I was recently reading a post in this sub called “Not Guilty Pleasures” about foods that people didn’t give up while losing weight with I.F. and that got me thinking about the common diet rule that you shouldn’t bring junk foods into your house.
I used to ban junk foods from the house, and I grew up (fat) in a home with parents who pushed 90s-diet-culture adages (while simultaneously making the kids finish everything on their plate). However, during the time of banning certain items from the house as an adult I was also the type of person who would get a craving and go get and polish off (in one evening) a pint of Ben and Jerry’s every other week.
I noticed that after starting I.F. last year I am more intune with how hungry I am, what I want to eat, and don’t really have strong cravings. I also noticed that I have started keeping some “junk” in the house – but it lasts a long time, and I’m more aware of portioning.
This made me wonder: is there something counter intuitive going on with actually keeping “junk foods” around? I wonder if this is a sort of expression of the “scarcity mindset” (once you have an abundance of something in your environment, you have a better-adjusted relationship with it)? Is there any research to this effect? Curious about other’s experiences with this as well.
I am still working on my relationship with food, but IF has definitely helped. My weakness is sweets, so I tend to have one box of cookies or one type of ice cream bar in the freezer at all times. Some days it makes me feel powerful: whether it’s an eating day or a fasting day, I can acknowledge that the cookies are there but that I don’t want or need them. And sometimes during an eating window, I indulge. Knowing there will always be something sweet available to me takes away some of its power.
When I previously banned sweets from the house, their occasional presence flooded me with thoughts like “omg we never have cookies in the house, I need to eat more of them right now because they won’t be in the house soon enough.”
I also learned the hard way that if I am only eating in a 1-6 hour eating window on any given day, I feel so much better when what I do eat is more nutritious… even when those cookies are within reach.
There is no right answer here. I have times when I can keep junk in my house and have no issues just having a bit from time to time in reasonable quantities. I also have times where I have to stop buying it because I can’t seem to control myself.
I find that buying things in single serving packages helps, but not all of the time.
Since we are all different (and going through all kinds of different stages/circumstances in life) All we can do is figure out what works for us personally, and recognize when that specific solution is no longer working, and adjust accordingly.
Honestly the same goes for intermittent fasting. It is a great way to keep daily calories in check, and has been a wonderful resource for me (and so many other people) but I have absolutely had to adjust based on my circumstances/mental health etc and have done everything from OMAD, to EOD, to 16/8 to simply skipping breakfast. And even then, I keep CICO in my back pocket if I find myself waking up hungry too often and just being miserable until lunch. If eating 3 spaced out meals and a snack is easier for me to keep my calories in check at any given time (for whatever reason) then I’m going to switch back to that until I’m ready to go back to an eating window.
Find what works for you now, and do that. If it stops working for you (for whatever reason) then reassess and tweak/change as necessary. It is rare for one way to do anything to be the most practical/effective way to do it through your whole life. Life changes, find the best way to change with it while sticking to your goals.
Like any form of deprivation, “banning” something from your pantry will only serve to make you crave it more until you snap and binge.
The real benefit of IF is that it teaches you self-discipline and self-denial where, as you said, that bag of Doritos will sit in your cupboard for weeks instead of a day or two.
I don’t ban anything in my house. My husband and I are teaching our son how food serves different purposes. There is food for fun (sweets and other junk food) and food for energy. We have to feed our body with the food that gives us long-term energy first, and then we have some of the fun food. He is surprisingly good at regulating his own sweets intake even at 3, but he is still a kid who has days where he would happily gorge himself on m&ms and ice cream if he could. I don’t want him growing up with any food issues or insecurities like I did
My mom used to ban specific foods and rewarded us with banned food as a result. My sisters and I used to go ham at our friends houses who had pop or ice cream available to them. We also learned to reward ourselves with food which was not good once we had our own income sources. We all have food issues now. My husband on the other hand had junk food readily available in his house growing up and as a result he learned how to have a healthy relationship with it.
When i started i thought banning foods was the way to go as that was what was taught to me growing up. Losing weight? food= bad. But being that i dont want to start (back) an ED since i know how my personality is, what i do is that i let myself buy maybe a healthier? alternative or closest i can find. I have a toddler so junk will always be around to tempt me, but if i have a tasty alternative that i know will satisfy that.. then i have that instead. seems to really work for me.
Nope! I don’t ban foods. I’ll take a bowl of air fried cauliflower with primal kitchen Buffalo sauce over cookies or a heavy pasta lunch any day. If I have a real hankering for a nutter butter or something sure I’ll get one if I’m already grocery shopping but I won’t go out of my way for it like I used to. Also same with the diet culture in my family. My mom is anorexic + bulimic so I got told what to and not to eat as a child so I just eat mindfully as a formerly overweight adult
I can’t have chips in the house, its the one food I have zero control over. But, I don’t like BBQ, AllDressed or Doritos, so have those cause I’ll never touch them.
I’ve never had much of a sweet tooth, but its almost gone now. Very rarely (like I still have unopened chocolate bars in the fridge from before Christmas) will I reach for that stuff, I just don’t really enjoy it. I rather things like pastry, but need to go out of my way to get that
Part of changing the way I eat was admitting to myself that others in my house will bring treats into the kitchen and I had to adjust myself. And not others have to adjust to my diet.
So far, very good. I’ve managed not to just grab a bag of chips or cookies and eat mindlessly. Instead, I plan my mindless eating and it feels much better and my weight loss or maintenance (whichever phase I’m in) is smoother.
We don’t ban food in the house, out of five people in my house I’m the only one who is trying to lose weight. It doesn’t make sense to make 4 other people adjust their eating on account of me.
I’ve also gotten less interested in food in general with calorie counting. For example I used to buy a chocolate bar and eat the whole thing. Three times now I’ve bought a chocolate bar and had them sit for a week each, slowly taking a piece or two here and there but not thinking about it otherwise. I tend to stick to the same foods when calorie counting and I don’t snack a lot so, banning foods I might snack on doesn’t make sense for my house. I’m definitely a full meal kind of person and not a snacking kind of person. If I want chocolate I just include it into my meal plan as dessert.
Hm. I don’t fry worth squat, so that’s an out of the house item. We keep chocolate bars for my partner, who is very disciplined. Except for ice cream/gelato, which we rarely keep, and then only buy a pint.
My great treats are baked goods, and for a long time they were sharply limited. Now, I make small batches, enjoy and let time pass before baking again.
Left to my own devices, snacks would only be bought in single sizes. I do keep tortilla chips for nachos, however.
I focus more on stocking what I want to eat more of consistently: whole grain items, beans, lentils, veggies, fruit. And so much herbal tea.
Biggest thing for me was getting over sugar addiction with IF. Once my blood sugar is better regulated cravings are pretty much non-existent. That’s a bigger factor for me than a psychological “scarcity mindset”
I have 100% experienced this. I’m 38 and have been on and off diets for 30 years - yes, my first one (in the 90’s) was when I was 8 years old.
I used to polish off an entire package of cookies so “it’s out of the house and I can’t eat it anymore” or toss food in the garbage and dump windex on top of it so I wouldn’t be tempted to eat. Or try to satisfy a specific craving with anything but that “junk” food which led me to overeating on “healthier” options - spoiler alert, I would always end up turning to the food I was denying myself anyway.
I’m almost 4 years in my intermittent fasting lifestyle and it has completely changed the way I view food and what my body wants. I had a package of Oreos in the pantry for about three weeks. THREE WEEKS. It might not seem like a long time to some people, but those Oreos would barely last 3 days back in the day, let alone weeks. My relationship with food continues to evolve and improve as time goes on, but it’s such a remarkable and exciting thing!
I read the book “intuitive eating” which helped my mindset tremendously. It speaks on the diet/binge cycle and the shame connected to food. Restricting and banning foods to therefor binge and overeat. It’s been a hard balance for me with IF, since I may go against my intuition by waiting until noon to eat and cutting my food off at 7. But by eating the things I want in this timeframe, I still feel the comfort of access and therefor don’t binge.
The book familiarized me with the feeling of being satisfied, and made me more comfortable with how I am now. Doing that was hard but it lessened the pressure and hateful self-talk that usually lead back to binging.
I used to do IF and delegitimize food, calorie count etc to achieve the fantasy of a different body, which ultimately made me fed up, self destructive, and led me to stop IF and watching what I eat. So that book really helped me during that time, though it was hard to be totally conscious of the bad habits I’ve had my whole life. It’s a balance for sure
Yes I have the same mindset, where I would finish a family size block of chocolate or a pint of ice-cream on the same day. IF is really helping me control my binge lifestyle, I still make sure to eat dark chocolate everyday (to keep the beast away) or dates. I still have my sweet tooth and I buy slightly less healthy things for my toddler like mini cookies or something and these are lasting longer and longer, when normally I would’ve eaten it.Im still at that stage where if I eat something high sugar it will break my diet for a week. So I’m trying to eat healthy first or taking ACV before high carb meals That being said sugar doesn’t taste as sweet as it used to.