Reflecting on the Reasons We Reward Restriction

“Why do we wear our food restrictions like medals of honor?” 

This thought recently sprang to my brain when I felt the familiar urge to restrict. Except this time around, I realized that I had absolutely no clue what type of food I wanted to restrict. I simply heard the voice in my head tell me that I needed to. 

It was in this moment that I realized a pattern in my tendency to restrict - that these urges usually arose when I felt lost or unstable in my position in life, in a positive or negative way. They usually arose when I was going through some kind of major transition or change - encountering a situation that challenged beliefs that I had about myself, entering a new environment, or trying something new.

The urge to restrict stemmed from a desire to define myself - restricting something provided me with temporary sense of purpose and identity. 

This need for purpose and identity is by no means a maladaptive thing - we all want to feel like we belong, that we contribute to the world in a unique way. But I began to wonder:

Why is it that we use the narrative of restriction as a reason for identity and pride?

Why do we celebrate the limitations of things that we are able to enjoy?

Why does food represent a realm in our lives where we applaud those who see their glasses half empty? 

Let me make this clear: dietary restrictions are not the problem - the problem lies in the intention behind why we incorporate these restrictions into our lives, and how we weave them into our personal narratives.

For some of us, incorporating dietary restrictions are a matter of self-care - I fully understand that the elimination of certain foods may occur for physical, emotional, or spiritual reasons that have nothing to do with restrictive tendencies.

However, it is also worth asking yourself whether your food restriction fills a space in your identity that you are scared to fill or explore more deeply, and whether you have decided to cut something out just so you can say to the person next to you at a dinner gathering, “I AM xxx free,” as if your entire self is defined by the absence of this food group. 

My musings brought me to these final questions to myself, and now, questions that I hope we can ponder together:

Can we start to celebrate what we can eat, even amidst the restrictions we may need to incorporate?

Instead of saying, “I am xxx-free” can we start to say, “I am FREE from the constraints of diet culture?” 

And for those of us who do not have any significant reason to eliminate certain foods (besides, of course, the overwhelming pressure of diet culture): can we learn to see ourselves as lucky? Can we learn to be proud of the fact that we can eat anything that we wanted to, if we just allowed ourselves to? Can we stop trying to look for foods to eliminate so that we can feel “better”? Can we entertain the possibility that the path to feeling “better” may not necessarily stem from changing our food habits, but rather our thought patterns and beliefs? 

Just like everything else on our site, I ask these questions to invite you to a conversation, rather than to challenge or to criticize. None of these questions have firm answers, and I am always interested and excited to hear different perspectives. 

Final food for thought to end: 

• Do you have food restrictions?

• Do you feel proud of these restrictions?

• And if you do, have you ever asked your why, and where this sense of pride stems from?