How is Scarcity Affecting My Relationship with Food?
Written by Isabel Vasquez RD, LDN
You’re at a party with so much delicious food—tostones, chicharon, arroz blanco—but your latest diet doesn’t allow you to eat those foods.
Your tracking app says you’ve almost reached your limit for the day and eating the food you really want to eat would mean exceeding what the diet tells you is appropriate.
This self-inflicted food scarcity is a telltale sign of the diet mentality. It’s a part of what diet culture teaches us—eat less, lose weight, and you’ll be happier. Yet, that’s not usually what ends up happening.
Read on to learn about how scarcity (via a diet or food insecurity) can impact your relationship with food and how to shift towards an abundance mentality.
Food Scarcity and Dieting
A scarcity mentality is a natural result of diets, which are essentially forms of voluntary restriction.
Even though someone has the resources to eat enough, they elect to diet and therefore, limit themselves to a finite amount of macros/calories/types of foods.
When this happens, you typically feel heightened anxiety, specifically around food. The scarcity sparks a survival mode in your body, which can lead to:
Low mood
Irritability
Rigid food behaviors
Your body reacts the same as if there were a famine because it can’t tell the difference between a famine and a voluntary restriction.
Related: What is the Binge Restrict Cycle?
Food Scarcity and Food Insecurity
Food insecurity is an involuntary form of food scarcity, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t also affect your relationship with food. Even if you’re food secure now, if you have a history of food insecurity it may still impact your relationship with food.
According to the USDA, food insecurity affected 12.8% of United States households in 2022, a significant increase from the year prior. Importantly, food insecurity has been linked to increased risk of disordered eating and eating disorders.
A 2017 study in the International Journal of Eating Disorders found that participants with a higher level of food insecurity also had higher levels of eating disorder symptoms—binge eating, dietary restraint, weight self-stigma, and more. Notably, 17% of participants in the child hunger food insecurity group reported clinically significant ED pathology.
Many other studies have found a significant link between food insecurity and binge eating. This makes sense. When you don’t have access to food, it’s normal for your body to compensate by eating all it can when there is food available.
In fact, this effect was demonstrated in the Minnesota Starvation Study. After participants were put on restrictive diets for six months, some still reported binge eating eight months after the end of the diet.
This also disproves the myth of eating disorders being a thin, white, cis-gender, middle-class female issue. We know that Black and Latine folks are more likely to face poverty and food insecurity, yet they’re often neglected in the eating disorder world.
In addition to fraught relationships to food, experiencing food scarcity has been shown to negatively impact people’s relationships with their bodies.
For example, a 2019 study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics found that California teens facing food insecurity were more likely to be dissatisfied with their bodies than teens who were food secure.
Shifting From a Scarcity Mentality to an Abundance Mentality
The solutions to these two different forms of food scarcity are obviously very different.
If you have a scarcity mindset as a result of dieting or diet culture, working towards an abundance mindset is key. This can be fostered through intuitive eating—a non-diet approach to nutrition.
This process might mean reflecting on the resources (including food access) you have and allowing yourself to utilize and enjoy them.
It means working through any food rules you have set for yourself and giving yourself true unconditional permission to eat. Learn more in our blog post on food habituation.
For those facing food insecurity, the root issue is a systemic one. This leads us to the importance of food justice, which is central to improving not only people’s relationships with food but their overall health and well-being.
Patrilie Hernandez, founder of Embody Lib, created a graphic that wonderfully illustrates this point. In it, Hernandez demonstrates that in order to practice intuitive eating, one must first have consistent access to an adequate supply of food, including foods that are culturally relevant and ones that you enjoy eating.
For those struggling with food insecurity, some resources for attaining food include:
Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)
Local food pantries and food banks
Final Thoughts
It’s clear that food scarcity plays a huge role in people’s relationships with food. We all deserve to have access to a variety of food, and enough food.
We see that the consequences of food scarcity can present whether someone actually has access to food or not, but the solutions depend greatly on whether the restriction is voluntary or due to food insecurity.
Ultimately, we need to work towards creating a more just food system, reducing weight stigma and shining light on pseudo-science promoting unnecessary and ill-advised food restriction.
For education on how to ADD nutrition to your favorite Latine cultural dishes, make peace with food, and focus on your health without dieting, join our nutrition library for just $27/month.
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