Food Habituation Pitfalls and Somatic Signs You Need More or Less Structure with Food
Recently, I put out a post on social media discussing how do you know when you need more or less structure with food. It was a clear yes that you all wanted me to go into more detail on this. It has been a common suggestion when healing your relationship with food that you need to eat all foods.
Food habituation refers to a psychological phenomenon where repeated exposure to a particular food, especially ones you have denied or restricted, decreases the desire to consume it. Habituation occurs when the novelty or excitement associated with a food diminishes with repeated exposure, leading to a decreased preference for or interest in that food.
Food habituation occurs because of:
1. Repetitive Exposure: The novelty of a food will wear off the more you eat a specific food and your brain's response to it can diminish.
2. Sensory Adaptation: Your senses become less sensitive to the sensory qualities of a food with repeated exposure. This can lead to a decreased perception of taste, aroma, and texture, making the food less appealing.
3. Satiation: When you repeatededly consume a food, you will become more quickly satisfied by it and experience less motivation to continue to eat that same food.
4. Boredom: Eating the same food over and over again without variation can lead to boredom where you can lose interest in eating that food.
5. Preference Shifts: When you normalize a food and eat it consistently, you'll notice that foods you once enjoyed become less appealing. You'll desire new and novel experiences with foods where your preferences shift.
For all of these reasons, food habituation has been very effective for many people to feel more comfortable around a more diverse array of foods. What food habituation doesn't take into account is your potential past trauma, sympathetic nervous system dominance, low dopamine production, and neurodiversity.
Living in a body that's navigating this internal environment and trying to practice food habituation can lead to an increase in wanting more and more of these foods as you eat them.
The pitfalls of food habituation include:
1. Does not include individual differences: While some may experience a decrease in desire for a particular food with repeated exposure, others may maintain their preference or even develop a stronger liking for a food over time. This is what I have often seen in my private practice over the years. I want to reiterate that food habituation can work for some people, but predominantly who I have found myself working with, this did not work and it didn't work for me either. I found that there were other factors that needed to be addressed first like a trauma response in the body making you feel unsafe all the time and especially around food. Your sense of safety and capacity to stay with yourself in your emotions and sensations needs to increase before you're able to experience a triggering food differently.
2. Contextual Factors: Your nervous system state, hunger levels, environment, and people you're around can all affect how a food is processed in your body regardless of how familiar the food is. It won't matter how many times you've consumed a food that you've restricted if you're eating in a dysregulated state in a triggering environment with intense hunger cues. You're never going to want to stop eating that food because it is providing safety and increasing your dopamine levels.
3. Habituation Reversal and Variability in Sensory Adaptation: For some, the more you eat a food, the more appealing it becomes. For someone who is neurodiverse, you may have heightened sensory sensitivities. You may be more sensitive to certain textures, tastes, smells, or visual stimuli associated with food. You may never experience a sensory adaptation with some foods and your senses may actually become heightened where you want the food more and more. You may also experience some hyperfocus tendencies where you become fixated on a particular food item and have difficulty habituating to it, leading to repetitive consumption despite diminishing enjoyment. So it wouldn't matter how many times you eat a food if you're currently fixating on it and this hyperfixation can be a coping mechanism to naviate intense emotional experiences so you won't want to let that food go.
4. Habituation vs Satiation: An argument also against habituation is that what is actually occurring when you eat a food over and over again is that you're giving your body food that it needs. If you've been dieting and restricting for a long time, as your body moves out of a survival state and toward satiation, you may find yourself less interested in these foods simply because your body doesn't need as much food anymore. Decreased desire for a food over time may actually be driven by physiological factors rather than psychological habituation.
Both approaches can be supportive so how do you know if you need to play with eating foods you haven't regularly consumed and create less structure in your eating and when you need to increase your boundaries and curate more structure with your food?
Let's explore some factors that may provide you some further information on whether more or less structure with food would be the best thing for you.
Starting with less structure. You might need to explore bringing in new foods, eating at different times, and creating meals with less balance if:
1. You feel stuck in food rules and panic when your safe foods are unavailable
Exposure therapy sometimes works. When you have SO much fear around food and specific foods, increasing your exposure to different foods can be supportive to show your body that you can eat them and you will still be safe. When your food rules are so rigid that you're scared and overwhelmed to break them, you're living day to day in your sympathetic nervous system. Staying in your sympathetic nervous system for extended periods of time can increase heart rate, inhibit digestion, suppress your immune system, disrupt hormone balance, increase anxiety, and exacerbate sleep issues. No food can do as much harm as living in a stressed state all day every day.
2. You’ve been undereating and heavily restricting your intake
At some point, your body is going to take over and make you eat when it hasn't been given the nutrition it needs to function. This is when it doesn't matter what or when you eat, you just need to eat. Any food consumed consistently throughout the day is going to start to turn your digestion back on, stabilize your moods, and increase your energy. The more you interact with food, the safer it will become with time as you normalize eating as a regular part of your day.
3. You experience little joy or pleasure with food and nourishing your body
If you've been in a place for a long time where you've been creating lots of structure and boundaries with food and you feel tons of joy in all other areas of your life except for food, this is where bringing in more play with food might be necessary. Food is meant to be pleasurable. You were created to enjoy food to keep yourself alive. Trying new foods and at different times of day can be supportive to broaden the variety of foods you feel safe with as your body will get more comfortable with a new food over repeated interactions with that food.
Now, for many of you, you may have already been practicing food habituation, as this is often something that Intuitive Eating practitioners are utilizing, and have maybe discovered that this doesn't work for you as you've been practicing it for months, years, and maybe even decades and you still want to eat certain foods abundantly.
Here's some signs for you to notice to perhaps play with bringing in more structure with your eating.
1. Your meals consistently lack balance where you rarely feel satiation
If you've noticed that your meals have become less and less balanced because you've been creating more space in your day for all the foods you have restricted for so long but still feel a lack of satiation with what you're eating, it may be time to focus on eating rhythmically throughout the day with more balance. In really simple terms, your body needs food about every 4-5 hours and it needs carbs, protein, fat, and fiber at most of your meals.
2. You’ve been skipping meals
Skipping meals is going to leave you with unstable blood sugar where you might feel chronically hungry all day long. Once you skip something like breakfast, your body is going to be working to recover from that all day long. This will affect the kinds of foods you feel drawn to because your body is in a survival state and will tell you to go get quick hits of glucose to try to stabilize your blood sugar levels. You've got to start eating with a regular cadence in the day, which will also support you in feeling more grounded to be able to assess what foods feel most energizing and grounding to your unique body.
3. You feel starving every evening and can’t stop thinking about food
Consistently binge eating in the evenings is sometimes your body letting you know that it hasn't eaten enough or been given enough of specific nutrients it needs. Additionally, since 80% of communication comes from your body up to your brain, incessantly thinking about food is often your body's way of saying it needs more food. It's making you think about food so at some point you go reach for it. These are bodily messages that it needs you to be creating more structure in your meals and meal timing throughout the day so that by the time you get to the evening it can switch into rest and digest mode.
Overall, I don't live in your body and so I can't tell you what is going to be best for you.
You might start with proposing to your body creating more structure or less structure to your eating and notice your body's feedback. If you observe a relaxation response to one or the other, continue to bring in curiosity about where that reaction is coming from. Do you feel drawn to that choice because it keeps you in your comfort zone of what you know? Do you feel drawn to that choice because you're not yet ready to explore something new? Do you feel drawn to that choice because it is calling to you and it feels like the most aligned decision right now?
There's no right or wrong decision to make here. Sometimes you need to be with where you're at in your relationship with food to learn how those food behaviors have been trying support you in feeling safe and secure. You may need to play with both for a period of time and pay attention to how your body feels in a day with more structure or with less to make an embodied food decision on how to move forward.
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