04/20/2025
I dare to argue: It is not food addiction you struggle with, it’s restriction from following a diet that makes you crave the food even more.
Scarcity creates demand. The less of something you feel there is, the more you want it. When you eat too few calories and food becomes scarce, there’s an increase in food seeking behaviors. This over-restriction in food intake tends to result in you eating more food than you would have had you just eaten from a place of abundance and fueled your body properly.
When you place fun foods off limits they immediately become scarce. Banning them creates more intensity and allure around them and you just want them more. Eventually you do eat them, and usually in greater quantities.
When you eat from a place of scarcity it drives what you call last-supper mentality. You’re always in a state of feeling like you can’t have a particular food, so when you do inevitably eat it, you end up eating it in larger quantities than is desirable because you know that starting tomorrow you won’t be able to have it again. So you get in your fill now.
This is the reason so many people feel out of control around particular foods. They blame addiction to sugar, or label certain foods as triggery. And while food does have some physiological effects on your body that might drive your desire to eat, the bigger driver is your self-imposed psychology and the food prison you continue to keep yourself locked in.
When you let yourself out of that prison, neutralize scarcity with abundance, and give yourself permission to eat what you want, food loses its intensity. Off limit foods lose their value and allure, and the food seeking behaviors that you try to suppress diminish.
M&Ms are no longer this amazing chocolatey goodness that is so bad yet oh so good. It’s just food. Food that either meets your needs or doesn’t. Food that either makes you feel your best or doesn’t.
So as you heal your relationship with food, you start eating food again instead of labels and feelings. You’re able to recognize what’s best for you and you gravitate towards the foods that meet your needs and will make you feel your best.
Because that’s really what scarcity and abundance are all about. Most people think of scarcity as something that’s really rare, and abundance as something that’s just overflowing beyond capacity.
But I like to think of it as something much more simple. Scarcity means not having or being enough, and abundance means having or being enough. Scarcity means your needs aren’t being met, while abundance means they are.
Feeling abundant around food means you’re eating enough calories to feel and perform your best and enough of the types of foods that are going to satisfy you.
10 years ago I wouldn’t have had to think twice about whether I’d want M&Ms or a salad for the rest of my life. It was M&Ms all day every day. But now? M&Ms are great, but only in small doses. Eat more than that and I’ll hear my body screaming for nutrition. So these days I’m taking the salad, and it’s not even close.
Your goal is to create an atmosphere where you take fun foods for granted. Because when you do, you don’t eat as many of them. As soon as fun foods seem scarce; as soon as you feel like they are going to be taken away from you, that’s the moment you want them most, and that’s when you tend to overindulge in them.
Permission, healing, and abundance got me out of the intense food moments of the now that were being driven by the disempowering psychology of my past, and allowed me to honor what I truly wanted and needed in order to feel my best not just right now, but for the rest of my life.
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