Dietary Self-Regulation: Rendering Your Limits Irrelevant

In this series so far, we’ve used the all-inclusive vacation model to illuminate recovery from a restrictive eating disorder: from adhering to a blanket rule of “as little as possible” to incentivizing “more than necessary.”

We’ve reviewed evidence suggesting that “dietary restraint” is counterproductive, atrophying the skill of eating without top-down rules, and often resulting in the opposite of what’s intended (eating lots once any eat-less rule has been broken).

I’ve suggested that the difference between applying rigid rules and “self-regulating” amounts to whether the feedback is meaningfully incorporated into the decision-making system: whether our actions adjust in response to other relevant stuff that’s happening in ourselves or our environments. In this penultimate part, I offer some pointers for how to tell whether you’re operating with meaningful feedback or not and how to start if you’re not.

In a way, the “self” prefix in self-regulation is a misnomer. There is no little homunculus me sitting in my skull, pulling the strings. “Me” includes innumerable inbuilt signaling mechanisms that evolved to guide human eating and movement, plus all kinds of evolutionarily newer factors like social conformity cues stretching far beyond the individual organism.

And, of course, there’s no hard line at the cellular level between these implicit “rules” and the explicit numerical ones we might also cognitively generate—it’s all just stuff arising from the activity of our neurons and all our other cells.

Someone with anorexia knows better than most people—someone in recovery from anorexia, all the more so—just how automatized the “top-down” rules can get, how seamlessly integrated into the self they can become. They come to pass themselves off ever-so-nearly convincingly as “what I really feel like,” e.g., I’m not hungry, I don’t even like ice cream, I feel better this way, ugh, bacon fat is so disgusting.

Operationally, though, there is that key difference between the rules that work and those that don’t: the former incorporate feedback, the latter don’t. And if that structural difference is hard to spot (because we’re all experts at self-deception), there’s a simple difference you can glean from the outcomes.

If you’re in the ambiguous not-very-ill-but-probably-not-entirely-fine zone (aka quasi-recovery) and want to tell which method you’re operating by, the million-dollar question to ask is: Do I ever eat “too much” or exercise “too little?” More precisely: Do you ever get to the point where all the signals are straightforwardly saying “I don’t want to eat anymore” or “I really want to move just for the sake of it” because you’ve ignored a subset of the signals that were saying you ought to stop eating or start exercising much earlier on?

If the answer is yes and you feel fine when that happens, great, you probably don’t have a problem. If the answer is no, or yes, and you feel awful when it happens, you probably do.

In the dietary restraint experiment described in Part 2, this simplicity is presumably the point the high-restraint (“dieter”) participants got to at the end when they were genuinely full of ice cream. Or maybe they just stopped because their rule-breaking was freaking them out enough that it felt better to stop than carry on. Or maybe some of them actually got to the end of the tub and would have kept eating if they hadn’t.

If these people started making a consistent habit of eating “too much,” that would be a route for them to switch high dietary restraint for low. Contravening the signals that constituted the blanket priority of high restraint would allow them to start letting other measurements take up the slack.

How do you actually make a habit of rule-breaking, though? When the rules are as pathologically powerful as anorexia’s, you need serious encouragement to transgress. There are plenty of encouragement types, but the simplest and best is often to change the explicit “do not transgress” threshold.

Do the thought experiment: If you have anorexia and you tell yourself, “OK, I now have no limits, I can eat as much ice cream as I like,” what happens? Possibly, you buy yourself a carton, pick up a spoon, and never look back. Probably, you do nothing.

Having no limit is meaningless because you have no idea how to operate without a limitation to butt up against, with hunger, desire, and the self-satisfied sense of being superior to all those people who eat when they’re hungry and stop when they’re not. Your number is how you know how to stop eating, and it is therefore what gives you the confidence to start.

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Given this is how your eating operates—given you know exactly what to do with upper limits—it’s far more sensible to make your first step towards losing all the limits by just upping the limit. That, you can work with.

However acutely or semi-recovered you’re using numerical limits, you can do worse than just increase your current ones by some non-negligible margin and see what happens. (Or the opposite with an exercise compulsion: gradually reduce the minimum per day or per session.)

What happens when you’re patient and determined, is that in the end, you’ll reach the point where you’ve raised the limit high enough that you can’t actually get there (or, with exercise, where it’s reduced to zero)—in other words, all the other ways of deciding when to stop (or start) have taken over.

In other words, you’ve booked yourself an all-inclusive vacation with limitless food and drink and no need to do anything much. All the other mechanisms that show you how to stop and start have been allowed to start doing their job again because the “300 calorie max.” or “30 minutes min.” (or whatever other) rules have been stopped from pre-empting all of them.

An alternative or complementary strategy is to turn your maximum (for food) into a minimum or your minimum (for exercise) into a maximum. This gives you an additional explicit imperative to act differently and a different route to weakening the previous rule by ignoring it.

Finally, here’s another way of defining the difference between self-regulating with feedback or not: Do I have only one method for deciding when to start/stop eating (or exercising), or do I have many? The more methods you have, the less you’re probably aware of “having” any at all because they’re all kicking in as and when appropriate: hunger/satiety, the appeal of this specific food, social context, today and tomorrow’s activity levels, how much time you have, what happens to be in the fridge, etc.

If you try out any of these structural encouragements to develop self-regulation, remember that you cannot set too high a numerical open-loop rule for yourself because all you need to do is stop operating by such rules.

You won’t get “unnecessarily” fat by upping your limit too high because “too high” is the structural prerequisite for the rule’s irrelevance—which is where you can really start living.

Read on to the final part of the series, which offers a recap of the main ideas before expanding them out beyond eating disorders.