What is disconnected eating?

Your body is constantly communicating with you to tell you what it needs. When you’re cold, you’ll shiver or get little goosebumps. When you need to go to the toilet, you’ll notice a full feeling in your bladder. When you’re thirsty, your mouth and throat will feel dry. But what about the relationship between your body and food?

Disconnected eating is a term I use to describe eating patterns that put you out of touch with your body, usually if you’re following a diet or meal plan or ‘healthy eating program’ aka dieting. Instead of trusting your body to tell you what it needs (internal cues), you rely on things outside your body (external cues), such as the time of day or a set portion size. The opposite of disconnected eating is intuitive eating, where you are tuned into your body and can respond to it’s needs in a way that makes you feel good and helps your body be healthy.

You might be experiencing disconnected eating if you:

• Don’t allow yourself to eat certain foods
• Eat certain foods because they’re healthy, not because you like them
• Restrict your portion sizes
• Only allow yourself to eat at set times
• Often find yourself feeling very hungry or very full
• Never allow yourself to get “too hungry” in case you overeat
• Avoid eating out in case there won’t be foods you can eat
• Feel guilty after eating certain foods
• Try to be “good” the day after eating certain foods
• Try to last a little longer before you have something to eat
• Use distraction techniques when you start to feel hungry
• Deliberately prepare food that’s bland so you won’t eat “too much”
• Track how many calories you consume each day
• Try to eat a set proportion of each ‘macro’ each day
• Exercise to burn calories from certain foods you’ve eaten
• Exercise before eating to “earn” your food
• Avoid having certain foods in your house
• Choose a “healthy” alternative when craving something “unhealthy”
• Try to eat “clean”
• Feel addicted to food

What are the harms of dieting?

Dieting has become so accepted in our culture than most people don’t think of disconnected eating behaviours as abnormal. They’re seen as just part of eating healthy. We’re likely to be praised for our dieting efforts, which reinforces the idea that we’re doing the right thing. The truth is that dieting can seriously impact your physical and mental health.

Dieting can:

• Disrupt your body’s metabolism
• Lead to malnutrition (not getting enough of the nutrients your body needs)
• Lead to reduced muscle mass
• Lead to lower bone density, which is a risk factor for osteoporosis
• Increase your thinking about food to an unhealthy level
• Cause headaches
• Cause constipation
• Cause fatigues (feeling very tired)
• Lead to low self-esteem and poor body image
• Increase your risk of depression

You might be dieting even if you’re not following an actual diet. Did you know that dieting is the biggest risk factor for developing an eating disorder? Eating disorders affect people of all ages, genders, cultural backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses. People in bodies of all shapes and sizes can develop an eating disorder.

Specific concerns

Food addiction
Do you feel out of control with your eating, or feel like you can’t stop yourself from eating “too much” of certain foods? You might feel that you have a food addiction problem. I understand that it makes sense to connect these feelings with addiction, because it’s a concept that we’re familiar with when it comes to things like gambling, alcohol, and other drugs. Food itself isn’t an addictive substance (after all, we need food to survive), but that doesn’t mean that your feelings of food addiction aren’t valid. Your relationship with food might look very similar to the relationship someone has with an addictive substance or behaviour. I help my clients to understand that food isn’t actually the problem, it’s the way we’ve been conditioned to think and feel about food that gives us the feelings of food addiction.

Many of the people who feel they have a food addiction are actually experiencing thoughts, feelings and behaviours consistent with Binge Eating Disorder (BED). BED is a diagnosable eating disorder and someone with BED is just as deserving of validation and support as someone with Anorexia Nervosa or Bulimia Nervosa.

Orthorexia
Orthorexia is a form of disordered eating where a person is fixated on only eating the right kinds of foods – usually foods that are “clean” or agreed on as “healthy”. For a person with orthorexia, the quality (healthiness) of their food is usually more important than the quantity of food they eat. Orthorexia is not yet recognised as an eating disorder in the DSM-5, but the negative health effects – physical and mental – are similar to other eating disorders.

If you’re experiencing disconnected eating and would like to improve your relationship with food and your body, I’d love to work with you. I’m passionate about helping people to break the diet cycle.