So you think your diet is

NORMAL? 

    Counting out grapes, sticking to one kind of veg, pouring salt on leftovers… You don’t need to have a ‘real’ eating disorder to have a dysfunctional relationship with food

    Emily*, 26, never thought of herself as particularly food-conscious – beyond watching that she didn’t eat too much junk. But when she got to university, she began to see first-hand exactly how unhealthy the act of eating could become. Her housemates had a system: during the day, they’d only eat steamed veg. But at night they’d hit the shops, stuffing their bags with forbidden foods – crisps, KitKats, Jaffa Cakes, muffins, “Back at the house, they’d devour them like a pack of wild animals,” Emily remembers.

    Few would dispute that that’s not exactly a healthy attitude to food. But get any group of girls together and there’s a good chance you’ll hear crazy stories of fasting, bingeing and restricting, That’s because, although only a small percentage of the population has a recognized eating disorder, what experts call disordered eating is widespread. Eating disorder charity Beat says the figures for general disorders have increased by about 40% in the past 10 years, and a large part of these diagnoses come under the umbrella term ‘eating disorders not otherwise specified’, or EDNOS. “This can involve creating rigid rules for oneself about food,” says Anne Kearney-Cooke, author of Chance Your Mind, Change Your Body. Examples include eating exactly 20 raisins for breakfast, figuring out the exact calorie counts of your intake, and even restricting your diet to just one food, such as cheese sandwiches.

    When disordered eaters break their self-imposed rules, they often go to the flip side of control: they binge. Then, as they struggle to put a kind of order into their relationship with food, the weird rituals come in.

    “This kind of diet is mostly about control,” says Monica Black, a hypnotherapist who specialises in eating issues. “I treated one women who felt that if she put on a single pound, her career would suffer. If something went wrong. She’d blame her weight.”

    This kind of behaviour can take a toll on more than a women’s waistline. Common side effects include low sex drive, lack of energy and depression. One recent study found that the brains of overcontrolled eaters.

    “Some people end up numbing out their hunger signals and creating rigid defenes so that they don’t enjoy food,” explains nutrition expert Karin Kratina. “But when you flick that switch off, you desensitize yourself to other physical pleasures as well – sexual stirrings, for instance.”

    So how do we end up in this situation? Social forces – such as pictures of size 0 celebs and newspaper s care stories – play a part. “In every paper you pick up, there are warnings about a particular type of food,” says behaviour disorder specialist Dr. Alex Yellowlees of the Priory Hospital in Glasgow. “Then six months later it appears to be the reverse. People get confused.” But other elements come into play, too;

    Perfectionism and low self-esteem, family pressures, childhood influences and the role of our peers. Having a best friend with an eating disorder can influence your own eating habits, possibly making you more self-conscious or restrictive.

    Once your eating is habitually restrained (ie, you’re constantly vigilant about your calorie intake or trying to eat less than your body craves), your responses to food become increasingly neurotic. In one study, restrained eaters who were told they’d start a week-long diet the next day immediately consumed more food at a ‘taste sampling’ buffet than either the restrained eaters who weren’t starting a diet or the unrestrained eaters. So just thinking about a diet makes you hungrier, basically.

    In everyday life, according to psychologist Susan Head, many women tell themselves they’re on a diet and hardy eat anything during the day. “And then they justify consuming an entire day’s worth of calories at night because they feel they’ve been so virtuous.” The next day, the ‘diet’ resumes…

    And when researchers told a group of people to try to suppress eating-related thoughts, they found that those with disordered eating habits thought about food even more, while unrestrained eaters didn’t.

    Ultimately, something breaks down your self-control and you cave in. “The minute you become disinhibited by stress, alcohol or an emotional event, you’re likely to start gorging on whatever you’re been avoiding,” says Susan. Deprivation is powerful – a US study showed that people who’d been deprived of food for between six and 24 hours reacted more strongly to photos of food on a physiological level than those who hadn’t been fasting.

Sustaining healthy habits