No pain, no gain! Helpful or hurtful?

Photo by Mitchell Hollander on Unsplash

During a client consultation the other day, I spoke to a middle-aged mother who is an APRN with a distant history of bulimia and a “diet resume” a mile long.  

She expressed frustration about how women are conditioned to think and to eat—about how hard it is to divorce feelings of hunger from feelings of moral goodness or accomplishment.  “I’m in my forties now,” she says, “and I’m tired of feeling hungry all the time.  It’s like, how long do we have to wait until we get to say, ‘I’m hungry, damnit, so I’m going to eat!’”

Eating when you are hungry and feeling okay about it.  How obvious is that?  And yet, at the same time, how radical!

Even for my clients who have very healthy relationships with food and their bodies—and admittedly, even for myself sometimes—it can be difficult to perform this tender uncoupling of hunger and achievement.  

Of course, diet culture and our societal obsession with thinness play a major role.  Stuart Koman, in his foreword to James Greenblatt’s Integrative Medicine for Binge Eating, puts it this way: “For many people, the ideal and quest for thinness and body perfection trump any other personal goal or life direction.”  Ugh.

But our cultural values aren’t the only ones at play.  Lately, I’ve been thinking about how the “no pain, no gain” fitness paradigm translates into our beliefs about nutrition and what it means to eat healthy.

This comes as a personal curiosity.  I’m proud to say that the pursuit of thinness is not a preoccupation of mine anymore, and it hasn’t been for several years.  I’ve been climbing trees and have had other things to worry about, like not falling out of one.  

In fact, I’m eating to gain strength and muscle right now.  And still, still, my default response to hunger is gratification.  It’s the temptation to push at the edges a bit, to wait just wait a little while longer.  For what?

But if I resist judging myself for it and, instead, get curious about it, I begin to wonder: in what other areas of our lives do we not push the edges a bit?  What do we do when we get tired in a workout?  We push just a little further.  When we’re working on an important project at work?  When we extend ourselves for a friend?  

Some degree of pain—physical or mental—serves a role in our lives.  It strengthens the body by forcing it to adapt.  It allows us to accomplish important things.  It makes the difference in the health of our relationships.  We establish credibility with ourselves and gain confidence.

So perhaps it’s no wonder why it’s so tempting to apply the “no pain, no gain” paradigm to nutrition as well.  In other areas of life, pain can be an indicator that you’re growing.

It’s just that, when it comes to feeding our bodies, the glorification of pain—and I mean the glorification of deliberate, prolonged hunger—is misplaced.  Here, pain is not an indicator of growth, but a signal of shrinkage, starvation.  

We seem to have this notion that a good diet is a hard one.  That if we just push ourselves hard enough, we’ll win some kind of prize.  Reality check: the only prize you’re winning for “pushing the edges” around food is a date with disordered eating.

The “no pain, no gain” paradigm may have merit elsewhere, but it has no place in good nutrition.  Is hunger a natural part of normal and healthy eating?  Yes.  Can you expect to experience some regular low-level hunger if you are trying to lose weight?  Also yes.

But is the pain of hunger like the pain of a workout, where you get rewarded for gritting it out to the bitter end?  No.  It’s the wrong application of an otherwise useful behavior. 

My advice?  Love your hunger for what it is: your body communicating with you.  But please don’t exalt it.  And then go eat.