Tags
[Content warning: weight and calorie numbers.]
I have a lot of sympathy for intuitive eating, a strategy in which you respond to your inner body cues about food. For instance, you eat when you’re hungry, and you stop when you’re full; if you feel a craving for avocados or cheese or celery or bread, you eat the thing you’re craving; at each meal, you ask yourself “hmm, what sounds good?” and then eat that.
A point in favor of intuitive eating is that people are naturally absurdly good at regulating their own eating. Now, I know that some people are going to the comments to go “obesity epidemic! Obesity epidemic!”, but think about the facts. A weight gain of 11 pounds over six months– a remarkably quick rate of weight gain– only requires a one percent mismatch between your energy expenditure and your consumption of food. (This fact I got from Nutrition: A Very Short Introduction.) Most people– even overweight or obese people– have a stable weight, naturally eating about as much as they burn; even people who gain weight typically gain it relatively slowly, as the product of a tiny difference between their energy expenditure and food consumption. This is a truly remarkably effective system.
On the other hand, intuitive eating is expecting a lot of your body’s signals.
I can imagine about four ways that food self-regulation can work.
First, there’s the way that water works for me. Most of the time, water is vaguely unappetizing. When I’m thirsty, water is suddenly the MOST DELICIOUS SUBSTANCE IN THE UNIVERSE, until I’ve had a glass or two, at which point it mysteriously transforms back into being vaguely unappetizing. If I drink water when it is vaguely unappetizing (which I’ve done under the instruction of gym teachers), it sloshes around in my stomach and I feel uncomfortable. My body is capable of correctly indicating when I’m deficient in an important nutrient (water) and creating a plan to no longer be deficient.
Second, there’s the way that pica works. When people feel a craving to chew ice, it’s often a sign of deficiency in certain minerals, particularly iron, even though ice doesn’t contain any iron. A desire to chew ice is a fairly reliable indicator of a mineral deficiency, but chewing ice will not give you any minerals. In this case, my body is capable of correctly indicating when I’m deficient in an important nutrient, but it does not create a viable plan to no longer be deficient.
Third, there’s the way that B vitamin deficiency worked for me. When I first became vegan, I didn’t take a B vitamin supplement. I felt fine, but I mysteriously acquired this sore near the side of my mouth that wouldn’t go away. I shrugged it off until a horrified friend said, “you have a serious B vitamin deficiency! Get a B-complex NOW!” In this situation, my body did not indicate that I was deficient for months after I was seriously deficient.
(Although now that I think about it I did have bizarre near-sexual cravings for cheese, so maybe my body was indicating it and I didn’t listen.)
Fourth, there’s the way that sweet things work for me. While my body does eventually tell me it no longer wants to eat sweet things, it tells me that well after a nutritionist would have said “maybe you should eat fewer Tootsie Rolls.” In this situation, my body drives me to eat a particular nutrient (sugar) even though I am not remotely deficient in it and in fact I am probably consuming an excessive amount. Presumably, this is because Tootsie Rolls did not exist in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness and thus there was no need to fear excessive sugar consumption.
So I think the question about whether intuitive eating is a good idea probably depends on which of the four kinds of food self-regulation is the most common (either for people in general or for a specific person). If most things work like water, then intuitive eating works great. If most things work like pica, then intuitive eating is still a good idea, but requires a little more thought and care. If most things work like B vitamins or sweet things, then intuitive eating is probably a bad idea.
Tapio Peltonen said:
This is a lot like the kind of dietary attitude I wholeheartedly support. A few years ago I came up with a heuristic I’m still proud of:
Imagine a perfect free buffet, where there’s absolutely everything you could ever dream of, and you’re free to eat whatever you want and as much as you want. Also imagine this is not a single occasion, but that you’re guaranteed the same opportunity every day for the rest of your life. What would you have?
This has actually helped me a few times: Use the thought experiment to decide what I want and then just adjust it to the closest actually available option.
The problem with this heuristic is that applying it requires effort, just as the decision would require effort if the buffet was real and not just a thought experiment.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hoffnung said:
Instant 4000 kcal plus binge. Do not want.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Dr. Addison said:
Maybe the first day. Maybe the second day. Maybe even a third day? Not by the time a week was up.
I went to college and was confronted with 1) all the Captain Crunch and Fruity Pebbles I could eat, any morning of the week I wanted them, and 2) top-your-own Belgian waffles every Sunday. I ate myself into several cases of bad mouth-burn on the Captain Crunch, and sugar crashes on the Fruity Pebbles, in that first week. By the third week I might have a small bowl, once a week. It would be there tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, no need to have it all now. Same with the waffles – week 1, ice cream and sprinkles and whipped cream and jam! Week 2, more of the same! week 3, wait, what am I doing, I don’t really want this?? Week 4 – maybe I’ll split one with my roommate and do butter and cinnamon sugar, for a change? Week 5+ – meh, they’ll be there next week.
This happens to a lot of people on cruises/resort vacations too.
It also happens when nutritionists work on intuitive eating with clients who have a history of restricting certain foods, dieting, bingeing, having food insecurity in the past, and/or have strong “moral” judgments about which foods are good/bad. There might be a brief period of bingeing but it tends to taper off pretty quickly as they work through the cognitive and emotional stuff.
LikeLiked by 1 person
tcheasdfjkl said:
I think this really varies by person. I think for various reasons I find it really difficult to really believe that yes, I will always have the option to eat this type of yummy thing, this is not a scarce opportunity that I have to seize (not sure how much of this is how I naturally am and how much of it is Parents Issues & in particular the fact that this framing was pretty accurate when I lived with my parents). Possibly I could in principle change how I feel about this but it hasn’t worked so far and I’m not sure how to do that.
LikeLike
shemtealeaf said:
@Dr. Addison
I don’t think you reach that tapering quite so effectively when you have a variety of foods to choose from. Sure, if all I have is a buffet of delicious pizza, eventually I’m going to stop stuffing myself with that every day. However, if I can rotate pizza, burgers and fries, Taco Bell, nutrient-devoid snacks, and a half dozen kinds of deliciously unhealthy ethnic food, I’m pretty sure I could binge for years if I were just eating whatever I wanted.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hoffnung said:
Yeah. Been there, done that, gained weight and over ate every day.
LikeLike
shemtealeaf said:
I think your calculations about rate of weight gain might be off by an order of magnitude. I’m calculating as follows; let me know if I’m screwing something up.
One pound of weight gain requires about 3,500 excess calories, so 11 pounds of weight gain require 38,500 excess calories. 38,500 calories over the course of six months (183 days) ends up being about 210 calories per day.
210 calories isn’t all that much, but it paints a significantly different picture than ‘half a pretzel rod’.
LikeLike
Jared said:
Yes, Ozy’s figure violates common sense. If it were true, you would be able to gain 11 pounds in a few hours by eating 90 pretzel rods. Your figures match mine.
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
Hm, you’re right. Nutrition: A Very Short Introduction doesn’t give figures for how they calculated it, and I consider it to be most likely that I misinterpreted the figures. I have removed the bits that weren’t in the book to begin with.
LikeLike
Jared said:
While I understand your inclination to trust books, in this case it is the book that must be wrong. The claim is that a 1% mismatch in consumption/expenditure will lead to a gain of 11 pounds in six months, or about 180 days. This implies that an excess of 1.8 days worth of food is enough to gain 11 pounds. That is, by eating 2.8 days’ worth of food in one day, which is totally possible, you can gain 11 pounds. (Or 1.9 days’ worth of food per day for two days straight.) This is clearly false.
LikeLike
gazeboist said:
Strictly in terms of mass, how heavy is one day’s worth of food (and water)?
That might actually be the cause of the mismatch – if we have (calorically) denser food, and people’s satiation instincts are at least partially tuned to weight (a more immediate, but less accurate measure of “do I need more food”) as opposed to caloric gain/loss ratio, any scaling mismatch in the conversion from weight to calories will tend to result in extra calories consumed, since ancestors using the opposite heuristic would tend to starve in lean times. This would also fit with the trend of “more meals” -> “fewer calories total”: as you (arithmetically) increase your number of meals, your error on any given meal scales down geometrically.
LikeLike
thirqual said:
Wait, the 1% figure is from the book, not from a calculation you’ve done? Because as shemtealead and Jared are saying, it is wrong by an order of magnitude!
Trusting that figure will lead you to make very strong (and undeserved) assumptions about the efficiency of self-regulation.
LikeLike
Vilhelm S. said:
The idea that people would have to match their energy intake closely to their energy expenditure is often said (I think maybe Gary Taubes popularized it?), but I think it’s a misunderstanding. Having more body weight increases the amount of energy you burn (e.g. because the tissue continuously requires energy to function, or because moving around takes more work). So for any given amount of food you eat, your bodyweight will increase or decrease until there is balance. This is naturally self-stabilizing, your brain doesn’t have to do anything.
LikeLiked by 1 person
callmebrotherg said:
//When I’m thirsty, water is suddenly the MOST DELICIOUS SUBSTANCE IN THE UNIVERSE, until I’ve had a glass or two, at which point it mysteriously transforms back into being vaguely unappetizing.//
Sometimes I eat salty foods specifically to make water more delicious. >.>
LikeLike
R Flaum said:
Honey existed in the ancestral environment, and it’s probably higher sugar content than a Tootsie Roll. Though I guess early humans wouldn’t have been able to extract it separately and would have eaten honeycomb rather than just honey? Not sure.
LikeLiked by 1 person
gazeboist said:
Is it really that hard to extract honey? I thought you just pressed the comb. *Keeping it* would probably be a pain in the EEA, though, which is another plausible explanation for excess desire for simple sugars.
LikeLike
R Flaum said:
Well, nowadays they centrifuge the honey out, which paleolithic humans obviously couldn’t do. In the middle ages they used a screw press — basically a big flat metal thing that tightens like a vise. The disadvantage of this is that it destroys the honeycomb, whereas centrifuging it lets you replace the honeycomb in the hive when you’re done with it. Wikipedia says that some neolithic cultures had honey in jugs, so they must have had some way of extracting it, but I don’t know what that way was or whether it was available in the Paleolithic.
LikeLike
Nita said:
Honey is extremely sweet, and it’s hard to eat a lot of it at once. Most modern sweets contain some sort of fat, which is high-calorie but bland, and this softens the taste to a more palatable sweetness. Complex carbs (as in flour), dairy products, salty or sour flavoring and lower temperature can also contribute to this effect.
Do-it-yourself demo:
1. Eat a teaspoon of honey.
2. Mix (ideally, beat or blend) a teaspoon of honey with butter, spread it on white bread and eat it.
Additionally, honey was probably relatively scarce back then, so most people were not in danger of chronically overeating it.
LikeLike
Lambert said:
If I want a tootsie roll, I don’t have to fight scores of bees whose home I’m destroying.
LikeLike
gazeboist said:
Most of the time, water is vaguely unappetizing. When I’m thirsty, water is suddenly the MOST DELICIOUS SUBSTANCE IN THE UNIVERSE, until I’ve had a glass or two, at which point it mysteriously transforms back into being vaguely unappetizing.
Hmm. Water is consistently vaguely unappetizing to me, but I’m also consistently very thirsty, and I like to be drinking (in the sense of consuming fluids, not specifically alcohol). As a result, I drank (and drink) a lot of not-particularly-healthy beverages of various kinds, which I’d rather not do.
My solution was to hang a water bottle off my belt, and keep it topped up as best I could. The result was that I wasn’t thirsty any more, and I never had to spend three minutes in front of a water fountain failing to relieve my thirst. It worked great until a week or two ago, when I lost the water bottle. 😦
I have a similar thing with food, actually, but I don’t think there’s as good a solution available. I have considered just carrying celery sticks, though.
LikeLike
gazeboist said:
I think I screwed up my blockquote somehow…
LikeLike
Neb said:
Your B vitamin example – does not seem like an example of the thing you’re making it an example of?
Like, because of the parenthetical, but even the sore part seems to put it in the same category as pica instead – there was an indicator that something was off but not one clear enough to connect to the cause without extra knowledge.
(Is anyone aware of a better example for this square?)
Also, curious how other people experience the candy thing. I totally enjoy sweets, but I’ve also noticed that if i’m seeking out lots of gummy candy I’m usually short on fresh fruits and vegetables, and if I’m seeking out large amounts of chocolate I’m usually short on calories. (Also I ate a ton of candy in college because we didn’t have it at home growing up). (Er, asking from genuine curiosity, since as the water example shows this seems to be an area where people can have different experiences).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Githzerai said:
I experience chocolate cravings the same way as you do! I tend to forget meals, and when I tried to cut back on chocolate, I repeatedly failed until I figured out that I needed to seriously increase the calories I was getting from other sources, and make sure I had more regular meals.
My body was capable of finding a solution to the problem, but not the best solution.
Also apparently my anxiety spikes if I’m running at a caloric deficit. To the point where people around me are like “The heat death of the universe, sure, sure, did you eat lunch?”
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
Ideally I would like to be alerted before I’ve had a vitamin deficiency for six months resulting in sores. 😛
My experience is that my desire for candy naturally self-regulates when I’m not depressed and I’m eating fat regularly, and I crave a lot of candy when I am instead having dinners of peas and corn. (This is actually somewhat annoying because I bought a lot of candy after Valentine’s and didn’t get to eat much of it because other people are not as good at regulating their candy intake. :P)
I expect I am still eating more Peeps than would be optimal for my physical health, though. (“None” would be the optimal amount of peeps to eat. 🙂 )
LikeLike
Hoffnung said:
I,… Find this deeply unfeasible. Doing this, myself, would probably put me over 4000 kcal a day. Its ridiculously hard to stop eating before I feel actively uncomfortably full.
LikeLiked by 1 person
shemtealeaf said:
Agreed. If I went with the ‘hmm what sounds good’ method of eating, my eating habits would be largely indistinguishable from a stoned high school nerd. Lots of Mountain Dew and snack foods, Taco Bell several times a week, etc. I would almost definitely be very unhealthy and overweight (more overweight than I am now) within a year.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Autolykos said:
My guess would be that the intuitive method generally works, but with some major caveats:
a) You prepare the food from fresh ingredients. Most convenience food is so full of artificial aroma, glutamate, sweeteners and various ersatz and other junk that your intuition about its nutritional value is likely to be way off.
b) You did not ruin your intuition by getting used to junk food, or by being forced/persuaded to overeat (or eat things you hated) as a child.
c) You do not add too many other dietary constraints on top of that (like your example of being vegan).
LikeLike