Disturbances in eating behavior are central to eating disorders. Irregular eating can take many forms, including:
- Delayed eating
- Infrequent eating, such as skipping meals or snacks
- Insufficient eating, such as under-portioning or avoiding types of food altogether
- Secretive eating, or
- Eating with the experience of a sense of loss of control.
One of the most important treatment goals for recovery from an eating disorder is the establishment and maintenance of regular eating. This is a cornerstone of cognitive behavioral therapy for eating disorders and nutritional counseling. It’s also built into programming in higher level of care settings like residential treatment or intensive outpatient programs.
Eating patterns are influenced by many different factors, including age, sex, cultural background, and food availability. And yet, it is crucial for everyone working towards recovery to ensure they are getting the appropriate variety, volume, and frequency of food intake.
Why is regular eating so important?
Regular eating can break the cycle of an eating disorder. Unhelpful behaviors that are caused by and contribute to the eating disorder, like restriction, rigidity, and binge eating, need to be disrupted and replaced by recovery-oriented patterns.
Setting a regular eating schedule helps normalize eating as a necessary (and even enjoyable!) part of daily living. Equally if not more important, it reduces the risk of disordered behaviors. Regular eating can also help challenge dietary rules that arose during the eating disorder, such as rules about limiting how many meals you can eat in a day or not eating during certain times of the day.
Eating at regular intervals has numerous physiological benefits, for example:
- helping maintain blood sugar levels,
- combating exhaustion, irritability, and difficulty concentrating, and
- improving metabolic and gastrointestinal functioning.
What is regular eating?
For some people, it helps to think back to what eating looked like early in childhood. Breakfast before school. Sometimes classroom time designated for snack. A break in the school day for lunch. An after-school snack at home or a quick snack before a sports practice. Dinner at the day’s end. And dessert in the evening. This is just one template for what we mean by regular eating. It can be adjusted for different work schedules or other commitments.
The consistent principle of eating for eating disorder recovery is to eat 3 meals and 2-3 snacks per day. The first meal is advised to take place within an hour of waking and subsequent eating occurring every 3-4 hours. This may look like breakfast, a mid-morning snack, lunch, a mid-afternoon snack, dinner, and an evening snack if dinner is more than three hours before going to sleep.
Ways to Implement Regular Eating
Putting regular eating into practice relies heavily on planning:
- Identify the times of day that work for you to eat your 3 meals and 2-3 snacks, accounting for both weekdays and weekends.
- Plan what you are going to eat and where this food will come from. This can be a detailed plan or a rough plan, so long as you ensure you will be fueled sufficiently and you will know when/what your next meal will be.
- Consider “meal prep” for the week. For some people, preparing meals at the beginning of each week removes some stress from mealtimes. For others who may be prone to inflexible eating with lots of meal repetition, it can be frankly unhelpful.
- Anticipate disruptions to your eating schedule and prepare backup options. For example: if you’re at work and an urgent meeting comes up during a planned snack time, or if you’re at school and an assembly is planned when you were planning to eat during a class. In situations like this, carrying a snack with you (i.e., nuts, dried fruit, granola/protein bars) comes in handy. It’s also important to re-assess your plan for the rest of the day to ensure you still get adequate intake if you had to delay a meal.
If you mess up, try again!
Other Tips
When it comes to regular eating, many people tend to get into a harmful all-or-nothing mindset. If your meal plan is disrupted, remember you have other opportunities to fuel yourself properly. Additionally, if you experience a lapse — skipping a meal or purging after a meal/snack — account for this in your meal plan going forward.
When eating is at a healthy cadence and sufficient, it becomes part of the plan to avoid eating outside of planned meals and snacks. If you feel excessive hunger between these times, you may not be eating enough through your meal plan. Similarly, if you are experiencing ongoing symptoms of starvation, are binge-eating, or have been losing weight, then you are likely not eating enough and will need to adjust your intake.
When working towards recovery from an eating disorder and establishing regular eating, it’s important to know that you do not have to do it on your own. Therapy can provide you with a safe space to problem-solve, identify and remember your motivations, and learn coping skills to use in difficult moments.
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