Snacking and Impulse Control
Snacking and Impulse Control
“I’m good one week then eat like an asshole for days.”
“I don’t know what my problem is. I know I feel better when I eat better.”
“Ice cream is my weakness. I can’t help myself.”
“I know I should eat better my family always has snacks and eats out all the time.”
Sound familiar?
As a personal trainer and nutrition coach my friends, family, and clients vent these frustrations and struggles to me all of the time. We’re in an age where for the most part people know what they need to do to treat their bodies well, but it’s the gap between knowing what to do and having the tools to do it successfully. And believe me, I know the struggle. Binge eating, food noise, stress eating, disordered eating, snacking, etc. however you want to label it, it is frustrating as hell. But I do believe demystifying why our brains do what they do is a powerful first step in uncoupling the impulse from the action.
My Own Experience
Outwardly, I may have always appeared “healthy” to friends and family, but I’ve had my own disordered eating patterns. Throughout my 20s, I was a hardcore runner. As in, marathoning and ultramarathoning multiple times per year. At peak training cycles I was logging upwards of 50 miles per week. This was neither a smart nor sustainable training strategy and I’ve since coached people much more strategically and safely. Running served its purpose at the time. I loved the hours of me time in the cool mornings listening to a podcast or audio book watching the sun rise and the birds wake up. I was an anxious mess (there was a lot I was yet to discover about hormones, diet, and my hoshimotos condition). When running, I had control. One, two, three babies were born during that time and I leaned out fast logging miles on the road, sometimes with the jogging stroller and sometimes solo.
I also ate whatever I wanted to eat whenever. It was several years into running before I so much as drank a protein shake before a run, and more time after that before I figured out carb timing and how to maintain adequate glycogen levels. Most evenings I’d bake cookies and slam an entire sheet but it was fine because I’d run it off the next day. I didn’t see it as binging and I didn’t recognize the input (poor food choices) and output (way too much running) as a truly dysregulated nervous system. And why would I? You hear what you want to hear, and what I heard was “Wow, that’s amazing you can run that far” or “You look so lean.”
Dude, I was a wreck. My sleep was shit with nightly panic attacks. Most nights I was up from 2am-4am with my brain thinking I was about to die (thanks, brain) and then I’d be up at 5am for whatever ridiculous 8-13mile run before the kids woke up. Caffeine and carbs would get me through the day, and repeat.
Racing Thoughts, Anxiety, and Stress Eating
In my experience working with a therapist and then later an experienced nutrition coach, Jon Buettner (Big Jon Fitness), in order to gain control of an unwanted behavior or impulse, you have to address the why. Why is your brain telling you to do a certain thing even if the thing is harmful or unproductive? After over a decade of disorder and a now a few years into being on the other side, these are the key points to address:
Shame: You need to separate the behavior or impulse from how you determine your self worth. You aren’t “bad” or “lazy” or any other label you happen to be using because you ate an entire bag of chips and chased them down with a line of Oreos. This leads me to point number 2.
It’s Working: It might not be working effectively, but for whatever reason your brain has determined that food is relief from the stressor. And your lovely brain is trying to protect the hell out of you in the only way it knows how, with a cookie. Maybe this stems from a childhood pattern. Maybe there are some Big Traumas or little traumas in your past (see The Body Keeps the Score). Maybe it is just a pattern you have developed over time (ex. Kids fight, I grab a chocolate so I don’t lose my shit), or it is part of the work ecosystem (ex. Work is stressful, but at least they have donuts in the office).
When you can digest points 1 and 2, now it is time for point 3.
3) Determine the why: A lot of people try to squash the impulse or behavior by ignoring the impulse. And this can work for a short period of time. The problem is that the impulse grows. The White Bear thought process (also known as Ironic Process Theory) is a good example of this. In the experiment, participants were told not to think about the white bear. Well guess what the participants couldn’t stop thinking about? It brought the white bear to the forefront of their minds.
So I tell my clients to ask themselves, and ideally in writing, why it is they are desiring a certain food. Name the stressor or stressors. Describe where in the body the impulse resides (chest, belly, shoulders, etc.). Reflect on why they think their brain wants them to have the food and reflect on how they felt during their previous experience having the food and how they felt after having the food. How was their brain trying to solve a problem?
This is not unlike how I’ve dealt with racing thoughts in the past (and finally got my sleep back). But I’ll save that for another blog.
4) Create space: To decouple the impulse from the action, you need to create more space between the two. Say your pattern is typically impulse straight to action within 5 minutes (I want cookie, I eat cookie), then your first step would be to pause and reflect. Your win day one may be that you waited 30 minutes to an hour before the impulse led to the action. Jot down a word or a sentence or two about why the impulse has surfaced. Have a glass of cold water (physical sensations can change thought processes too). Then see if the next time you can stretch out the response time longer.
Also create space for empathy. Remember, your brain is trying to save you. Think of it as a toddler picking up a cat. They love that cat so much and maybe picking it up by the neck isn’t optimal but damn it they are trying the best they can.
