Seeking Health

Eat when you're hungry. Stop when you're full. Don't see food as "good" or "bad." Eat what you want, when you want.

It kind of sounds like the best "diet" out there, right? This is the philosophy of Intuitive eating, which is based on the belief that you should eat based on hunger signals and listening to your body. Followers of intuitive eating state that we are all born with an inner wisdom that will tell us what to eat and when to eat, so that you’ll eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full.

People like intuitive eating because they’re been told what they want to hear. And it is a very liberating philosophy if you’ve been stuck on the dieting merry-go-round for years and restricting your food intake.

But, does it work?

At first glance, intuitive eating makes sense. When we look at the rest of the animal kingdom, we see intuitive eating working perfectly. Even when animals inhabit areas where their natural food is in abundance, none are overweight. There are no zebras calculating the percentage of fat they are about to ingest; no lions ensuring that they're "in the zone" before sinking their teeth into a Thompson's gazelle; no cheetahs too fat to climb to the top branch of their abode without the use of an elevator.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it works as well for people. It’s never worked well for me or for my clients, and there’s no record of it working for anyone else in the scientific literature. So why does it seem to work well for other species but not for us?

The answer is that they’re all eating their species specific diet and we’re not. We evolved in a food environment that looked like this

and now we find ourselves in a food environment that looks like this.

All animals, including us, follow three motivating forces in life, called the motivational triad: we all attempt to increase our pleasure; we all attempt to decrease our pain; we all try to do this by using the least amount of energy. Animals following the motivational triad in natural surroundings will never go wrong, because in nature there are no short cuts. The problem is the modern world, where man has created a multitude of short cuts that lead directly to pleasure (and addiction), as well a whole new slew of problems that don't exist in nature - like obesity.

Just think about the type of foods you (and everyone else) typically craves. It’s not usually fruit and vegetables. Typically we crave foods that are high in sugar, fat and salt. These are nutrient-deficient, unhealthy foods that lead to a form of addiction. There is no nutritional reason for craving them. They don’t indicate some underlying nutritional need. We’re addicted to them because they increase our pleasure, distract us from our pain and all for very little effort.

The problem is modern processed food, artificially high in fat, artificially low in fibre, artificially sweetened and artificially processed like nowhere in nature. These foods quickly boost dopamine levels in the brain, allowing us to experience pleasure all the time, getting us hooked nearly as strong as an addiction to drugs. High fat foods are more appealing to animals (they cause more pleasure) because of their high-caloric density. Remember that animals will expend the least amount of energy while increasing their pleasure; finding more calories in one food is better than having to locate multiple sources to get the same total number of calories. However, natural high-fat foods are nowhere near as fatty as magic foods and they don't come close to modifying the brain chemistry in the same manner. Hence, animals in the wild don't have the problems that we have. But if you took that chimp out of the wild, and locked him inside your local McDonald's (such cruelty has got to be illegal), giving him the same access to all of their unnatural food, he would soon balloon to 110kg and look just like the customers waiting in line!

Our instinctual satiety mechanisms don't work with the magic foods of modern society. These mechanisms evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in the midst of natural surroundings, where there wasn't flour, refined sugar, Cola, hormone-administered beef, ice cream, cheese and the million other processed foods that line the shelves of our supermarkets and restaurants. When we eat these foods we can no longer rely on these mechanisms to tell us when we've had enough. But if we stop eating unnatural foods, it becomes impossible to over-eat and eventually maintain the weight intended by nature.

This is the way of eating that is taught in my Eat More to Weigh Less program. And it does have some commonalities with intuitive eating. Both Eat More to Weigh Less and intuitive eating reject the diet mentality by teaching you to honour your hunger and respect your fullness and to honour your feelings without using food.

The big difference is that while intuitive eating encourages you to eat whatever you feel like, Eat More to Weigh Less teaches you which foods are part of your species specific diet and which foods need to be eliminated from your diet. This allows you to eat as much as you want without falling into the pleasure trap of highly addictive foods.

For a free Eat More to Weigh Less Strategy Session with me, phone 357 4335 or email cath@ckinghealth.co.nz