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Binge eating: why restricting makes it worse · No Forking Nonsense - The Nutritionist UK

• 0:00
  @paulthenutritionist: Hello, and happy Friday. It's a Friday episode. The weekend is nearly here. And this is a Rewind episode, and it is on bingeing, and specifically the binge and restrict cycle. And the thing with the binge restrict cycle is that it offers connotations of perhaps restricting to the extent where you just eat in grass and I don know what, whereas bingeing you re like Gunther from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and you re just gobbling it all up.
• 0:32
  When it isn t actually like that, it s a little bit more nuanced. So I feel like a lot of people have some form of binge and restrict and this episode kind of goes into details about why it happens, what you can do about it and hopefully give you some practical ways that you can move through it. So I hope you find this useful and I'll catch up with you at the end. Oh, while I'm thinking about it, if you want to improve your algorithm on here, and your algorithm in general, if you are sick of the absolute nonsense that's on social media, people pushing things, you know, the noise that s just absolutely crazy, these influencers telling you to take this supplement and go on this diet and eat one meal a day and fast and you re just sick of all that confusion and you re sick of that Forking nonsense, then press follow or subscribe to this, not only does it help me but it will train your algorithm that you are only interested in factual information and it will impact your podcast feed suggestions, it will impact your social media. You've got to train your algorithm to stop showing you shite.
• 1:45
  And if you subscribe to this, that is a way that it's gonna help you. Even if you never listen to another episode, it will help you because I only ever post factual information, and I've never pushed anything sponsorship wise. So you basically train in your algorithm that s what you want, and who doesn t want more of that? Anyway, that s all from me, I catch up with you at the end, enjoy this episode. Here is a fact that should be on the front of every diet book ever written, the most reliable way to make someone binge is to restrict them, not to make them greedy, to make them lazy, to restrict them.
• 2:16
  And we ve known this since 1950 and we are still selling people the opposite. So today, I m going to explain to you what restriction actually does, why the Binge isn t because you re shit as a human, why it s much more nuanced than you starve all day and eat everything at night, and what actually breaks the cycle. So here s what we learnt in 1945, during the war, a physiologist called Ancel Keys ran a study at the University of Minnesota, '36 healthy young men, volunteers, conscientious objectors who all wanted to contribute, and he put them into a six month semi starvation because the allies needed to know how to safely refeed people who had been starved in Europe. Most of them lost about a quarter of their body weight, and the physical stuff you'd expect, so fatigue, weakness, cold, swelling, but it's the psychological findings that matter for today. The men became obsessed with food, not interested, obsessed.
• 3:15
  They talked about it constantly, they read cookery books for entertainment, they collected recipes, one of them ended up with over 100 cookbooks, three of them changed career and became chefs. They developed rituals around eating, dragging meals out, hoarding, playing with food on their plate, they became irritable, anxious, withdrawn, men by the way with no prior mental health history. And then he came to refeed him. When they were finally allowed to eat properly, so many of them binged. They ate to genuine physical discomfort, they reported feeling full and ravenous at the same time.
• 3:51
  One man was hospitalised, none of them had EVER binged before this study. For some, normal eating took years to come back. And here s the point, you could take 36 psychologically healthy young men, restrict them and manufacture any disorder behaviour in every single one, because they were starving. You fast forward to 2011 and a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, a lead author called Pria Samithran, and she found that with 50 people, she put them on a ten week weight loss programme, measured appetite hormones before, immediately after, and again a year later. After the weight loss, ghrelin, which is your hunger hormone, was up, and your leptin, which is your I'm full hormone, and kind of signals how you're full, was down.
• 4:42
  Subjective hunger ratings were also up and I guess you'd expect that but at sixty two weeks over a year later, those changes still hadn't returned to baseline, the hunger didn't switch off when the diet finished. So when someone tells you that they came off a diet and they just couldn't stop eating, they are basically describing a measurable documented, year long biological signal. Now the nuance is this, and this is where it kind of gets mis sold, the cartoon version is that you starve all day and then you eat your body weight in calories at night, and that is not what most people are actually doing. Most people who binge are not starving, they re not in the minnesota experiment, they re eating reasonable amounts most days, what s actually going on is much subtler, It runs on two engines. Engine one is a slow death, so it s not the dramatic fast or a skip breakfast, tiny lunch, a salad that you didn t want, not eating between two and seven.
• 5:43
  Each individual day looks fine, nobody will call it starving but it's the persistent low level shortfall that will never get paid back and your body keeps the ledger even when you don't and that's why it tends to hit in the evening. It's not that evenings are dangerous, it's that by 07:00 you are carrying the whole day. An engine two is the rule and honestly, this one does more damage than hunger. There s a classic bit of research from Herman and Pollyvie on what they call restrained eating. They took two groups, dieters and non dieters, and they gave everyone a milkshake first, then they let them eat freely afterwards and measured how much.
• 6:25
  The non dieters ate less afterwards, obviously because they just had a milkshake, the dieters ate more. More after being fed, because the milkshake broke the rule, and once the rule is broken, the day is written off, so you may as well. And they called it counter regulation, and you might know it as the fuck it effect, and that is nothing to do with hunger, it's a thought. And that's why two people can eat identical biscuit at four in the afternoon, and one of them has a biscuit and the other one has 10. The difference isn't the biscuit, it's whether they were, quote unquote, allowed it.
• 6:58
  There s the third thing sitting underneath both. Forbidding of food doesn t make it less appealing, it s going to make it much louder. The stuff you eat regularly becomes ordinary, your brain stops flagging it. The stuff you ban stays permanently interesting because you ve never got bored of it. Ban chocolate and you don t stop wanting chocolate.
• 7:18
  You make chocolate the most interesting thing in your house, it s called the cat string theory, and it s a concept where if you hold a ball of wool or string over a cat, it will go for it. As soon as you give it that ball of string, so it's no longer a fun thing to try and grab, they are not interested. So the cycle breaking down properly, you restrict, so you build a debt and you kind of embed rules and then inevitably you break the rule, usually on something trivial, then you write off the day because you broke a rule and you re trying to kind of strive for perfection, and then you end up beating past the point of wanting it, you feel awful, and then you'll compensate. You'll skip the breakfast tomorrow, you'll train it off, you'll start a game Monday, and it's that compensation is the bit that closes the loop, because now you're back at step one, only with more data, tighter rules, more evidence so you can't be trusted around food, and that last bit matters, every round of this teaches you something false about yourself. So what can we do to change it?
• 8:20
  And here's six things and I've put them in order, in kind of the way that it matters. First, eat during the day, this is a big one and it is one that nobody really likes to talk about because it feels like going backwards. A proper breakfast, proper lunch that you actually want and something in the afternoon. Most of the evening problem is solved way before 06:00, I had a client who was having such a tiny lunch and he was just obsessed with biscuits, by us making his lunch a lot bigger, we found that the evening cravings just completely disappeared, you cannot out discipline a body that hasn been fed. Second, get protein and fibre at every meal.
• 8:54
  NOS target, NOS number, just every time you eat. They re the two big things that are going to make a meal actually finish. A meal that doesn satisfy you isn t a smaller meal. Nothing goes on the badness. If chocolate is the thing, chocolate needs to become boring.
• 9:08
  It only becomes boring through regular, ordinary, unremarkable exposure, and that does feel reckless but it isn t because you re being proactive and not reactive. Forget about Monday, the next opportunity is the next meal, not tomorrow, not Monday, not the first of the month. If you overeat at 04:00, you eat a normal dinner at seven, that's it, you never restrict. Half the binge is the writing off, not the eating. Track the trigger, not the food, it s usually happening because there s something else going on.
• 9:38
  So if it s happening regularly, stop logging what you ate and start logging what happened first, your emotions, what time, what you d eaten that day, who were you with, what had just happened, how much sleep. If you do that for a couple of weeks, you will usually find a pattern and usually it s really obvious and it s almost never about the food. Finally, sleep. Ham and alcohol are the two things I m always banging on about. Short sleep will push hunger up and self regulation down the following day.
• 10:06
  Alcohol just removes everything between thinking about the food and eating it, it just removes inhibitions, we know that. And neither of these is anything to do with your brain being shit, it s that they are both conditions that make your cycle more likely. One more thing and I mean this, everything I ve described today is the ordinary restrict and rebound pattern that a huge number of people are in and many people come to me stuck in this cycle. But binge eating disorder is very different and it's a clinical diagnosis and it's the most common eating disorder in The UK, it's much more common than anorexia and bulimia. I know because I worked in an eating disorder clinic with children and young people.
• 10:48
  If the eating feels genuinely out of control while it s happening, if it s regular, if there s loads of distress around it or if there s crippling shame around it or perhaps you re compensating afterwards, that s probably beyond nutrition. That s probably something you want to explore with a GP. It s important that we say that. It s very treatable and it s treated properly and routinely, but please don t sit with it for years because you think that you have a problem with your own discipline. So what s to take from this?
• 11:21
  Number one, restriction reliably produces binge behaviour. It was demonstrated in healthy men in 1945 and I see it week on week on week. Number two, the hunger after dieting is very real, it's measurable and it can persist for fucking ages, so stop going on stupid diets. Number three, it isn't just a deficit, the rules do at least as much damage as the shortfall, because the binge usually follows a broken rule rather than limp stomach. Four, the way out is really unglamorous, you need to eat during the day, bad nothing, stop writing off the day at four in the afternoon because you re going to fast, you do not have a problem with your own ability to have willpower.
• 12:07
  What happens is you ve set yourself out to fail by trying to be perfect all the time. So I hope you found this useful and I shall speak to you next time. I hope you found that episode useful and I m going to let you into a little secret, I actually had to re record it because the original audio was don t shoot so you ve basically got a August 2026 version of that and I think it s really really good. I pulled out the notes, I added a few things, I m really happy with it. Now if you do find yourself in this cycle, which I m going to tell you 80% of people who come to me do, then I can help you.
• 12:41
  And the help is not that we need to put you on a bigger diet. If you're struggling to lose weight or you find yourself in a roller coaster of eating too much, then under eating, then the weekend comes, you eat too much, then you start again on Monday and you just feel like you're on a hamster wheel and you're not making progress, guess who can fix it? Me. So feel free to send me a message and if you have any questions, feel free to message me on Instagram appallnutritionist and I'll speak to you next time. Thanks so soon.