What is “Last Supper” Eating? (and how to stop doing it)
Does this sound familiar: you feel dissatisfied with your body and decide to start a new diet (probably on a Monday). It’s going to be a clean slate! You’ll be perfect! You’ll stay on the wagon this time!
You research and decide on a cookie cutter meal and workout plan, and head to the grocery store to stock up on all the low-calorie, low-carb foods. But while you’re there you think to yourself: if you’re going to be giving up all these things you usually crave—cookies, chocolate, ice cream, French fries—you might as well have one last meal… with them all! You grab all the foods you won’t be allowing yourself to eat—ever again!—on your new diet.
The idea behind this is that you’ll get the craving “out of the way” and then you won’t have to think about those foods. You spend the night, or sometimes whole day, before you begin your restrictive diet plan eating anything and everything you want. You might even find that you keep eating even when you’re too full because you don’t want to “keep junk in the house” when you start your diet. Often you might feel overfull and use this a motivation to get the diet going the next morning.
This is called the Last Supper eating.
More concretely, we often refer to it also as the binge-restrict cycle: You being a diet (cutting out foods you like) but you can’t stop thinking about those foods you “can’t” have. So, your obsession with those foods builds until you binge eat them all, feel bad, and then go back to dieting to try and “fix” the problem.
In this scenario you are participating in black-and-white thinking, foods are either “good” or “bad” and depending on which kind you eat you are either “good” or “bad.”
The solution?
Eat the foods you like! This might sound scary if you’re an emotional eater because you don’t think you can trust yourself around food and believe that you’ll eat nothing but ice cream all the time. But if the cycle can turn one way—you can get bored of broccoli and chicken—the same will be true for all those foods you feel out of control around. You might eat more of the foods you used to think of as “bad” to begin with, but it will even out. So, start by giving yourself permission to eat any foods!
Plus eating the foods you actually enjoy means you’ll be able to free up a lot of mental space from thoughts that are preoccupied with food you want but are telling yourself why you can’t have them.
Taking a more flexible approach (instead of rigid diet rules) to your eating can be a big way to not only change how you feel around food, but how you support your mental health. Eating the foods you want, more of the time, will lead to fewer binges which means you’ll receive fewer negative messages from your inner critic and that means your mood can stay more positive… which means less reaching for food when you feel inadequate, guilty, or shameful.
Now that’s a cycle to get into!
💛 Your peace awaits.
