Do you often have thoughts like, “I shouldn’t be eating this,“ or “I ate too much today, I need to eat less tomorrow.”? If so, you most likely have mentally restricted before. Mental restriction is exactly what it sounds like - putting limitations or shame around food you are eating in hopes to eat less.
In order to protect our mental health and keep our perspectives healthy, we need to evaluate the messages we receive from the world around us. We need a moment to ask ourselves - Is this message true? Is it helpful? Is it adaptive? In addition, sometimes we need to work backwards with this process, because there may be messages we’ve already absorbed without awareness.
