choices might give you a stomach ache, leave you with a hangover, or worsen your health conditions over time. It’s okay to choose sometimes to eat things that upset your stomach, many lactose intolerant people feel like ice cream is a worthy exception and I do not disagree. But the important thing is to feel like you are making your own, reasoned choice, not one you are forced into against your will.

Fifth. We include response inhibition in our coaching program. Except we don’t call it that. Basically, it’s wise to expect that you will at some point feel triggered - you will experience the urge to go to the store and buy binge foods because someone ate all your cookies at home, or because your mother asked if you were going to lose some weight by the wedding. When your food limit reactivity is triggered, but you cannot or do not act on it, it passes. And not only that, but it weakens the whole reactivity pattern! It’s very important to gain the confidence that you can be triggered into wanting to binge eat, but not actually act on it.

Sixth. When it comes to practicing self-restraint around food choices, begin gently, and progress gently. Extreme food limits tend to cause intense negative reactions, so taking up a fasting protocol where you aren’t permitted to eat at all for a long stretch of time is, to put it bluntly, a terrible thing to put yourself through. Same goes for cutting out any foods or food groups.

We usually begin with some gentle self-restraint practice in the very first week of the program, when we set up our regular eating pattern. The idea is to outline times for yourself to eat a meal or snack, and have them be no more than 4 hours apart. So in between these times, it’s appropriate to practice waiting to eat until the next time, but it’s never more than a few hours away. Many clients say this part feels really good, because they have a clear plan of when to practice eating, and when to practice not eating.

When it comes to progressing, it’s also key to go slowly. For example, instead of saying “drop all the processed foods from your diet” which is a drastic change for virtually everyone, we encourage people to trade one processed food for a less refined one. And throughout this whole process, the theme is, ‘here’s a strategy you can try, if you want. It’s completely up to you.’

Which brings me to the last, very important piece of ending food limit reactivity: Trust. When I read the research papers I could find on control aversion, the word trust came up over and over. Nations where people have greater trust in their governments had less rebellion and greater adoption of disease control measures that were mandated. In the workplace, employees who trust their supervisors show less control aversion than those who aren’t quite sure about their superiors motives. And in human behavior studies, people are more control-averse when it’s a total stranger trying to control their behavior. All this boils down to the fact that we need to feel safe and trusting of the source before we are able to set and abide by food guidelines. I do not take it lightly that my clients and listeners place their trust in me, and I know that part of why our program has such high success rates is because of that trust. I’m sure it takes time, but when people internalize the awareness that I will do everything I can do to alleviate and not increase their suffering, they feel okay with trying out new ways of thinking, and eating.

Develop that same trust in yourself - promise yourself that if you want to try healthier eating, or eating for weight loss, lower cholesterol, or another nutrition related goal, you will not put yourself through starvation and misery. Promise yourself you will be gentle and kind. Promise yourself that you will protect yourself from suffering. And then, keep those promises, every one of them.