Cutting Out a Food Group Entirely

You announce it on a Monday, probably: “I’m cutting out carbs.” Or sugar, or dairy, or gluten, or whatever the current villain is. The first few days feel powerful. You are in control. You are doing something. And then, ten days in, you find yourself standing in the kitchen at midnight eating toast with an urgency that feels like madness.

Cutting out an entire food group is one of the most popular diet strategies, and one of the most likely to set up the pattern it was supposed to fix.

A fictional example

The following is an illustrative example, not a real person’s story.

James decides to cut out all sugar. He reads the labels. He avoids fruit, because it contains fructose. He stops eating anything processed. For two weeks he feels virtuous and slightly irritable. Then his daughter has a birthday party, and he eats three slices of cake in the kitchen while clearing up. The next morning, he feels disgusted with himself and resolves to be even stricter.

• What he thinks: “Sugar is poison. If I can just eliminate it, everything will be fine.”
• What he feels: control during the restriction, panic during the lapse, shame after.
• What he does: cycles between total elimination and uncontrolled eating of the eliminated food.

James has not failed at willpower. He has created a psychological set-up where the restriction makes the binge inevitable.

What the research shows

• Deprivation increases cravings. In a study of restrained and unrestrained eaters, depriving participants of a specific food for a period increased their cravings for that food and how much of it they ate when it became available [1]. The forbidden food became more desirable, not less.
• Rigid control drives cravings; flexible control does not. Research found that rigid dietary control predicted stronger food cravings, while flexible control did not [2]. Cutting out a food entirely is the most rigid form of control available. It maximizes the craving it was meant to eliminate.
• Restraint is not one thing. An influential line of research distinguishes between rigid restraint, which is associated with disinhibition and overeating, and flexible restraint, which is associated with lower weight and better outcomes [3]. Elimination diets sit firmly on the rigid side.
• Sugar addiction is debated. The idea that sugar is addictive is widely popular but scientifically contested. A review of the evidence concluded that animal studies showing sugar “addiction” depended on cycles of deprivation and access, not on a pharmacological property of sugar [4]. In other words, the addictive-seeming behavior may be a product of restriction, not of the substance.

Questions to sit with

• What medical reason, if any, do I have for cutting out this food group?
• Did the elimination make me think about the food more, or less?
• What happened the last time the ban broke?
• Would I be willing to eat a moderate amount of the “banned” food, or does the idea feel impossible?

A small optional practice: the reintroduction meal

If you have cut out a food group without a medical reason, try this:

1. Choose one food from the eliminated group. Something you actually like.
2. Put a normal portion on a plate. At a table. At a normal meal time.
3. Eat it without the story. Not “I’m cheating.” Not “just this once.” Just eating a food that was always available.
4. Eat your next meal normally. The reintroduction is not an event. It is a return to ordinary eating.

A worked example

James reintroduces bread. He makes a sandwich for lunch on Saturday. It feels transgressive, which tells him something about how rigid the rule had become. He eats the sandwich. Nothing terrible happens. His body does not collapse. He has a normal dinner.

Over the following weeks, he stops dividing food into allowed and forbidden. He still eats less sugar than before his elimination attempt, but the reduction is a preference, not a rule. There is no cake-at-midnight scene, because there is no ban to break.

When elimination becomes disordered. If cutting out food groups is accompanied by intense anxiety about contamination, rigid rules that keep expanding, social isolation to avoid “unsafe” foods, or significant weight loss, these may be signs of an eating disorder such as avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder or orthorexia [5]. In the UK, Beat’s helpline for England is 0808 801 0677 [6]. In the US, call or text 988 if you are in crisis. This article is general education, not treatment.

If the elimination is part of a broader pattern of rigid food rules, see the difference between a preference and a rigid food rule. If the ban-breaking episode triggers the “I’ve already ruined it” thought, see examining that thought.