Restricting, dieting and the in between.
I just don't want to eat chips right now, I'm sorry if that offends you.
It’s June 15th, 2022, I just landed from an 8 hour flight into the sweaty city of Paris. The air is hot, the Uber is cool and Paris is more alive, open and inviting than I remember it. I stay in a hostel because 2022 hotel prices are astronomical and I’m sharing a room with 6 other strangers. Personally, it’s my favourite way to travel.
My then partner calls me on the phone.
“Don’t do it! You can’t sleep now, you got to push through. That’s the way to adapt to the time change.” I groan. I’m going on day 1 with no sleep but I have so much to look forward to.
“Un café allongé, si vous plait.” I sit back, click open my phone and glance over to my left, I can see the whole neighbourhood from up here. The streets like a spiderweb, the trees providing a respite for the heat, people strolling, dancing, eating. I’m in Paris, on an adventure, about to see my partner, drinking an espresso. Thankful and grateful do not even come close to what I feel. Life just feels right.
I press play on my podcast. Kylie McBeath has started up her show again and I decide to listen to a conversation she has with a woman named Kendra Cunov.
The episode begins and my head is cracked open with the ideas presented (and lack of sleep truthfully.) Kendra asks Kylie, “how do you know that you’re free unless you have the freedom to not do something?”
My body stopped for a moment. My espresso swirls at the bottom of its cup. A seed was just planted. The question now swirls in my mind. “How do I know that I’m free unless I have the choice to not do something?” The question almost growls at me. Deep from within. I know exactly where it’s coming from and what it’s pointing to.
There are some things in my life I feel as if I have to do or else something bad will happen, or else I cannot cope, or else or else or else.
As I sit here and write this in a library in southern Ontario, far away from my afternoon in Paris, far away from that moment and that perfect coffee, I think about how far I’ve come since that time two years ago. Just like that, almost 600 days later and I feel like I’m having more choice than ever.
One of the things that I have felt truly chained to in my life is food. The ecstasy of being able to be alone, eating what you want when you want, hypnotized by a screen in front of you, is my version of heaven. (Or it used to be.)
For me, my ultimate food of choice is chips and popcorn. The beautiful crunchy, salty chips that tease me because of course one is just never enough. When times were tough, one bag wasn’t even enough. The perfect compliment of different types of flavoured popcorn. Endless availability and convenience of these two foods meant endless soothing for me.
The first time chips became a companion, a soul food, a crutch to my life which was like a broken leg, was when I was about 7 years old. My parents had just split and my dad lived in a new house that smelled weird, with people I didn’t recognize. Cigarette smoke filled the air and at night time I became increasingly scared to sleep. Monsters, ghouls and ghosts felt more real than ever and I began waking up in the night unable to put myself back into dreamland. As I wandered out of my room in search of my dad, I went through the living room and saw an open bag of Salt and Vinegar chips. The TV still on, I began to eat and watch and eat and watch and eat and watch.
Slowly, I knew that the monsters weren’t real, because nothing was real as long as my face was in front of a screen and my mouth was full of bliss packing potatoes.
My family always had us stocked up on popcorn, particularly white cheddar Smartfood and chips were seen frequently, most notable Salt and Vinegar and All Dressed (you have to be Canadian to get it.)
As I grew up, the chips and I never really did. The relationship was like it always has been since I was a kid, they give me momentary satisfaction and helped hijack me out of my current reality. I eat as many as I can fit inside of my body and then I don’t have to feel anything. This really was a win win relationship.
I usually felt disgusted about this process, I felt uneasy and shameful about my actions. I never looked at myself with compassion, I enjoyed living with roommates and staying over at a boyfriends place because at least then they would be the boundary that I couldn’t give myself. I couldn’t eat the way I wanted to around them so I was free from my impulse, my compulsion and my vice for the moment.
But then, like clockwork, when no one was around, it was time to celebrate, numb out and leave this place. I would plug myself into the matrix, give myself a dopamine high with my salty goodness and say “see you later!” to any reality I was currently in.
Over the years and in therapy, we tried different methods to address this. Mindful eating, adding in fibre and protein, sitting in discomfort, but it never stuck. Truthfully, all of those things are important and all of them have become important pieces to this very odd puzzle. But last year, something really clicked and changed for me.
I decided to go on a No Man Diet, months without romantic or sexual interactions with men, extremely limiting interactions with male friends, even muting them on social media so I wouldn’t feel the need to interact with their content. I began my year of limiting this one interaction and then slowly it bled into other things.
As I am anti diet, of course, the No Man Diet is a play on words, it’s meant to be catchy and fun, not so serious and removing the joy out of every day life (like most diets do.) But I did learn from this year of being on a NMD just how much I needed to set boundaries for myself and really learn how to parent my inner child. In tandem, the No Man Diet and my therapy began to unveil a new world to me. A world that had freedom and liberation through limitation. That one podcast episode in Paris I began to live in my bones in my current life.
I began to learn that limitations are beautiful. Limitations can be sacred boundaries that you give to yourself in order to address certain life issues, become more whole or to just experiment what life looks like without so much of that thing.
Here are the following things I began to pause:
My screen time.
Interactions with most men.
Interactions with certain women.
Mindlessly scrolling TikTok.
Buying random beauty products that I didn’t need.
Buying random clothes that I didn’t need.
Avoiding feelings.
Avoiding bills.
Eating chips or popcorn at home.
And none of this felt like restriction, all of this felt like I was just making different choices, not cutting off my circulation to the world or life. If anything, once I gave myself specific boundaries, I actually felt like I could breathe more. The difference between an unhealthy restriction (ex, I need to avoid sweets because I am a bad person and I can’t stop eating) and a sacred boundary (ex, I need to pause buying this food because I actually don’t know how to be present when I eat it) is that a restriction is inherently coming from a place of good/bad where a sacred boundary is exploring life mindfully without something overtaking you.
When I posted on Instagram that it was 181 days since I ate popcorn at home, I received mostly supportive and kind comments, of course then I pissed off some people too, they told me that I was dieting and that I was triggering and careless with my messaging. I knew that this would come, some of the messages I responded to with grace, others caught the brunt end of my frustration at feeling misrepresented.
We’re so hyper vigilant online, there is very little space for nuance, for pauses, for people who don’t fit the norms that we create. One of the norms that I have not fit into, ever, is the Intuitive Eating community, which sometimes acts more like a cult. No matter how many times I tried intuitive eating, I could not figure it out.
I realize now that it is because as a person who has a broken sense of embodiment, as someone who could not even locate a feeling or emotion in their body, as someone who has been diagnosed with C-PTSD, I have not figured out a way to intuitively eat because I could not figure out a way to know what intuition feels like.
In 2022 my therapist and I started to build a roadmap of intuition. It started with continually recognizing when I was feeling intuitive and then being able to map that feeling/sensation into many different situations. I realize now that the growl I felt in Paris as I listened to that episode was my intuition, coming from deep inside me. When I stand in the kitchen to make a decision on food, I know where the decision is coming from. Sometimes in my head it sounds like “oh, this is clear, this feels wise” or “I’m making this decision and it’s not the most grounded decision, but I’m going to make it anyway.”
This has taken over 15 months of work to be able to do.
The opposite of trauma is choice. The ability to choose. If I sit down at night and the only option I have is to numb out with food, I am not free.
The goal is not to abstain from chips forever! I have to echo to the crowds who are displeased with me. The goal is to integrate this learning experience into a world full of chips and popcorn and to still feel like I am able to choose to eat or not to eat them and have both of those decisions feel equal to one another. Without morals, without judgment, because at the end of the day it’s just food! It doesn’t make you a good person or bad person.
Sometimes in order to regulate your life you will need to “restrict” certain things, but not in an old world, let’s control every morsel of food and deny pleasure type of way. I am not religious and I do not treat food as evil, so I don’t need to prove my purity against it, however not all food is created equally. Some food is specifically created to hit every bliss point on our tongue and provide a very stimulating experience. Some food my body doesn’t agree with after I eat it. Some food I use to hurt myself. Food is not all equal and that is also part of my integration.
I am proud of myself for this endeavour, if I can choose not to do something that I have felt the need to do forever, then I am capable of much more than I give myself credit for.
Liberation through limitation. God, I love it. I feel so free, I feel so far away from being a fucked up disordered mess, I feel like I have worked so hard to be able to choose.
This is perfectly said. I went from massive restriction and calorie counting and exercise addiction to intuitive eating. It felt like a huge relief at first, eating boxes of doughnuts and pizza and icecream and saying fuck it all! But when my body starting complaining and hurting, I wasn’t being intuitive I was still saying “fuck you!” to restriction. I hadn’t found balance or any sort of intuition. I had to really sit with a lot of painful feelings, have therapy to work through the pain instead of smothering it and now I am at a place where I can listen to myself and my nutritional needs much more. I think a lot of people react against you making posts like these, because they are still in pain, they have been hurt by dieting and they won’t allow themselves to be in a vulnerable place again, which makes perfect sense. But true intuitive eating to me, means being able to stop yourself sometimes too. Not just eating everything all the time out of anger against past restrictions, how is that freedom? It’s just falling prey to another marketing practice from the fast food companies. We have to really learn and listen to our guts.
Our journey from dieting to not dieting is so complex. Mine has encompassed 40 plus years. Always learning, always shifting, but also, often doubting, often tempted to retreat to old (not great) habits. There's no one way to approach this complicated healing. Thank you for sharing what's you've been doing in your recovery and how it's been for you. Keep learning!