Latest / Unlearning Beautiful / Ep. 16 The Famine Response: What the Minnesota Starvation Study Taught Us About Dieting
Transcript
- Kristina Bruce: In 1944, during the Second World War, a group of healthy university-age men volunteered for a study to help understand the impact of starvation that many people were experiencing during the war. Some of the results of that study were pretty extreme. But what you might find more surprising is that you recognize yourself in some of the behaviors that the men of the study were demonstrating. Because even though this data became available for the medical field to see, for decades it's continued to prescribe and encourage similar patterns of eating that caused a lot of the damage and suffering these men experienced. In the study, it was called semi-starvation. In our culture, we call it dieting. So if you've ever felt like you were failing at dieting, I want you to consider that your body was actually succeeding at surviving. This episode is an invitation to let go of that shame and hopefully serve as an invitation to make peace with a body that isn't your enemy, but your greatest ally. Let's dive in. Welcome to Unlearning Beautiful, a podcast for women tired of trying to look good enough and ready to feel good from within. I'm your host, Christina Bruce. Here to help you let go of the pressure to look right or do it all right and reconnect with your inner guidance, your natural worth, and what truly makes you feel fulfilled. Because the freedom you're craving was never in how you look. In 1944 at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Ansel Keys wanted to understand how they could safely rehabilitate famine victims after World War II. So he set out to create a study. He recruited 36 university-aged men who were all healthy. had what they quoted as high psychological stamina. So they were healthy in mind and body. They began the study by having the men eat a very normal diet to establish a metabolic baseline. And then for six months, they proceeded to cut their calorie intake in half. They weren't eating nothing. They were definitely eating, but a massive restriction in their calorie intake. And then after the six months were over, there was a three month period where calories were gradually introduced under controlled conditions. And here's what they found out. During that starvation period, the men's basal metabolic rate had dropped by nearly 40%. And their bodies became hyper efficient at conserving energy. There was significant muscle loss. They experienced edema, so swelling. There was hair loss. And many of the men reported constant sense of feeling cold. The men also became obsessed with food. They stayed up late reading cookbooks, they collected recipes, and they would take the time over their meals just to make them last longer. Men who previously would have been said as having cheerful dispositions became irritable. socially withdrawn and prone to emotional outbursts. And many suffered from clinical depression and anxiety. Interest in sex and dating completely vanished and it was replaced entirely by thoughts of eating. During the refeeding period, the men experienced what they would call extreme hunger. So even though they were eating three, four, even five times the amount of calories than they were having during the starvation period, They would report feeling physically full and yet still biologically hungry. Many men gained back more weight from what they had lost and specifically in the form of body fat. Several men developed a lifelong struggle with binge eating and others had this obsession with making sure they always had food around. So one participant had reported feeling like he couldn't stand to have an empty cover. And years later, many participants still reported this preoccupation with food and a fear that it might be taken away. So if you're hearing this, already you might be starting to draw some parallels with your own experience with dieting. Now, in this condition, for many people, this is really an eating disorder. A lot of the symptoms that people are experiencing, if you've struggled with an eating disorder, then those symptoms are probably pretty familiar. But even if you wouldn't say that you've had an eating disorder, but you've had a lot of experience with restriction and dieting, you're probably gonna find yourself in this too, particularly these factors. Starting to be more obsessed with food, thinking about food all the time, thinking about what are you gonna be making for your next meal? When are you gonna be eating? Starting to get more interested in food itself. I know this was happening a lot for me when I was dieting. I was posting photos of food on my social media. I was constantly thinking about what am I going to have for lunch? What am I going to have for dinner? Food was taking up a good amount of space in my mind. Also, I felt colder when I was dieting. I grew up skiing, and so I can remember when I was in the height of my weight suppression. I went skiing with a friend and I was surprised at how cold I was. And I was thinking, I don't ever remember feeling this cold when I was skiing when I was younger. ⁓ maybe it's just because I'm getting older. And I really had no idea. was because my body was thinner and it just didn't have as much fat on it as it used to. Also the change in mood I think is really... important. I know when I again was at the height of my dieting, I would come home from work and if my husband was making dinner and it wasn't ready right away, I would snap at him. My emotional state was way more up and down than it is now that I've stopped dieting. So being able to manage my emotions was much more difficult when I was actively restricting my calories and my food. And I would say that many women that I speak to and clients that I work with It's pretty safe to say that a good 50 to even 75 or 80 % of the food noise and the food thoughts that are going on in their head is happening because, well, they spent so much time in this cycle of dieting. I think also another factor that we see that happens commonly with dieting is that weight regain. It's gaining back more weight than you actually lost and in the form of fat. That is not a mistake. that is a proper function that the body is reacting to because it's saying, we're not having enough energy reserves in our body right now. We got to put some more on to save it for the future. So going into this act of restriction and dieting throws the body into a survival state. Also, the lack of interest in sex that the men were experiencing, that makes a lot of sense too. because when you're dieting and you're restricting, your body does not have the energy that it needs for its regular functions. So if you're in survival mode, that's a really terrible time to reproduce. Your desire for sex is going to go down. Also, it's why if women are in more extreme restriction, they lose their periods. Same reason, because the body is taking that little energy that it has and putting it towards its more vital functions. and the other function of the body, they quiet down and they go a little bit more dormant. Also the idea too of feeling like you always have to finish your plate or not letting any food on the table. Same for when I was dieting, I would always finish my food because it was all that I was getting. And I knew that I wasn't going to allow myself to eat again until the next meal. And so there's this idea that we can't actually trust our body's signals because there's a rule that we have to follow. But if you're not giving yourself enough or adequate variety of nutrition or quantity of nutrition, it is gonna feel like you're gonna wanna eat everything that you have because you don't know when you're gonna be getting it again, but at a later time, or maybe not at all. That's also where the binge eating comes from. So it's this feeling of I need to have it all now because the body's saying. We don't know when we're going to eat again, or it could be taken away from us. Another factor where this can come up is if you've grown up with any sort of food insecurity. Maybe there wasn't a lot of money to buy a lot of food, and so that can also trigger this biological and survival instinct around food. Now the good news is that after a long-term follow-up, they showed that once the men felt biologically safe, meaning they had consistent unrestricted access to food for a long period of time, their weights eventually stabilized. I've talked about this a lot before, which is when you're dieting and suppressing your weight and controlling and managing your body size, it creates this pendulum swing. So you're pulling the pendulum all the way back to one side, that restrictive phase. And so the body and the mind is saying, don't have enough. This can even happen even if you're giving yourself quote unquote enough calories, but you're mentally restricting in other ways. So you really do want to have the ice cream, but you're telling yourself, no, I shouldn't, or I'm bad if I do it. So I'm going to restrict myself from it. But then maybe you do allow yourself to have it. You have a quote unquote cheat day. And then you binge on it. You jump off the wagon and all of a sudden that pendulum swings all the way to the other side. That is a very natural response to the body and the mind saying we're in restriction. It's going to compensate in the other way. What happens is that most people get really freaked out at that point and then they feel like they can't trust themselves or that they're going to just continue to eat this way forever. And so they the pendulum all the way back again over to the other side. But all that does is just keep the pendulum swinging back and forth. And what happens if you stop pulling the pendulum back and you just let it go? It's going to swing a little bit back and forth, but eventually it's going to fall into a balance in the middle. That's personally what I experienced was that my weight has stabilized for years now since I stopped dieting. But they showed that in the study too, that Once the body and the mind actually realize we're safe now, we're going to be getting consistent access to the food. It's not going to be starved. We have quote unquote food freedom in the sense that we're not mentally restricting ourselves from what we want. It starts to settle down and the nervous system feels safe again. So what I really see from this study is that they took a group of men who were totally healthy. and kind of screwed everything up by putting them into this restriction. This is not actually a state that is healthy for ourselves mentally and emotionally and physically. And yet we are putting ourselves into this all the time. This has become a normal way of eating in the culture. And it's top of mind for me right now. I was just watching this documentary on modeling and it followed this one model to show the real you know, life behind the scenes of being a model. And the expectation for these young women was to be as skinny as possible. And she said, yeah, they're doing it in very unhealthy ways. Like, it's very common to just not be eating or to be drinking too much coffee or whatever it may be. And so when this is what we see in the culture, it's when that's what's put on a pedestal that's supposed to be the epitome of beauty and is glamorized, we start to think that our very normal and natural bodies are somehow wrong. And so it puts us onto this path of, well, maybe I'll just skip having this dessert or maybe I'll cut a little bit back here. And for many women, this started in late childhood and even into adolescence and that put them on a path now of years of chronic dieting and into eating disorders that is completely messed up the balance of the system and has made us feel like we can't trust ourselves. But so much of it is skewed by this pressure, the cultural beauty standard, and frankly, as I talked about in previous episodes, especially the one on the BMI, about this hatred that we have around fat. Now, is it true that you can be in a body size that isn't optimal for you? Yes, it is. And that can happen on both ends. We can't say what that weight is. What we're trying to do is categorize it through the BMI, through these markers, and say, well, if you just get yourself down to here, then that's what's healthy for you. We can't actually know that, especially we don't know what the history is. So if we just instead stop focusing on weight altogether and say, I'm going to focus on coming into harmony. with my body to start to have eating patterns and nourishing myself and moving in a way that feels good and focusing on health, the body will, because it is very intelligent and wise, start to work that out itself. And if there's any deeper emotional past trauma that needs to be resolved, that's also there to be addressed too, because that does affect our physical state. But focusing on the weight and trying to manage it the way that we have, is actually contributing to the problem, as we can see in this study. It's making things worse. It's throwing our body out of balance. We are trying to say that we know what everybody's body size is supposed to be. The truth is that we don't. But if we instead focus on actually treating each individual with the most care and looking at what is it that makes them feel the most energized, the most safe and good in their body, then that is the path that we go forward. not by treating our bodies like they're wrong or bad or a mistake. And dieting in this culture of the way that we treat bodies is doing exactly that. It's throwing us completely into disarray. So if there was ever a reason to just stop trying to control your food in that respect, stop trying to manage your body size and instead tune into what do I need to do? What do I need to focus on in order to feel and more vitality in my body, that is the path to take. What we've been doing with dieting all these years does not work. It makes things worse. So we need to take that upon ourselves to say, you know, I've been trying this for 20, 30, 40 years. I'm done with it. And I hope that this is also giving you permission to look at that food noise in your head, not as a personality flaw, but as a biological signal as a result from this fixation and focus on your body size from all of these past previous years of dieting. You can restore that, you can come into balance, but a huge piece of that is the mental emotional piece and all of the beliefs that we have adopted about fat being bad, about what it means about ourselves if we gain weight, about feeling unsafe in our bodies because if we've had past trauma or experience of being teased or bullied for our body size, it doesn't feel like it's going to be safe to just be okay in our body. So working on healing that and resolving that is going to be able to give you the freedom to say, now I can just be at peace in my body. Even though we've gotten out of balance biologically, mentally, emotionally around food, you can restore it back into harmony. it is possible to do that. They saw that in the studies. I've seen it in my own life and in the lives of other people too. So if wanting to come into that balance again, if wanting to let go of this pressure and shame and criticism and judgment about your body is something that you're wanting to do and you're new to me or this work, I have a free guide called the Guide to Body Peace. You can get your copy at a link in the description below. And if you've been following me for a while or you're just really ready to have some actual relief from all of this body and food noise and you're curious about how you may go about doing that, there's also a link below where you can book a complimentary body peace consultation. So this is not a sales call with me. This is actually a real coaching conversation where I will bring you through an experience to have a genuine shift in how you think about and feel in your body and understand why that matters. So if you're curious about that, there's also a link in the description below and you can book your consultation. So I hope that this episode was a little bit enlightening today. Maybe it was surprising, maybe it wasn't. but that if nothing else, it gave you more of that determination for those moments when you start to question yourself on the body peace path and say, yep, dieting is not going to work. It's not the place that's actually going to lead me to true health and wellness. And I'm gonna keep moving forward with focusing on how I feel and trusting myself and my body. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks for listening to Unlearning Beautiful. If this episode resonated with you, Follow the show and share it with another woman who's ready to see beauty and herself in a new way. And if you feel moved, leave a rating and review. It will help the show reach more women who need to hear it. Remember, you're already everything you've been trying to become, enough worthy and free. I'm Christina Bruce. Until next time.