Restrictive Diets Are Traumatic and a Response To Trauma

Before we dive in today, I wanted to give you all a heads up that I'm taking my annual end of summer fall break from the podcast. This is a time where I get to explore what I want to focus on here, write new content, get curious about new ideas and come back at the end of September with all sorts of new things to share with you. 

In the interim, make sure you're subscribed to my newsletter where I will continue to put out emails to you all. You can also find me on Substack at stephaniemara.substack.com where you can keep up to date on my work Somatic Eating®. The next Somatic Eating® Program will occur at the end of October and when I come back doors will be opening to join and you can get on the waitlist now to be first to know at somaticeating.com. Lastly, if the Satiated Podcast has been supportive to you, please consider leaving a review so others can find the show. 

Today we're going to explore how restrictive diets are traumatic and can be a response to trauma. Over the years, I've had people say to me, “But I haven’t had any trauma in my life and I don’t understand my binge eating as a response to trauma when I haven’t experienced any.” My response when I hear this from those I work with is, “Have you dieted?”

When I started to look at the overlaps between trauma and dieting, it felt clear that dieting is experienced as traumatic in the body.

Trauma is not what happened; it’s not about the event, but rather how the body processes and stores that experience. In dieting, and what I’m referring to when I say diet is being a part of diet culture that instills shame and dysregulation, being forced onto a diet by a parent as a child, being shamed into a diet by a medical professional, pressuring yourself to go on a diet to alter your body out of panic of not adapting to the culture’s body ideals. I'm not talking about the kind of of diet that you choose, that you own, that you feel like is the best thing for you. In dieting, there is constant restriction and fleeing away from food you need, fighting your hunger, people pleasing to contort your body into something it may not want to be, freezing when you have to make a food decision, and collapsing from exhaustion of worrying about what, when, where, and how to eat. Do you see the nervous system survival responses in there? Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and flop. They are all playing out while you’re dieting.

Both trauma and dieting:

• Take away your sense of choice

• Keep the body in constant dysregulation

• Make the body feel unsafe to inhabit

• Break a sense of trust within yourself

• Increase the experience of exhaustion, disconnection, anxiety, numbness, and dissociation

At thirteen years old, I now know I was drawn to dieting as a response to other traumatic situations in my life. I was desperate to find some sense of control and be able to land safely into something that could hold me the way I needed to be. Diets were described as a path toward empowerment as I could be in control of my body and how much it weighed.

If someone had told me the truth that going on Weight Watchers (AT 13 YEARS OLD!) will lead to a lack of trust in your body, obsession with food for years to come, an intense fear of food and anxiety around what to eat, and a decade in the restrict-binge cycle, I’m curious if my smart little self would have said, “No thank you. I’ll find a different way to feel safe.”

Those who have experienced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often describe feeling on high alert all the time, live in a hypervigiliant state, feel numb, detached, isolated, worthless, have trouble sleeping, experience nightmares and flashbacks, avoid certain places, people, or even conversations, and generally feel inherently unsafe.

This is exactly what I have heard those I work with describe what it has been like since they went on their first diet. You may feel like you’re on high alert all the time especially to your hunger and fullness cues, sense you need to be hypervigilant around food or else something bad will happen, are dissociated from your body and feel like you have no idea what it needs, decreased sense of self worth and purpose, have trouble sleeping from either not eating enough throughout the day or binge eating right before you go to sleep, avoid people who trigger impulses to restrict or binge, and generally feel inherently unsafe every day.

This is why I have approached food recovery as I would support anyone in trauma recovery.

Dieting has moved your body into a survival response and your nervous system has adapted to the rules of the diet. Food, hunger, and satiation now equal threat and danger. Meals are battlegrounds. Hunger and starvation equal safety. Dissociation then occurs to keep you safe from the experience of eating or binge eating so that your body can get the nutrients it needs to continue to try to stay away from food for you. Your body is amazing in what it will accommodate to try to keep you safe and alive.

When you try to leave diet culture, your body panics. Being a part of diet culture can feel like armor that you’ve put on to protect yourself from the world and has become a way of living that you know. You know how you will feel when you skip meals, you know what is going to happen when you restrict certain foods, you know how you will feel after a binge, and you know the thoughts and plans that will occur day after day, and Monday after Monday.

To take that armor off can feel terrifying because safety is connected with what is known. Even if you can sense that the armor isn’t actually protecting you anymore but inhibiting your ability to move, there is comfort in the predictability of it.

Dieting keeps you coming back because the safety of the known feels more stable to inhabit than the possible safety waiting for you in the unknown.

I really want to take a moment to normalize how scary and anxiety provoking no longer dieting will be. Your body is biologically terrified it is not going to get enough to eat to survive while also navigating somatic memories and associations that food is dangerous. This is not as simple as just stop dieting.

To stabilize from the trauma of dieting is a process of repetitively experiencing that it is safe to eat, it is safe to eat consistently, it is safe to interact with a variety of foods that resonate with your body, and that nothing bad is going to happen. This is why it is important to find community who is also committed to leaving diet culture. Diet trauma recovery does not happen in isolation and coregulation is crucially important to make sure you don’t feel alone as you enter into a safe and trusting relationship with your food and body.

Now, let's flip this concept around: you may feel drawn to a diet because you’ve experienced other trauma in the past.

And as a reminder the “dieting” I’m referring to here is one where you feel forced, coerced, or shamed into a diet. With this kind of dieting, it doesn’t feel like you have any sense of choice.

Have you ever had the experience where you went on a diet with all of this hope and inspiration for change? You felt like THIS diet is going to be the answer to all of your body image and food struggles. The further you got into the diet, your experience of hope started to tank. You felt depleted, exhausted, and hungry. You eventually found yourself at the grocery store buying all of the foods the diet told you not to eat and wondered where the hell your determination went.

A few months go by and you think about trying again. Maybe it wasn’t the “right” diet, maybe you were doing something “wrong”, maybe you just need more willpower to commit. The same thing happens all over again. You might start to wonder why you keep feeling drawn to a diet even though you keep seeing that it doesn’t lead to any greater sense of safety, security, or stability in your body.

We repeat what we know.

You may be drawn to dieting as the “answer” to living in a trauma response activated by other life events. It doesn’t have to do with the diet, but how the diet is making you feel.

Experiencing a traumatic event (anything that happened that was too much, too fast, or too little for too long and there was no coregulation present to help you to feel safe again) teaches your nervous system that you are in constant danger. Your brain and nervous system become hypervigilant, scanning your environment for threat. When you’ve lived in this sympathetic, fight or flight response for years, it becomes home. The faster heart rate, shallow breathing, shoulder/belly/jaw tension, and rapid thoughts become comfortable because they are what you adapt to and now know as your “normal” state of being.

You can then, unconsciously, look out for what activates a similar experience in your body because that is what feels comfortable. Diets also ask you to be constantly scanning for danger. Counting every calorie, monitoring every bite, fearing specific foods, constantly weighing yourself, or worrying if you’re going to fail. It mimics the same bodily response you’ve come to know.

You start to feel a loss of autonomy.

This is also what occurs when you’ve experienced trauma. In a traumatic event, you may have felt like you had no choice in what happened to you or how you had to navigate the situation. You may feel like you lost agency of your body. I often like to go one layer deeper beyond feeling like you need control because what does control give you? It gives you an experience of safety.

You may feel like you want greater control (or rather safety) of your body, but you may also have started to believe that you can’t trust yourself because of the experience you went through. Dieting comes in as a way to give you everything that you’re looking for, yet they create the same experience inside of your body.

You already feel like you can’t trust yourself to make the best decisions for yourself and diets perpetuate that. Instead of asking yourself what sounds nourishing to eat, you’re referencing what is the “right” thing to eat at lunch based on the diet. Rather than exploring what your body needs, you’re referencing how many macros you have left to consume for the day.

This may give you a perceived experience of control, but it is really the diet that is controlling you. This can be similar to feeling like if you just don’t think about the past and what happened, then you don’t have to feel or acknowledge the trauma response that is there.

Life can start to feel small after trauma and dieting can perpetuate that.

Dieting can feel like a protector. When going out in the world has started to feel overwhelming because all of your senses are now heightened, a diet can be an “acceptable” way to limit your exposure. You tell people that you’ve got to wake up tomorrow morning to work out and can’t go out to dinner. You go gluten or dairy free (specifically when you don’t have to and haven’t received any bodily feedback that these foods don’t work for you) so that you can have what feels like a legitimate reason to not go to that party.

The diet is continuing to make your life smaller. You may feel like your days are solely focused on what, when, where, and how you’re eating. BUT, let’s bring in some compassion here that this intensified focus on food is supporting you. There is a part of you that feels like you will only be safe if you keep your world and who is in it as small as possible.

Eventually, your body can collapse from how exhausted it is looking out for threats all the time.

A day living in a trauma response can look like waking up already panicked about the day, who you may see, what you will have to navigate, and how you will get through it all. The same can occur with a diet where you wake up already worried about whether to eat or intermittent fast, make your own lunch or get it out, include carbs or try to avoid them.

This can feel draining, where you shut down in the evenings. This is where you dissociate for hours, binge eating or binge watching a television show to try to conserve your energy to do the same thing the next day. The trauma response was already exhausting you, and the diet can give you a reason for why you feel so tired without touching the pain of your past.

Trauma can increase an experience of helplessness and so can the diet.

Experiencing trauma may start to cultivate a belief that there is no point in doing anything because nothing is going to change. You tried repeatedly to get your needs met, to be seen, to be understood, and all you were left with was feeling more isolated, misunderstood, and alone. Your nervous system went into collapse because it registered that fighting or fleeing would be ineffective.

Diets can make you feel the same way. You keep trying to make them work, but they leave you feeling even more helpless that nothing is going to change about your body or the way you look or food coping behaviors. There can be a part of you that is confused about why you feel so helpless, but you know that you do. Diets can give this part of you a reason to feel the way you do and mirror the bodily experience you’re already in.

The guiding question I ask in my work Somatic Eating® is: What is your body trying to communicate through these food or body image behaviors?

We can perhaps consider that yo yo dieting has very little to do with the diet. Rather than asking the question of how do you gain control over your body or stop dieting, you can start to explore what feels familiar in your body about these diet behaviors that are a part of your life.

You can describe the bodily experience you have when you start thinking about food, or what to eat, or how it might change your body, and then get curious about when you have felt this same way in the past. A focus on any diet behavior can be trying to mimic what you already know and mirrors back to you the states your body lives in.

If you're someone who has been in a chronic cycle of being on and off diets, please meet yourself with compassion. You've been doing the best you can navigating what is happening inside your body. We will continue to explore all of this when I return in the fall and I'm here for you every step of the way on this food and body image recovery journey. I hope you all have a smooth transition into whatever season you may be entering into where you are in the world and I look forward to connecting with you again in a few weeks! I hope you have a satiating and safety producing rest of your day. Bye!