Mastering Embodied Boundaries With Food That Prevent Sparking A Binge Eating Experience

My husband and I adopted our dog, Tato, when he was only 2 months old. The first time we took him to the vet, she said, "You're going to have your hands full with this one." I have never felt that way about him. Yes, he's opinionated. Yes, he's got preferences. Yet, this is part of why I love him so damn much is that he's clear on what does and does not work for him.

When he was 6 months old, we started taking him to puppy school to get some training. Honestly, I feel like puppy school is actually adult-person dog school that shows you how to protect and support your dog so they feel safe in the world. Anyways, we learned early on that Tato gets overwhelmed easily and gets really scared of other dogs. So what the trainers started to do when we arrived, is they would set us up in a corner and put a gate in front of him. Now, he had a boundary between him and the other dogs where he could look out, assess the room, see he wasn't in danger and we could slowly take the gate away.

While I had been teaching the importance of boundaries previously, my experience with creating a boundary for Tato to feel safe in his world gave a whole new meaning to the importance of learning to set boundaries for your body's safety. Setting a boundary is in service to you feeling like you can be present in the here and now.

I've been noticing a growing trend when it comes to healing from patterns of binge eating. There is a common suggestion that binge eating is partially sparked by a sense of restriction and to decrease this experience of restriction in your body you need to eat whatever you want to eat in whatever quantity. What this CAN do is neutralize all food which is important on this healing journey to see all food on an equal playing field to take away any sense of morality, guilt, or shame when eating different foods. I even tried out this phase myself and saw the benefits and the drawbacks of this approach to healing relationship with food.

The thing that is often not talked about when suggesting this eating strategy is that when you’ve experienced trauma your NO was taken away.

You may have been drawn to diets because it helped give some safety in saying no, yet, this no was externally influenced.

So you go to a practitioner to get off the hamster wheel of diet culture and they tell you that you have to start saying YES to all foods because you've been saying no for so long. But why you were drawn to dieting wasn't about the food to begin with. It gave you structure, rules, boundaries, and a place where you could say no because someone else was telling you it was alright to. Sometimes though, this no is wanting to be expressed in a different area of your life. 

You start saying yes to all foods and you eat, and eat, and eat, and find yourself more and more unsafe and dysregulated. One of the many definitions of trauma is anything that happened too much too fast, and eating whatever you want to eat in whatever quantity can feel similar to the too much too fast experience and perpetuate the trauma response in your body.

What I hear from many people looking to find a more safety producing relationship with food is that now they're scared to set boundaries with food for fear that it will spark a binge eating experience as their body perceives that restriction is occurring and fights back. When healing from patterns of binge eating your internal no needs to be reclaimed based on your body’s feedback of what supports you in feeling safe so that your boundary is not interpreted as restriction. 

So how do you do this? Great question! Let's get into it.

1. Food neutralization.

Whatever food you're thinking about eating, decrease the tendency to label that food as wrong, bad, junk, trash, processed, or unhealthy. It's just a food. Whatever messages you've received from diet, wellness, or fitness culture, put that on a shelf in your brain for a second so that you can drop into your body's feedback about this food.

2. Sensation assessment.

As you consider eating this food, notice any sensations arising. Your body is already sending you messages based on how you feel. Tato wasn't choosing to be scared of the other dogs in the room. His little body was perceiving that he was in danger and he naturally went into high alert. You aren't choosing to be triggered by a food, your body is perceiving this food as dangerous and threatening based on many different factors that may include what you've been taught about this food, your personal experience of this food, and how this food has felt in your body in the past. For now, you don't need to know why you feel what you feel. You first get to build awareness of how you feel around a particular food and validate your experience.

3. Interoceptive awareness.

More and more research is showing that those who struggle with food have low interoceptive awareness. Interoception is the sense of knowing what is going on inside of your body. There are many ways to build interoception ability. One way you can do this is by reflecting on the last time you ate this food and remembering how you felt. Often we have a mental construct and associations with certain foods. You may believe eating a certain food is going to give you peace and calm yet when you reference your body, you actually feel agitated, bloated, and anxious after eating that food. Reflect on your many experiences of eating this food you're considering trying and how it felt in your body after you were done eating it.

4. Embodied Choice.

When healing your trauma based food coping mechanisms, it's crucially important you make your food decision your choice. There is no right or wrong here. If after you slow down, practice neutralizing your food, assess your sensations, explore what you're intercepting, and the feedback you get considering eating this food makes you feel anxious, scared, tight, tense, and you remember feeling ungrounded and dysregulated the last time you ate this food, you can choose to say no. You get to make it clear to your mind that this is not a no forever. This is a no just for now based on what you're hearing from your body. You can have this food whenever you want. In this moment though, you're choosing to say no out of respect to your body.

You will begin to notice a felt sense difference between when you're setting a boundary and when something feels like restriction.

Setting an embodied boundary can feel empowering, calming, safe, connecting, where you may notice your heart rate and breath slow down. Restriction can feel disempowering, tight, tense, constricting, disconnecting, where you may notice your heart rate and breath speed up. Remember that everything I offer is just a suggestion. No one lives in your body except for you and only you will know what is best for your body based on how your body responds to different food suggestions and explorations. 

As a reminder, the next class of the Somatic Eating® Program starts April 22nd! If you're feeling an internal pull toward understanding what your body is trying to tell you through your food behaviors, go to somaticeating.com to join the waitlist and be first to know when doors open. Additionally, if you have been loving the Satiated Podcast and want to support the show, please consider joining Satiated+. You can donate a few dollars every month to keep the show going and I'm almost at the point where enough people have joined to start doing private Satiated+ calls. So if you're interested in also getting time with me and other Satiated Podcast listeners to ask questions about the episodes, click on the link here to join today.