How Deprivation Leads to Overeating

Deprivation is a big factor in what I have termed: the urgency to eat. This deprivation leads to an urgency that does not always derive from some past memory of having starved. Rather, most who come to me to lose weight have deprived themselves of food willfully through dieting. Dieting doesn’t work for most people because of this. When you deprive yourself of something while really wanting it, you are suppressing a desire. This desire builds in energy so it creates a tremendous force towards the inevitable binge. I discovered that dieting itself, besides all of this, traumatizes our minds and bodies on a deep level and sets us up with a tendency to have an urgency to eat. You may not be conscious of this urgency for years. It speeds up eating, makes us feel slightly stressed when meal time happens. I causes us to hurry through our meal, and makes us distracted and very focused on food verses conversation and other things happening in the room. It makes the rule of chewing 20 times almost impossible. This urgency may be experienced as a sense of being out of control around food. A good way to test to see if you are being run by this tendency is to push your meal away from yourself mid-meal and allow yourself to feel what comes up. Most of us we feel a very strong urge to continue eating to the last bite on the plate. So, the first step is to identify this tendency. If you have it, know that becoming conscious of it is a first, critical step towards healing it.