“Why can’t I stick to a diet?” Because your food rules don’t protect you from your worst self.

Diet rules look like they make life simple. But you pay for that simplicity: by deciding what you are and aren’t ‘allowed’ to eat, you sacrifice your ability to make smart, present-moment decisions about when to stop eating.

Ever said, “I can’t have that” when offered something nice? Whether it’s “I can’t have that, it has gluten”, or “I can’t have that, I’m doing a detox”, or “I can’t have that, I’m sworn off all food beginning with C until April (real example from my own brain)”… that’s your food rules talking right there.

“When’s treat time?”, my kids ask, with big eager eyes.

“Quarter past three”, I reply, without missing a beat.

Aged 4, 6 and 9, I don’t think my girls have realised yet that ‘treat time’ is not a universal law of nature, like the sun setting and rising each day. As if some cosmic Queen would bang a gong at 3:15pm each day and every nation, from Luxembourg to Tibet, will pause and take a pink wafter biscuit from a platter that’s passed round.

My kids don’t realise that ‘Treat Time’ is just a rule I made up. My intention is that it’s reassuring, and it’s also damn convenient for me as a parent too. Because a) I want them to be secure that there will always be more treats tomorrow (I grew up in a sugar-free home, and it contributed to my later binge eating, so I want them to be at ease and familiar with treats), and paradoxically, b) because without the rule I don’t trust them not to badger me for biscuits all day.

We have other rules at our place too.

For instance: “Can this count as our Outdoor Time?”, my children ask hopefully, while rollerblading in the park. “Sure”, I smile, glad that they have, albeit reluctantly, internalised ‘Outdoor Time’.

Outdoor Time is my rule that we have to get outdoors, rain or shine, for at least an hour each day, to move our hips and shake our pips, scream and shriek and try to run away from each other until we’re too exhausted and have to hug instead.

I put rules around sugary food and physical activity so that rainy days or boredom don’t make unhealthy choices seem like they’re up for debate.

Rules are there to protect us from making bad decisions.

I’m cool with having rules around food and body health with my kids. It makes my life as a parent much, much easier, because we don’t have power struggles and don’t have to explain why all the time.

I’m less cool about food rules for adults, and on this particular occasion I will take the time to explain why ;). To give you a quick heads’ up: it has to do with the relationship we set up with ourselves when we make a rule for ourselves, and how that catalyses our overeating and binge eating.

Of course, off-limits things always have that extra allure. It’s easy to feel dutiful and deprived — unpleasured — when we only eat according to our food rules and fuel needs, and don’t listen to our wants.

When we make rules for ourselves, we try to dominate our impulses.

Let me explain. With the kids, I make the rules because I’m the mum. I’m the boss.

Admittedly, they reflect MY fear that without a boundary, the kids will sit around all day watching TV and every time I got to boil the kettle I’ll trip over them, standing in front of the treat cupboard like stray cats waiting to be fed.

Which I could let them do of course. I could let them learn about burns by playing with fire.

I know there will be people reading this who have been braver in their parenting than me and have given their children unlimited access to treats and TV, and their kids have a lovely relaxed take-it-or-leave-it attitude as a result — If that’s you, I believe you! I love your values, part of me would like to be more liberal myself.

“But, but, but” (that’s the sound of my brain cycling through the terrible consequences) “by the time they learned the hard way why that wasn’t a good idea, their precious developmental years would have whizzed by and their brains and teeth will be rotten and falling out of their heads, and there will be no way to repair the damage! They’ll be stupid and their mouths will be festering black holes.”

You see what my mind does? Creates a big bad fear, that the rule has to protect us from.

Rules are for kids, because kids supposedly can’t be trusted to make the right decisions in every instance.

So what does this mean for why we break diets, overeat, and binge eat?

Well, when you make a rule for yourself as an adult, you cast the desiring part of yourself as a child. You don’t let that voice inside you that wants something and has emotional needs (that you’re probably trying to meet with food, but still…) have a say.

Whenever there’s a ‘should’ sentence running through your mind — that’s probably a diet rule.

You don’t even have a conversation with yourself about what your desiring part wants. It doesn’t even get acknowledged.

So, when you eat by the rulebook, you never find out WHY you want to eat.

What are you thinking, that makes you have the urge to eat? You don’t know, because you just don’t tolerate any discussion with yourself.

It’s as if my kids said, “WHY do we have to have Outdoor Time?”, and I just said, “Just Because,” or, “Because I say so”, or “It’s just the rule, dudes, don’t question it”.

So all you do is make a rule, break it, (learn nothing) try again, break it again. You never understand your motives. You never change your relationship to your urges to eat.

You’ve just decided you shouldn’t want it, and you want the urge to eat to just stop. Squash it down, disqualify it, make it go away.

And guess what? It doesn’t go away.

That’s not how urges work. Prohibition doesn’t switch off desire. It just drives the desire underground.

So you eat in secret, or you make excuses and justifications for your exceptions to your diet rules: It was a cheat day; I was just tired; I deserved it; it was my colleague’s birthday; It’s Friday… or even, you eat in secret, absent-mindedly or in the dead of night, like a werewolf. Back to starting over with the rules come daylight, right? Because you were naughty. See — you couldn’t be trusted! You need a rule, and a punishing one at that.

Hey, I’m being a little dramatic to make storytelling colourful here, but the fact is I’m not throwing around characterisations lightly. I lived this reality.

At the height of my binge eating I’d get up at night and eat whole jars of peanut butter with a spoon alone in my room.

Or bowl after bowl of muesli; entire loaves of bread and butter, slice after slice after slice. I know exactly what it’s like to try to get all my overeating under my own radar. It has taken a ton of work to honestly see my own eating in broad daylight, and I still catch myself creating new excuses.

And that’s why I wrote this more detailed post on my own site, which also goes a step further and details some of the solutions to this conundrum. We desperately need to understand more about the rules we adults have for our own eating and body health.

Here, I have talked about the parent-child relationship. Not because I think I’m getting it right with my kids — this isn’t a parenting post. But because, when we use rules on our own eating, we mirror that relationship.

We use rules on ourselves, we are treating ourselves like we aren’t autonomous, aren’t responsible. Like our desires are too great and our urges are too strong so we can’t be trusted.

We patronise ourselves. We boss ourselves. And we make ourselves feel like children with too-strict parents: rebellious, indignant, cunning, stifled, and deprived of self-expression.

So what do we do? We say F*** It! And eat all the food.

By the way, the part of you that says that and eats for England might feel like your inner werewolf, but honestly, it isn’t your ‘worst self’ doing this. The way out of diet failure is to stop fighting the part of you that wants pleasure. Which doesn’t mean you have to acquiesce to it all the time either, but it’s not a moral war between your ‘best self’ and your ‘worst self’ anymore.

I want to tell you, it’s alright to want things. It’s also alright to have big feelings and want to make them feel less intense somehow — food might not be a long-term solution to take the edge off emotions, but it probably made sense when you were in a fix. And most of all, it’s OK to have desires.

You can’t create a good relationship with food without having honest conversations with yourself about your desires.

You are the person who’s guiding your life and the person being guided. Remember that. You’re not just the inner parent, wanting the best for yourself. You’re the inner child, full of questions and desire and wired to experiment and learn and make mistakes and want comfort and pleasure. They are both you. Be all of you.