All content in this article is provided for information, enjoyment, and educational purposes only. These are my opinions and, although I will present supporting science this should not be used as a substitute for qualified medical advice. If you or someone you know is suffering from an eating disorder seek medical advice in your area or check out the National Eating Disorder Association website.
I’d like to provide an alternative perspective on the popular recommendation to keep ‘trigger foods’ out of the house when trying to enforce dietary adherence. The scientific information in this article is primarily based off of a 2018 review [1] on learned overeating which was written to ‘provide an overview of recent findings relating to the role of Pavlovian conditioning in food cue reactivity, including its application to overeating and weight loss interventions.’
When I use the term trigger foods I am referring to foods that when eaten ‘trigger’ urges to consume it in large quantities, many times beyond what is required to satisfy your appetite.
Trigger foods are often viewed as foods that an individual has difficulty moderating and sometimes experiences feelings of losing control when consuming even the smallest portion. It’s logical to consider keeping foods that provoke such reactions out of the house especially when dieting to help with adherence. However, this isn’t actually helping you with your ability to control yourself around those foods. What happens if someone else in the household particularly loves that food? What if you stay by family and they keep those foods in the house? How are you going to cope when you are forced to venture out of your little bubble of protection?
It’s not impossible that you might be ok but you might find yourself in embarrassing situations like I did having to bashfully buy back peanut butter jar after peanut butter jar and cereal box after the next…
This is something that I struggled with for some time and I feel that I escalated the cycle by banishing certain foods from the house making them forbidden fruit. Sure enough, every time they would make their way back into my grasp I would experience this mix of excitement and panic and eat huge quantities of it all at once because I didn’t know when I would let myself get my hands on it again.
I’d then feel guilty and embarrassed, resign myself to NEVER being allowed to have that food again since I clearly can’t control myself around it…and then when it would end up in the house again I’d scarf it down and start the cycle all over again.
How did this cycle even start?
In my recent Instagram write up about stress eating I briefly explained how we can condition ourselves to respond in certain ways to specific cues. In the case of stress eating, the cue of experiencing stress can trigger the reaction of feeling urges to overeat. The overeating temporarily relieves the feelings of stress and now a positive feedback loop is formed and the habit is repeated when stress release is desired.[2]
Stress triggers urges to overeat and you develop the habit of wanting to overeat when stressed.
A similar form of conditioning is happening in the case of trigger foods. You have learned to associate that food with loss of control, overeating and sometimes negative emotions. Some of this is mental and some of it is physical. That food becomes the cue for a range of responses within your body. It activates a central appetitive state that results in those urges and desires to eat along with other physiological and neurocognitive alterations. This kind of learned reaction to food cues has resulted in methods of therapy where one attempts to reduce and hopefully remove the conditioned responses or train in alternative responses.
The review states as follows:
‘’ Extinction of appetitive responses in real life can be achieved during a diet: when CSs, such as a chocolate-associated time of day, or watching one’s crisp-associated favorite TV show in the evening, are deliberately no longer followed by food intake (noUS), food cue reactivity (e.g., eating desires) decreases over time. Several laboratory studies have indeed shown that conditioned responses (such as eating expectancies, eating desires) reduce with non-reinforced CS presentations’’
To simplify this, what it is saying is that your urges to eat in response to specific cues have the potential to be reduced if you expose yourself to the cues that usually trigger one reaction but you begin reacting in a different manner.
Right now exposure to trigger foods leads to intense urges to overeat that you are in the habit of acting upon.
However, if you expose yourself to those trigger foods, don’t eat it or don’t eat a lot of it you can begin to associate that trigger food with the new outcome: being able to eat a sensible portion or not feeling the need to eat any of it at all. This is the goal of a kind of therapy which is known as Cue Exposure Therapy or CET.
CET is often done with the aim to reduce the feelings or urges elicited in response to specific cues such as trigger food and/or to reduce the expectancy of a catastrophic outcome from exposure to the trigger. [3]
‘’ It is likely that violation of CS–US expectancies also play a significant role in CET. For example, a dieter may verbalize the expectancy “If I feel exhausted and chocolate is available (CS), then I will lose control and eat the entire chocolate box (US).” To maximize violation of overeating expectancies during CET, a patient is exposed to the box of chocolate when feeling exhausted, while exposure is continued until “losing control” is no longer expected (for example by asking how much time it will take to lose control and continuing exposure slightly beyond this point).’’
This is so well explained but to simplify it further, they are teaching an individual who fears losing control of their ability to moderate chocolate intake when tired that these fears are unwarranted. They do so by exposing them to chocolate when they are tired until they realize that losing control is not the inevitable outcome.
So you prove your fears wrong.
Of course this is easier said than done. It will take time and patience and may have ups and downs. However the purpose of this article is to illustrate that it is proving to be possible if you are willing to put in the work. Avoiding your trigger foods is definitely the easier option than the work required to learn self control and if you are ok with remaining susceptible to the occasional binge when presented with that food that’s a perfectly acceptable alternative. I’m not here to pass judgment on what people choose for their lives and if you prefer the simpler approach of simply practicing avoidance of your trigger foods then it just means that this article isn’t necessarily directed at you. I personally am of the opinion that living my life in fearful avoidance of specific foods added unnecessary strain on my mental wellbeing as well as those in close proximity to me who were made to suffer due to my food restrictions. I still feel regret for all of the good times that I wasted being stressed about food, for the food that had to be thrown out because I couldn’t have it in the house and for family members and friends who had to deprive themselves due to my inability to control my eating.
I wrote this article for anyone who feels similarly to the way that I felt but doesn’t know how to approach making a change or believe that it is even possible.
It’s important to emphasize once more that rewiring your brain in this manner can be frustrating because the reduction of your urges to overeat around those foods may be slow. It will require you to reinforce new behaviors in the face of your own physical urges. It’s normal to want to cave. You’ll be facing very strong urges designed to make you want to act on them. It is not a weakness to want to act on your urges but it’s important that you understand that you are not powerless to them. For the purpose of teaching yourself that trigger foods do not need to result in a loss of control or a binge you will have to face those urges, know why they are there and make a new choice.
‘’ In CET, individuals who suffer from overeating or binge eating are repeatedly and long-lasting exposed to palatable food cues (CSs), while refraining from intake (i.e., CS–noUS). During CET sessions, participants are thus exposed to intake-predicting cues (CSs) such as seeing, smelling, and tasting the food, while for example being in an overeating-associated context, and/or while experiencing a specific emotion, though food intake is not permitted (noUS) and food is thrown away at the end of the session. In line with a learning-based interpretation of food cue reactivity and overeating, the (small-scale) studies that have been conducted on CET suggest it leads to substantial reductions in cue-elicited food cravings and binge eating in bulimic patients’’
Again they explain how individuals are exposed to foods and environments that usually are associated with overeating but are not allowed to indulge. This is in an attempt to help these individuals learn that being around these foods and being in these settings doesn’t automatically mean eating and help to dampen the intense responses to the foods.
‘’ Occasional reinforcements might reduce the risk of relapse is by allowing a reinforced trial (CS–US pairing) to become associated with extinction (CS–alone presentations), leading to a slower rate of reacquisition with renewed CS–US pairings (e.g., when one experiences a lapse in one’s diet). In CET, one way to implement this technique is by encouraging individuals to occasionally consume small amounts of food during cue exposure exercises, in order to learn that eating a small amount of food is no longer a cue for overeating’’
There is argument that risk of relapse can be reduced by ‘reinforcement’ [3] by means of consuming the food previously associated with over eating in small quantities ‘in order to learn that eating a small amount of food is no longer a cue for over eating.’
Again, this is all part of teaching yourself that your trigger food doesn’t mean a binge is inevitable and in time reduce that unwanted cycle of behavior associated with it.
Notice that removing these urges requires facing the trigger food in order to create new associations/expectancy and regain control as opposed to avoiding them entirely where all that you learn is avoidance. In a perfect world you could find yourself at the point where you can have your trigger food in the house and not feel compelled to eat it all at once or feel confident in your ability to moderate your consumption of that food when you decide to have some.
After a lot of trial and error I finally found myself at this point and I have a hard time believing that I am the only person capable of this type of success. I’ll give you the breakdown of how I applied this to my life when going about this on my journey to overcome my binge eating but again, please remember that this is not to replace medical advice.
Before you brave bringing your trigger foods into the house you can begin by allowing yourself single serving portions of it purchased outside of the home. This step isn’t always necessary but it can be a good way to begin reducing your preconceived notion that X food always means a loss of control or a binge. This isn’t always possible for all food types. For example, if my trigger food is peanut butter I would have a hard time finding a single serving of that in a restaurant though you do have the option of buying food items with peanut butter toppings. Still, in these cases you have the option of letting your friends or family in on the experiment by keeping the trigger food at their home and having a sensible portions of it when you are there.
Again, you can probably skip this step but for anyone completely terrified of challenging their trigger foods this could be a less scary way to start.
The next step would be bringing the trigger food into the house. If you have more than one trigger food I would recommend working with one at a time or at least until you feel comfortable introducing any additional food items.
Enforce portion control in a way that you would have a difficult time circumventing. That is, store food in a way that doesn’t allow for immediate consumption. For example, keep the peanut butter in the freezer. Take it out just long enough to remove a single serving to store in the fridge and then place it back in the freezer. Incorporate that serving into your day.
With this approach you can continue to show yourself that eating these foods doesn’t automatically mean that something bad is going to happen. Freezing works for a good range of trigger foods like baked goods, nut butters, chocolate bars, soft candies etc as there will involve some amount of waiting between when you decide to eat it and when you actually can. Self sabotage isn’t completely avoidable for certain items as most of my readers likely know how to use a microwave to speed up the thawing period. In the case of easily thawed items like frozen baked goods but there is still going to be a small waiting period where, with time and practice, you can learn to stop yourself in the act of preparing to overeat.
If you live with others it helps to let them in on what you are trying to do. Sure, it might be a little embarrassing but it may be a helpful buffer. You can keep it very simple and just say, ‘I’m trying to limit the amount of cookies I eat. If you see me microwaving any I give you full permission to call me out.’ Or something to that effect. When I talk like that my mother says that I sound like a condescending robot so maybe say it in your own words. But knowing that someone else may hold you accountable can be helpful as well.
If you are not willing to bring someone else into things or you live alone you can place little reminders on the freezer or microwave. What reminders will depend on what will resonate with you. I personally prefer something more understanding like a gentle reminder of what you’re trying to accomplish but how you remind yourself should be based upon what you know may have the greatest likelihood of stopping you in your tracks.
For foods like cereal that you can still eat if you take it straight out of the freezer you might have better luck keeping that outside of the house, say, in the car. It sounds silly but the walk of shame to the car may be enough to deter you from breaking your resolve to only have your pre-measured portion. Or you can freeze the milk!
The trickiest foods to use this approach on would be things such as ice cream as they are meant to be frozen and cannot be kept in the car. In this case you may need to be a little more creative by keeping your spoons in the car or only buying a single pint at a time and portioning it out. You may eat the pint, but keep practicing. Remember, you are not powerless to your urges to eat and your resolve can strengthen with practice. If you defeat yourself by insisting that you can’t then you probably won’t be able to. If you are constantly bombarded with intense urges to binge you may also need to take a look at how much you are eating in general.
Practice your enforced portion control over and over and over until your comfort levels rise and you feel ready to keep the food in the house without the safety precautions. Don’t rush this step and don’t feel embarrassed about your process. It’s highly likely that you’ll mess up but my advice is to laugh about it. This is coming from the person caught half asleep in the kitchen eating cereal out of the box with my hands and woken abruptly in a pool of Honey Bunches of Oats with a great deal of it down my shirt. It’s also coming from the person who tied up the fridge with a dog chain and gave her roommate the key.
You don’t have to be perfect but you have to be relentlessly consistent in your attempts.
CET has been shown to help reduce the severity of urges to binge in patients with bulimia and also in obese subjects[ 4-8] though it true that results are mixed. I would be remiss if I did not mention that as it’s not my intention to make false promises. Long terms studies have mixed findings and this is still an approach to therapy that is under investigation. However, I strongly believe that simple avoidance of trigger foods serves only as a band-aid for the problem and doesn’t treat the issue at hand: You fear yourself. You lack trust in yourself. You are out of practice moderating that food.
There are very few things in life that we can control but one of them is our actions. You are in control of yourself even in the face of your urges. You doubt this because you are in the habit of acting a certain way in response to a very strong impulse and have not challenged that habit with much faith in yourself. If you truly believe you are powerless to your urges to binge then you will be. Challenge the impulse without doubting your abilities. Understand why these urges are there. The urges are a product of conditioning (or maybe due to your overall energy balance). Now try to do something about it: Recondition a new habit through practice.
References
[1] van den Akker K, Schyns G, Jansen A. Learned Overeating: Applying Principles
of Pavlovian Conditioning to Explain and Treat Overeating. Curr Addict Rep.
2018
[2] Tomiyama AJ. Stress and Obesity. Annu Rev Psychol. 2018
[3] Craske MG, Treanor M, Conway C, Zbozinek T, Vervliet B. Maximizing Exposure Therapy: An Inhibitory Learning Approach. Behaviour research and therapy. 2014;58:10-23. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2014.04.006
[4]Martinez-Mallén E, Castro-Fornieles J, Lázaro L, Moreno E, Morer A, Font E, Julien J, Vila M, Toro J. Cue exposure in the treatment of resistant adolescent bulimia nervosa. Int J Eat Disord. 2007
[5] Toro J, Cervera M, Feliu MH, Garriga N, Jou M, Martinez E, Toro E. Cue exposure in the treatment of resistant bulimia nervosa. Int J Eat Disord. 2003
[6] Boutelle KN, Peterson CB, Rydell SA, Zucker NL, Cafri G, Harnack L. Two Novel Treatments to Reduce Overeating in Overweight Children: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology. 2011
[7] Schyns G, Roefs A, Mulkens S, Jansen A. Expectancy violation, reduction of food cue reactivity and less eating in the absence of hunger after one food cue exposure session for overweight and obese women. Behav Res Ther. 2016
[8] Schyns G, van den Akker K, Roefs A, Hilberath R, Jansen A. What works better? Food cue exposure aiming at the habituation of eating desires or food cue exposure aiming at the violation of overeating expectancies? Behav Res Ther. 2018
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