It’s Q&A time! You can ask your own question here for a chance to have it answered in an upcoming edition.
The first part of today’s answer is available to everyone (about food rules I used to follow), and paid subscribers can read the whole thing (including the eating principles I do try to live by).
Diet culture feeds us a ton of different food rules. What is a food rule you used to stand by, and when did you realize it was nonsense?
Fyi: these answers are for educational and informational purposes only, aren’t a substitute for medical or mental-health advice, and don’t constitute a provider-patient relationship.
A decade or two ago, when I was struggling with disordered eating and chronic dieting, I followed so many food rules that it’s hard to pick just one. But there were a couple that persisted more or less throughout those years, even as others came and went.
The first was that I wasn’t allowed to eat before a certain time of day or after a certain time of night—basically a version of intermittent fasting that I made up long before that diet went mainstream, based on diet tips from friends who were equally disordered eaters. I would skip or delay meals until I was too ravenous to think straight, and then try to eat small portions the rest of the time, in the hopes of losing weight and being “healthy.”
It’s no wonder I ended up binge eating most days. It’s no wonder I was constantly hungry and constantly thinking about food.
That’s true of most diets, of course, not just intermittent fasting. Despite proponents’ claims that a time-restricted diet somehow makes you less hungry (which is not supported by scientific evidence), diets of any kind tend to lead to increased hunger levels and can trigger binge eating.
For some people, those and other side effects may feel worthwhile for the purported health benefits. But with intermittent fasting (as with many diets), those claims aren’t borne out in the data. As I reported here:
A 2021 Cochrane systematic review … analyzed 18 studies including 1,125 participants, looking at outcomes including weight loss, blood sugar, and cardiovascular disease risk factors like cholesterol, triglycerides, and blood pressure. The review found that in the short term, intermittent fasting led to slightly lower body weight than not dieting—but the difference wasn’t big enough to be considered clinically significant. The same was true for systolic blood pressure (but not diastolic blood pressure). There were no differences in blood sugar or any of the other cardiovascular risk factors measured. … The quality of the available evidence was deemed low to very low.
In other words: the potential upsides of intermittent fasting are far outweighed by the likely downsides.
The other food rule I followed on and off through my years of disordered eating was avoiding gluten. Early in my eating disorder, back in 2003, I developed a host of health problems that left my doctors mystified. I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, which was diagnosed and treated around that time, but I had persistent symptoms that couldn’t be explained by my (now-normalized) thyroid levels: fatigue, constipation, brain fog, digestive issues, dry skin, acne. As I continued to seek help in the conventional healthcare system, a family friend who was into alternative medicine urged me to look at gluten. She’d recently self-diagnosed with a gluten sensitivity and thought that might be at the root of my problems, and when I started reading up on it on non-evidence based websites and patient message boards, I became convinced that was true (despite multiple tests ruling out celiac disease).
I tried a gluten-free diet for two weeks and wasn’t sure if it helped—but I continued doing it on and off for years, convinced it had to have some effect based on everything I was reading and hearing. I also wrote several articles about the supposed benefits of the diet for people without celiac disease, fanning the flames of the nascent gluten-free trend. That’s something I think about a lot now when I see diet-trend pieces in the media: how many of those journalists are struggling in their own relationships with food, broadcasting their disorder to the masses?
I started to realize those food rules weren’t working for me when I began seriously addressing my disordered eating in therapy. But at the time, I don’t think I actually viewed the rules as nonsense (or at least non-evidence-based). I just thought maybe they weren’t the right fit for me, or (in my frequent self-critical moments) that I was somehow doing them wrong—that there was something uniquely wrong and broken in me that prevented me from sticking with these diets that so many other people seemed to be “succeeding” with. I started to feel resigned to the fact that I wasn’t cut out for dieting, but I wasn’t exactly sanguine about it.
A few years later, when I started focusing on disordered eating in my work as a dietitian and journalist, it finally dawned on me this was not just a “me” problem. Many, many other people struggled to stick with these and other diets. Then I started applying the research-methods skills I’d learned in my public-health master’s program to critically unpack the science on gluten, fasting, and diets in general—and I truly came to understand just how little good evidence there was behind the rules I’d tried to follow on and off for a decade.
That’s when I knew for sure I was done with dieting. My personal experience made me question diet rules, but the science sealed the deal.
This is a big part of why my work today focuses on deep dives into scientific research: I want to help people who are already questioning diets and other wellness trends to understand why they don’t work—and develop a more durable resistance to them. I know science won’t move the needle for everyone, but for those whose brains are wired similarly to mine, I hope maybe it can have a similar effect.
Today I no longer follow any food rules or diets. Still, there are a few food-related principles I practice—not in a rigid way, but because they’re helpful for self-care. I thought I’d share them now for paid subscribers.
