What Happens When You Forbid Yourself Your Favorite Food — A Classic Experiment

You think that if “you are just strong enough” and you forbid yourself chocolate, bread, pasta, ice cream (or whatever your personal “poison” is), then you’ll finally lose the weight you’ve been trying to get rid of for a long time.

But it turns out that denying yourself these foods often leads to exactly the opposite outcome: at some point, you end up eating even more of them.

A well-designed psychological experiment shows exactly how and why this happens — and whom it happens to the most.

Three researchers at the University of Toronto1 set out to understand a simple but important question:

Does temporarily forbidding a certain type of food increase craving and overeating? And does this work differently in chronic dieters?

How the Experiment Worked

The study involved 103 participants. First, the researchers asked them to fill a questionnaire to find out about their eating habits and history:

1. Restrained eaters were the chronic dieters, people who frequenty restrict themselves when it comes to food (sounds familiar?)

2. Unrestrained eaters were the people who normally eat without any strict rules.

Then, participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups:

• Chocolate-deprived group: chocolate in any form was forbidden for 7 days

• Vanilla-deprived group: no vanilla-flavored foods for 7 days

• Control group: no restrictions at all

After the week of restriction, everyone came to the lab for a so-called “taste-rating” session involving cake, cookies, and ice cream (in both chocolate and vanilla flavors). Participants were told that the study was about taste perception, but in reality, the researchers were looking at something very different.

Before they were allowed to eat, they had to work on a long anagram task (a word puzzle where scrambled letters have to be turned into real words). They could stop the task at any time to receive the food. Meanwhile, the researchers secretly measured:

• how long they performed the task before asking for the food

• how much they actually ate

• and how much craving they reported

This gave both behavioral and self-reported measures of craving, which is considered a strong and reliable approach in psychological research.

The Results

Only the chronic dieters who had been deprived of chocolate rushed to the food and ate far more sweets than everyone else.

Unrestrained eaters did not overeat — even if they had been deprived of chocolate for a week.

Vanilla deprivation had no meaningful effect in either group.

This clearly shows that deprivation does not cause overeating in everyone. It only affects people who already have a long history of repeated dieting.

You Want What You Can’t Have

The authors concluded that most restrained eaters are not truly starving in a biological sense. Instead, they experience psychological deprivation:

• “This food is forbidden.”

• “I shouldn’t want it.”

Over time, this constant mental inhibition increases the mental value of the food, weakens self-control through exhaustion, and makes rebound eating more likely when the rule breaks.

What This Means For You

The more you try to suppress your desire for certain foods, the more power those foods can gain over you.

This means that the cycle of denying yourself your favourite treat and ending up eating more of it later on is not a failure of character. It is a predictable psychological rebound effect of restriction, especially for foods that are highly liked.

It also means that when food is no longer forbidden, it also becomes less powerful.

Do This Instead

You can finally relax: sustainable eating is not built on tighter food rules.

It is built on rebuilding trust with your own body and desires, so you become better at recognizing your true hunger cues. This doesn’t happen overnight, but it is possible to relearn this long-lost skill.

If you would like support with reconnecting to your body, Nyami is a mobile app that is being built for exactly this purpose. You can sign up for the waitlist to get notified once the app is ready to use.

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