To define our terms here, intuitive eating is meant as the practice of eating ‘good food’ when hungry and stopping when full. This is the ideal, and for some people it works exceptionally well, though there are some significant issues which may arise.
In fact, most people who espouse intuitive eating as an answer aren’t actually intuitive eating as we have just described. Successful intuitive eaters are almost invariably (there are, of course, outliers) those who have a great understanding of the nutrient contents of foods, as well as that person’s requirements, and although they may not analyse or track those foods in the manner we will discuss in the next module, they are a long way from simply eating healthily when hungry, and stopping when full.
The reason for that is that intuitive eating is not something we have ever evolved to do.
Evolution is responsible not only for the way we look and the size of our brains, it’s responsible for the inner workings of those brains and the drivers to behaviour which we all experience. There is an evolutionary reason that most of us are at least a little afraid of large spiders – our ancestors who weren’t all died. There’s an evolutionary reason that on some level your children are more important than a stranger’s children whom you’ve never met – your children represent an investment in time and resources designed to propagate your genes and the children of others, while having an intrinsic value due to their humanity, do not hold the same level of importance.
While of course your upbringing, environment and experiences mould your psyche to a large degree, the fundamental behaviours which we all possess are preserved from millions of years of evolution, since long before there were trees on the earth, and their age should tell you of their historical importance as well as giving you a clue to just how powerful these drivers are. While you can learn not to be afraid of snakes, you will automatically move out of the way if one tries to strike at you.
This is critical information because these evolved behaviours govern a huge amount of our interactions with food, but something somewhat obvious needs to be said here – the environment we currently live in could scarcely be further removed from the one in which we, and therefore our behaviours around food, evolved.
You may remember from module 1 that we mentioned an evolved propensity for us to gain weight, and you may recall that we stated our physiological ‘fight back’ against weight gain was far weaker than our fight against weight loss. The same is true from a psychological perspective, too. Put in a very basic way, your brain rewards you with a large burst of the neurotransmitter dopamine (the happy chemical) every time you eat something calorie dense, meaning something rich in protein, fat or carbohydrate.
The reason for this is quite simple. Dopamine is released in your brain to reinforce behaviour, so everything that you do which has a good chance of increasing your ability to reproduce it, is encouraged on some level. To reproduce you have to survive, and in order to survive we have historically needed to eat as much as we can, when we can, because we didn’t know when the next bit of food was going to come around; in fact, it’s very likely that for the majority of your ancestry the norm was famine rather than plenty. We didn’t evolve to just eat anything and everything, though. There were a few things which we really needed to focus on:
A combination of the above makes for something really enticing too, leaving us with what is referred to as a hyper-palatable food. A combination of fat, sugar and salt provides an irresistible and incredibly enjoyable eating experience that is genuinely hard to say no to or to stop eating when you really should. People will say that fats are easy to overeat or that sugar is, but nobody is drinking oil (fat only) or eating sugar from a bag. Add those two together and you get the basis of the confectionary industry and when you throw salt and protein into the mix you get cheeseburgers with ketchup, pizza and all the other wonderful junk food we love, the availability of which has had a huge effect on the obesity epidemic.
What you will notice here is that micronutrient density doesn’t affect the reward centres in the brain all that much. This is probably because historically (meaning not only before our ancestors separated from the other apes, but long before that) an animal which consumed sufficient calories and protein to live will have, by default, consumed enough fibre and micronutrients to survive – even thrive. It’s almost impossible to eat a steady diet of wild fruits, tubers, grasses, honey, game and eggs while living largely outside yet still find yourself deficient in anything. So where does that leave us?
Humans have an evolved tendency to prefer highly caloric and salty foods, while finding low calorie, highly fibrous foods rich in micronutrients somewhat bland. Even when we do eat and enjoy vegetables we eat carrots with fatty dips, we add cheese and dressings to salads and we wrap asparagus in ham. Plain, steamed broccoli just doesn’t have the same appeal as a pulled pork sandwich, and you can thank evolution for that because it’s not self-evident that this has to be the case. After all, wouldn’t life be so much easier if your taste buds told you broccoli tasted like a chocolate cake, but chocolate cake tasted like broccoli?
Unfortunately, that’s not the case and the same wiring which would have encouraged you to eat as much as you can when food was available so you don’t die in the next 10 days, is the same wiring which tells you that yes, you do have room for dessert, long after you have consumed your actual energy requirements. Not only that, but food processing has allowed us to pack more energy into every bite and so we are now able to get far more energy into our stomach before physical fullness stops us eating.
Next, we need to consider marketing and the ‘health halo’. People will routinely estimate foods considered healthy or good for fat loss to have fewer calories than they contain and the opposite is true of foods which are branded unhealthy or good for weight gain. This means that those eating mindfully will subconsciously overeat on certain healthy foods – many are shocked to hear that a medium avocado can have over 250 calories and that 3 eggs and a small amount of smoked salmon on a wholegrain bagel can rack up over 800 calories, for example.
Additionally, foods are very rarely sold in a single serving format and people will routinely underestimate the amount of portions which are contained within a packet, meaning that each person (or the same person at different sittings) is consuming way more food than they had originally planned. When people are asked to serve themselves what they consider to be ‘a serving’, they will generally serve up a far larger amount of food than they require (this is often more pronounced for foods where there is a larger amount of total servings available). You’ll likely eat more lasagne if there are 12 portions in the tray than if there are 4, and of course those who are served larger portions will eat more (even if they don’t clear their plate) but after eating will report the same level of fullness. This means that the idea of “I’ll only eat what I need” is incorrect even if you do leave food on your plate. Your ability to stop eating when full is nowhere near good enough to be a reliable measure of when you should stop eating.
As a final nail in the coffin for intuitive eating, we need to consider the differences between the brain of lean people and the obese. It’s shown in neuroimaging studies that the areas of the brain associated with anticipation of reward (consider these to be cravings) are activated to a higher degree in those who are obese, meaning that obese people genuinely do have more intense cravings than those of us who are generally considered to have ‘better willpower’. This isn’t really a fair analysis because we aren’t facing the same drivers, and it’s even worse – those same individuals have fewer dopamine receptors in the reward centre of the brain which means that they need more hyper-palatable food to satisfy their craving than the rest of us. If you are or have been overweight or obese, your appetite regulatory system is not going to be as powerful as someone who has never been. Therefore, to expect yourself or someone you know in this situation to be able to simply stop at 1 cookie, is somewhat misguided.
To summarise:
So much for intuitive eating…
What we typically find is that those who can eat intuitively are those who have tracked their food intake for a long time, and/or are those who eat roughly similar foods day-to-day. So, long as they know more or less what’s in what they are eating and what it is they need to eat, and providing they keep their portion sizes of easily estimable foods (it’s easier to guess the calorie content of a chicken breast with some cheese and a potato than it is to guess a bowl of chilli because you can see everything individually), they can manage. Someone who has tracked and measured food for a long time will eat a small, 30g serving of cereal – most people will not.Now of course there are those for whom this does not apply. Some people don’t overeat and do have a very ‘in tune’ hunger/fullness sensitivity. Yet others have the wasteful metabolism we spoke about in module 1 which makes one heat up and move around a lot after overeating, but this is not the majority.
To manage your food intake, unless you are incredibly lucky, you need two things:
Being able to do these two things is what allows some people to seemingly eat whatever they want and not gain weight and it’s what will allow you, in time, to never struggle to maintain your weight again (though your application may change over time, as we will discuss later).
There are two ways to accomplish the latter which will be covered in the next module for the most part, but as for the former, we shall turn to that now. Just how exactly are you supposed to know what is in the foods you have in your hand, so you can make an educated decision around how much of it is a good idea to eat?