by Heidi Bylsma | Oct 22, 2013 | Blog
A note from a blog reader (and friend):
On one of your videos I heard you say, “following a 0-5 food plan,” which really got me thinking, because I have thought of a food plan as an “eat this, in that amount, at such and such a time” sort of thing, as opposed to an approach to how we are planning to eat when we get hungry. I had thought of 0-5 eating as “beyond food planning” or “letting go of food planning,” but, in the grand sense, of course it is a food plan. It’s a plan to wait for hunger and to eat to satisfaction. It’s a different type of food plan, but it is a food plan nonetheless.
I’d like to offer some more thoughts, based on my experiences as a person with a history of lots of very restrictive eating, including following restrictive food plans for much longer than was good for me, on the whole idea of food plans and how I’ve made food planning work for me within a 0-5 framework.
When I first learned about the whole concept of 0-5 (hunger/satisfaction) eating, I felt released from food jail and liberated into the loving arms of God. I was elated. I employed the suggestions and floated my way right into a headlong binge. What happened? It took me totally by surprise. Well, after repeating the same mistake about 25 times or more (I am not a fast learner in this department), I finally realized that I was eating -5 to +10 instead of 0-5. I was getting too hungry and then overeating. But I didn’t overeat each time I ate. Because I was so used to restricting, I was basically getting too hungry and eating too little for as long as I could take it, and then I would compensate by bingeing every few days. The old binge-starve cycle, except that it started with starving until I worked up to a compensatory binge. Aha. A clear problem presents a clear answer: stop starving yourself! My eyes were open to one answer for me: eat to satisfaction each time, and you won’t need to binge. Halleluiah!
As I continue to re-calibrate and re-fine my eating, I have become aware that although hunger and satisfaction are very important and help me to be and feel most connected to God through my body, life is much easier for me if I find my own eating rhythm and plan accordingly.
Here’s my rhythm: I am very likely to get hungry every few hours. I am hungrier in the morning than in the evening, but that doesn’t always fit well with family and social meals. I need to eat breakfast for myself, but I can’t usually gracefully skip dinner. I am hardly ever hungry for an evening snack, so I don’t plan on one.
If I plan to eat three meals and two snacks per day, separated by approximately three hours each, then I find that my brain is not constantly cluttered by calculating and re-calculating what I can or should eat next time I get hungry or how long it will take me to get hungry, etc. I do best when I expect to eat regularly. I eat meals and snacks in accordance with my signals of hunger and satisfaction, but I also plan to eat normal, social meals and snacks. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that three meals and two snacks is my primary boundary and hunger and satisfaction is my secondary boundary, but they both compete for primary (is co-primary a word? twin primary?).
The reason it’s important for me to elevate the regular meal/snack eating is that when I tell myself I’m just eating for hunger/satisfaction, I tend to default to under-eating and then become tempted to over-eat. I guess that’s because of my history of restricting, I’m not sure. But I do know what’s true for me, and what’s true for me is that although I am on the 0-5 food plan, I’m also on the three meals and two snacks food plan, and it is a manageable challenge to integrate the two. In fact, I think integrating the two is what normal eaters do. Normal eaters almost never say, “no thanks, I’m not eating dinner tonight – I’m not hungry yet.” They try to eat when they are hungry, but if they aren’t hungry, they’ll order something, eat a bit of it, and share the rest or bring home the leftovers or whatever seems like a good idea at the time to them.
I don’t always wait for hunger or eat to satisfaction. Similarly, I don’t always eat three meals and two snacks. Sometimes I get hungry for an extra snack. Sometimes I skip a snack. But I really never skip meals. I might delay meals because of life circumstances even though I’m hungry, or I might put a meal off because I’m not hungry yet, but I’m not going without lunch.
The big “never” for me is that I never binge any more (praise God!!) at least so far, since I started to get serious about this approach. The other “never” is that I never starve myself. If I’m hungry, I eat. If I’m not satisfied, I eat more. But I do it in the context of “I’m going to eat again in another few hours so I don’t have to stuff myself and in fact I don’t even want to because why would a person do that to herself?”
Maybe the main benefit of planning on eating three meals and two snacks is that it decreases my anxiety about starving. A person who eats that often is not going to starve. I am not going to starve myself and therefore I don’t need to overeat to prevent future starvation or to make up for past starvation. I am taking care of myself – I can relax around food : )
I hope this imperfect approach is useful to someone else. I so want to be linear and rigid, but I know that doesn’t work for me any more. It never worked for me, even though it’s how I attempted to live for years. I have to be integrated, complex, and flexible. Darn it.
~ Anonymous 🙂
What About You?
Have you modified your 0 to 5 eating in a way that frees you? Can you relate to this writer’s technique? How about sharing with us how you manage? It might encourage someone else!
by Heidi Bylsma | Sep 9, 2013 | Blog
Hi. A friend of mine who frequents this blog, sent me an email following my post last week on Truth Cards. I asked her if she would be willing to write a blog post to share her perspective with the readers of this blog. It is incredibly valuable, but one I have little experience with. I hope you will share the link with anyone you know who may need to see this!
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I find truth cards to be extremely helpful. But my truth, as someone who has suffered from years of restrictive food plans of my own making and through various anonymous organizations, seems to be almost the flip side of your truth.
One of your truth cards, which you shared with blog readers on 9/3/13, reads, “Today I will have to give up food I want to eat in order to follow my boundaries.” When I read that I immediately thought, “that is not true for me.” For me, I MUST eat food I want in order to follow my boundaries.
I had so many years of telling myself the following lies:
LIE #1. I cannot handle sugar.
LIE #2. If I start eating that binge food, I will never be able to stop.
LIE #3. There is something wrong with me at a cellular level.
LIE #4. The fact that I crave carbohydrates is evidence that I can’t handle them.
LIE #5. Desperate wanting (craving) is one step on the path to sinning.
Maybe these lies don’t ring a bell with you. If they do, if you have been like me and felt like you were evil for wanting things, and then denied yourself those very things in order to be “good,” then you can place yourself firmly in the “restrictor” camp.
I have been underweight, at my ideal weight, and overweight. I don’t think all restrictors are underweight. When I was overweight, I felt like a hypocritical restrictor. But wasn’t it inevitable? As I grew and matured physically and spiritually, I began to recognize the lies inherent in my beliefs. But that recognition was at a somewhat unconscious or perhaps semi-conscious level, and that’s when I transitioned from full-time restriction to binge eating. For me, binge eating is best described as intermittent restriction. It was restriction on the path to healing. But it was a very hard place to be, and it didn’t feel at all transitional. It felt permanent, and in fact it seemed like direct evidence that there was something very wrong with me. I told myself the lies, shouted them to myself sometimes, until eventually the unconscious or semi-conscious part of me said “NO!” and I ate every item of sugar that I could possibly stuff into myself in a short period of time. Bingeing seemed to confirm the lies, “see, I REALLY can’t handle sugar,” and “see, there REALLY is something terribly wrong with me.”
When I was finally able to see that the binges were actually created by the restriction and by my belief in lies, and I started to let myself eat the things I actually wanted, I was amazed and full of awe at the truths that God revealed:
TRUTH #1. I can eat sweets in moderation.
TRUTH #2. I can eat what I truly want and be satisfied.
TRUTH #3. There is nothing wrong with me (other than the fact that I believed a bunch of lies for years and years).
TRUTH #4. The fact that I crave carbohydrates is evidence that either I have overdone it in the sugar department and need some protein to balance out my overindulgence, or more likely, that I have not been eating enough carbohydrates and my body needs some sugar or complex carbohydrates to operate effectively.
TRUTH #5. Desperate wanting (craving) is a way of God communicating with me through my body. I can listen to God, honor my bodily signals, and take loving and nurturing action. Craving sleep, craving a hug, all my other cravings signal real needs that can be simply met. I do not need to be afraid. Cravings can be satisfied.
It all seems like a lot and as a person who is recovering from perfectionism, I tend to want to get it all right and find it overwhelming and want to retreat into a food plan that someone else has constructed because I still sometimes believe the lie that I am incompetent in the food department. When this happens, then I try to center on just one concept: My one goal for eating today is SATISFACTION.
When I am satisfied, I have no desire to binge. When I eat to satisfaction, I forget about food until next time I am hungry. In all those years of restriction, I was almost never satisfied, which is why I thought about food all the time.
Satisfaction is scary. It takes me to the next level. It solves my food problem and opens up new possibilities for me. I have been eating to satisfaction consistently for almost four months now. I have been eating to satisfaction and have been binge free for that entire time. This is coming from someone who five months ago and for the past 10 years before that was bingeing on average at least three times per week, with brief forays of binge free living that lasted at most six weeks at a time. It’s both a miracle and an incredibly simple answer to what seemed like a hugely complex problem.
It takes a lot of trusting in God to eat to satisfaction. But God is faithful, as always. If weight is a concern for you, then take heart. I had been bingeing heavily when I started, so I lost five pounds within the first week or two, of what for me has come to be known as “binge weight.” Over the subsequent few months, I’ve lost another five pounds. I am now at what I would consider an ideal weight for myself, a weight that I have not been at for over 10 years. And I got there by eating to satisfaction? Yup. Praise God!
Post by – Name withheld by request
How About You?
Prayerfully consider if you are someone who needs to write a different kind of truth in your truth cards. What does God’s Spirit testify to your heart? Are you, like my friend, in need of pressing on all the way to satisfaction? Are you restricting your eating in a way that is not trusting the body that God has given you? What is true for you? Are you willing to step out in faith and trust Him today?
