The Importance of Regular Eating
What is Regular Eating?
Regular eating involves eating something roughly every three hours. Regular eating typically takes the form of three meals and 2 or 3 snacks a day. This usually involves: breakfast, mid morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner and a late snack.
Establishing regular eating habits forms a fundamental part of overcoming disordered eating. Regular eating is the foundation upon which other positive changes in eating habits are based.
Benefits of Regular Eating
Helps establish habits to overcome delayed, infrequent, unstructured, or chaotic eating patterns
Reduces the likelihood of experiencing strong food thoughts, extreme hunger and potential binge and purge episodes
Allows you to feel more in control around food and less emotive about food choices
Helps challenges unhelpful rules / beliefs around when you “should” or “shouldn’t” eat, allowing you to start to tune in to internal, physical sensations rather than being guided by external cues
Better balanced blood sugar levels and Improve cognition, energy levels and reduce dizzy spells
Allows you to learn to re-trust your body and its ability to feel both hungry and full
How to Start Regular Eating
1. Make Regular Eating a Priority (!)
aim to be eating around every 3 hours. In the short term, it may need to take precedent over other activities.
2. Create a Plan
planning can help stop you from getting caught out and can also prevent an opportunity for negative food thoughts to present themselves. Create a Regular Eating plan and factor in certain obstacles that you know you will have to overcome for example, knowing you have a breakfast meeting or a brunch - how do you stick to regular eating around these events?
3. No foods are “off limits”
this can be a really scary process to start with, however it is important to remember that every time you say “no” to something you want, it is still a form of restriction and therefore will intensify your desire for the “forbidden” food. Reducing the intensity of food thoughts will help you feel more in control of your eating pattern.
4. Create a self-care box
this might include things like a favourite nail varnish, a nice hand cream, a picture that makes you happy, a post-it with your favourite song written on. This is there to soothe you in moments when food thoughts / emotions around food thoughts are too loud. Let’s do something kind for ourselves in this moment.
5. Don’t give up
this may seem like a really scary process, but it’s important to feel the fear and stick with it. Just like learning anything new, it will get easier with time and practice.
It is really important to remember that:
Leaving more than 5 hours between eating (during the day), your body will start to go into “Starvation Mode”, as it is unable to trust when the next meal will come. The body’s metabolic rate will be lowered in order to preserve energy, turning it into a calorie storing machine. Meaning, when you eat after a period of restriction, the food will be metabolised for the purpose of storage – exactly what you are trying to avoid.