Restrictive Diets Are Traumatic and a Response To Trauma

Today, we're going to explore how restrictive diets are traumatic and can be a response to trauma.

Over the years, I've had people say to me, "But I haven't had any trauma in my life, and I don't understand my binge eating as a response to trauma when I haven't experienced any." My response when I hear this from those I work with is, "Have you dieted?" When I started to look at the overlaps between trauma and dieting, it felt clear that dieting is experienced as traumatic in the body.

And trauma is not what happened.

It's not about the event, but rather how the body processes and stores that experience.

In dieting, and what I'm referring to when I say diet is being a part of diet culture that instills shame and dysregulation, being forced into a diet by a parent as a child, being shamed into a diet by a medical professional, pressuring yourself to go on a diet to alter your body out of panic of not adapting to the culture's body ideals.

I'm not talking about the kind of dieting that you choose, that you own, that you feel like is the best thing for you.

So in dieting, there is constant restriction and fleeing away from food you need, fighting your hunger, people-pleasing to contort your body into something it may not want to be, freezing when you have to make a food decision, and collapsing from exhaustion of worrying about what, when, where, and how to eat.

Do you see the nervous system survival responses in there? Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and flop.

They are all playing out while you're dieting.

Both trauma and dieting take away your sense of choice, keep the body in constant dysregulation, make the body feel unsafe to inhabit, break a sense of trust within yourself, and increase the experience of exhaustion, disconnection, anxiety, numbness, and dissociation.