[content warning for discussion of food, dieting, and moralizing around food]
To the best of my knowledge, the only place that my approach to scrupulosity has been independently worked out (by a person who is not an effective altruist) is food/dieting, under the name “intuitive eating.” It makes sense that that would be the case: food and dieting are something a lot of people have dysregulated shame and guilt about. So in this post I’m going to write about intuitive eating as a case study, and then expand it in a later post.
Many people have a very, very unhealthy relationship with food. They might try diet after diet after diet, searching for the one that will cause them to finally lose weight, or they might stick to a single rigid diet, or they might feel constantly guilty about how they should be on a diet (but somehow that never actually stops them from getting the second slice of cake). They might restrict food for weeks or months, but then it’s a holiday or a vacation, or they feel like they “deserve it,” or they’ve given in and had one cookie and now their diet is Ruined. They might not feel able to refuse food that they don’t want; they might feel guilty about eating the food they don’t want, especially if it’s “unhealthy.” They might eat without intending to, or feel like they have to clean their plates. The very thought of a diet might make them eat until they’re stuffed; after all, they might diet tomorrow and then they won’t get any of this again!
Diet is a very personal matter and lots of different things work for different people. I don’t mean to say that the thing I describe is right for everyone. I have no particular expertise in eating disorders; if you have a history of anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating, talk to someone who knows more than me before deciding to eat intuitively. But one thing that works for many people is intuitive eating.
The core of intuitive eating is unconditional permission to eat. If you want to, you can have ice cream for dinner. You can eat a six-course meal and clean your plate every time. You can have whatever your forbidden food is: Twinkies, hot chocolate, cheese, bread, fettucine alfredo. And you can have salads, steamed broccoli, tofu stir-fry, and boneless skinless chicken breast. You can turn down Aunt Ida’s disgusting meatloaf even if it will make Aunt Ida sad. You can have a bite of dinner and decide actually you’re still full from lunch.
If you’re good at intuitive eating, you can do some things that look a little bit like restriction: for example, I notice I compulsively eat certain kinds of candy when I keep them in the house, so I walk to the store when I want them. But if your relationship with food is a batshit mess, people who practice intuitive eating usually recommend you go to pretty extreme lengths to communicate to yourself that food is actually unrestricted. Buy the foods you used to not let yourself eat in enormous quantities, far more than you could actually eat, and whenever you run low restock. Carry a bag of foods you like around with you so that you can eat whenever you’re hungry. If you want fried rice for breakfast, pull out the wok and make some.
Now, maybe you’re the sort of person who, if you’re granted unconditional permission to eat, will proceed to eat nothing but brownies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don’t mean to argue with people’s experiences of themselves; I’m just describing one strategy that works for many people.
But many people will eat enormous quantities of brownies for a while– maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks. And then they will finally understand, on a gut level, that the brownies are always going to be there. This is not the last hurrah of brownies; there is not going to be a diet and then no more brownies ever again. You don’t have to save up brownie-eating experiences because someday you will never get to have another brownie. You will always get to have another brownie.
And once you’ve left the Brownie Scarcity Mindset, you can notice things. Like… eating until you’re stuffed actually doesn’t feel very good, it actually makes you feel kind of sick. And “brownies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner” leaves you feeling kind of shaky and unsatisfied. And maybe you’re never going to be a big fan of kale, but you find yourself eyeing the cucumbers and going “you know, what would really hit the spot right now? A big salad with a bunch of different vegetables, drizzled with olive oil and covered in nuts and cheese.”
The question a lot of people are going to ask at this point is “but do you lose weight?” In my anecdotal experience and the experience of people I know who practice intuitive eating… sometimes? If you have been eating past the point of hunger for a long time, or eating on autopilot when you’re not full, then you might find yourself losing weight when you stop doing that. If you have been ignoring your hunger signals and undereating for a long time, then you might find yourself gaining weight. But most people seem to settle at a stable equilibrium which may shift permanently after medical events such as pregnancy or serious illness.
On the other hand, that is exactly the result most diets give people too. And intuitive eating has a lot of other advantages. You get to have brownies, which is important. The diet you’ll wind up eating is probably healthier. You’ll enjoy your food more. And most importantly of all you get to take all the shame and guilt and self-hatred you’ve associated with food, all the emotional energy you have wrapped up in your diet, and just… stop. You can do something else with it.
There’s a common framing around food where everyone is constantly tempted to make the worst diet choices possible. If left to their own devices, everyone would eat nothing but pizza topped with cheesy chicken nuggets topped with pasta with alfredo sauce. The only way to have a healthy diet is a constant effort of will where you nobly resist even having a bite of donuts, and whenever you do eat a donut you self-flagellate appropriately. (Be sure to comment a lot about how bad the food is and how fat you are while you eat it: punishing yourself for eating “bad” food is the only way to make sure you don’t do something horrible like enjoy it.)
And, in fact, you can just… not? There is no Food Police who will arrest you for having a hamburger. The food you eat doesn’t have to mean anything about your worth as a human being, unless you decide it does. You don’t have to feel shame or guilt about what you eat. And if you choose not to beat yourself up about food choices, you will probably not have some pizza/chicken nugget/pasta chimera for dinner every night, because… that’s kind of gross actually?
It is actually just okay to eat the food you want and that makes you feel good. Maybe that will cause you to eat more chocolate than is best for ideal health, but over time it will probably result in a reasonable and balanced diet. You don’t have to hate yourself.
Tyler said:
Intuitive eating seems like it makes sense and is okay to do, but I kinda feel like it’s only okay to do it because it your diet doesn’t really hurt anyone. My scrupulosity, if that’s what it really is, manifests as an overwhelming concern that something that I do is going to hurt someone. I can’t really apply inuit I’ve eating to that, because there’s a very big difference between letting me do whatever I want to myself, and letting me do whatever I want to other people.
LikeLike
Jason Harner said:
I agree that you shouldn’t self-flagellate after eating an unhealthy food, and a lot of people tie up feelings of self-worth and morality into their eating habits that don’t belong there. But I would say that “everyone is constantly tempted to make the worst diet choices possible” is a fairly accurate representation of the modern food environment, and supported by a mountain of research. The brain systems that control how and when we feel hungry and how and what we crave when we do are being effectively hijacked by the hyper-palatable foods like pizza and ice cream and brownies that surround us in the modern environment. For some people this still isn’t a problem and they can eat what they like without facing the health consequences for being overweight and obese, but for others it’s a serious problem
Obviously, never eat a brownie again due to the virtue of your iron will isn’t a practical or sustainable solution. But there isn’t anything wrong with trying to reduce the number of brownies you eat, or trying to avoid brownie-rich environments. I think eating an enormous quantity of brownies is not a good idea due to the effect discussed in this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30587407 Effectively, it may strengthen your brownie craving long-term.
For me, beer is a tempting and delicious food that I enjoy. But I believe that drinking 3 beers with dinner each night, which would be my short-term preference, will have medium and long-term consequences that make it not worth it. For a long time I practiced intuitive drinking, and I did occasionally binge to the point of regret, but that lesson never really seemed to stick. I’ve now taken steps to limit my consumption and I think that’s okay. I wholeheartedly agree that there’s nothing ethically wrong with me consuming a food I enjoy, and I don’t need to beat myself up about it. But I can still want to reduce my consumption to help with my other needs and goals.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Erl said:
“guilty about eating the food they don’t want” looks like it should be “do want”
LikeLike
benjaminbuckley said:
I’m interpreting it as (a) eating food that is offered to you but that you don’t want, and (b) feeling guilty about it — in which case it’s correct.
For example, if my aunt makes a cake for my birthday and I don’t want to eat it, but I eat it for fear of offending her, but I also feel guilty about eating it because I know cake is unhealthy.
LikeLike
Anna said:
In context, I thought not: “They might not feel able to refuse food that they don’t want; they might feel guilty about eating the food they don’t want”. I’ve definitely felt guilt before about eating food I didn’t want. Obliged and guilty at the same time—such are the contradictions of the human state.
LikeLike
Sydney Yin said:
I definitely felt like I had to finish food or it would be *WASTED* and that would make me *TERRIBLE* and it’s still hard to throw out any good food even today.
LikeLike
Hyzenthlay said:
I also hate wasting food, though it feels less like a purely moral thing and more an aesthetic dislike of waste in general (though knowing about the larger problem of food waste and its impact on the environment doesn’t help either).
I compensate for this by just not buying a lot of food in the first place, or only buying things that I absolutely know I’m going to want. The food I do end up throwing out is usually unasked-for stuff that people give to me. I still feel kinda bad about wasting that, but less bad than if I’d bought it myself.
LikeLike
andrewflicker said:
So… many people have terrible feelings about their diet: Guilt, frustration, etc. It seems like the important part of this “intuitive eating” is *not* the “eat whatever you want” part, but the “don’t feel bad about your eating choices”.
However, if that’s true, and this advice boils down to “don’t feel bad”… I’m not sure how it’s meaningfully different or better from “make healthier eating decisions *and* don’t feel bad when you fail to live up that standard”. I mean, if we’re taking control over one’s emotional state as the starting place, why not just shoot for the moon?
LikeLike
dandysmurf said:
Personally, as someone who practices intuitive eating, the “eat whatever you want” part is necessary for the “don’t feel bad” part. For a lot of people, dieting is so wrapped up in guilt, frustration, and shame that they can’t diet without feeling bad. Therefore, removing the diet is the best way to remove the bad feeling.
Forgiving yourself for mistakes or for not accomplishing your goals is a different skill from eating whatever you want, and, in my experience, a much harder one to learn. If you don’t have that skill yet and can’t gain it in the near future, then removing the “goals and mistakes” framework is a good way of getting yourself to eat better (that is to say, in a more balanced and healthy way) and, more importantly, stop feeling awful about what you eat.
LikeLike
Nancy Lebovitz said:
I don’t think it’s possible to just decide to not feel guilty.
Ending self-imposed punishment is a way of saying “no more pain around food”.
LikeLike
Anna said:
My impression is that the not feeling bad doesn’t happen automatically, but is a gradual process that results from the behavior of letting yourself eat whatever you want. You aren’t assumed to have control over your emotional state from the get-go; your emotional state responds to your behavior changes.
I don’t know if intuitive eating works; I hadn’t really heard of it before. But I am pretty confident that trying to follow the advice to “eat better and don’t beat yourself up for failing” is not a highly successful route to either eating better or not beating yourself up.
LikeLike
andrewflicker said:
Anna- I agree that the “eat better and don’t beat yourself up for failing” is pretty unsuccessful statistically. I think it’s likely that intuitive eating would have the same poor general performance and, just like the other options, do well with a very small selection.
LikeLike
Sydney Yin said:
I would say that intuitive eating isn’t just about not feeling guilty; it’s more a…. reconfiguration of thinking around food that takes it from something that lies on the virtue axis (where and how much money to donate) to something that doesn’t (whether you like mexican or chinese food better). But also more than that, moralizing food is something that most people aren’t conscious they’re doing: the conscious decision-making is based around health and goodness for body, but it’s using the same thinking and valuing skills and unconscious reflexes as when making moral decisions. For some people, but not all people, just pointing out that their thinking around food is using moral thinking when it probably shouldn’t is already pretty helpful.
LikeLike
TracingWoodgrains said:
My impression is that, as with most intuitive ways of organizing one’s life, this works pretty well most of the time but has some major failure states—mostly based on unusually compelling stimuli.
I’ll use time management by way of analogy. This advice could be translated quite well into those terms: don’t feel bad about how you use your time. You’ll naturally adjust to a decent pattern, even if at first you binge on pleasurable activities.
Except, sometimes, those pleasures are so consistently rewarding that you never properly adjust. When I use an intuitive approach to time management, it works great in every situation where my internet access is limited, but as soon as I have a web-connected device near me, all bets are off. I could go years without substantially changing my behavior patterns.
I suspect it’s similar with food. Put someone in a setting where they have no deeply compelling unhealthy options, and intuitive eating works great. It’s possible for there to be options so compelling they overwhelm standard decision-making. Really, anything that can become an addiction demonstrates potential for that overwhelming of intuition. It feels good, so you do it, and it just keeps feeling good enough, even outside a scarcity mindset, that you keep going.
That sort of unusually compelling, unhealthy stimulus is the toughest barrier I see to any intuitive approaches. We’ve become expert at making just that sort of stimulus widely available, so I don’t anticipate an intuitive approach being viable for a lot of the people who struggle in a domain.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Liliet said:
When I went to the university, for the first time I found myself regularly going to somewhere with a McDonalds right next to it and money to eat there regularly.
So I did. Whenever I felt like it and had money in my pocket I just went there and bought whatever I wanted and ate it.
It’s important here to note that not only do I love McDonalds food, I’m also a picky eater. The list of food which I don’t recoil in disgust from is shorter than the list of food I do, and most food places will have, like, one or two dishes that I’m okay with. (And then occasionally they will turn out to have a variation of that dish that I’m not okay with but have already paid for…)
So McDonalds is not just hyper-palatable, it’s also on a short list of Food I Can Eat and Restaurant Where I Can Try New Food Without Worrying That I Won’t Be Able To Eat It.
After half a year or a year of just allowing myself to eat McDonalds food whenever I wanted, I found myself eating there like… once in a couple of months.
And after I treated all food I wanted like that for a while, I discovered something funny: my food cravings started to follow patterns of what food category I hadn’t eaten much of lately, or what fit the weather. Like I want more juicy/vegetable/non-fatty foods when it’s hot and want more greasy/meat/sugary food when it’s cold. Or we’ve been having mostly boiled stuff at home for a while and I really want something fried. Or I’d been basically not eating bread and I want some. And I can just kinda picture different foods in my mind, evaluate how I feel about eating them, and come to rational decisions about what I want to do with that feeling.
It feels great, and the hypertempting foods? They actually really aren’t, once you get past the “forbidden fruit is sweet” mentality.
Oh, and assuming you have money/resources to buy/make whatever food category you want at any given time, but that’s an obvious concer with all diets, so.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Aapje said:
There is a popular story in my bubble that people who work at candy shops are allowed to eat as much candy as they want, leading exactly to the result you describe, with initial binging being followed by people indulging rarely.
Whether it is true is another matter.
LikeLike
Manya said:
Data point: I have been eating approximately ‘anything I want’ for a couple years now. I have noticed no transition from a Brownie Scarcity Mindset. I eat a LOT, and it’s hard to so much as delay eating something delicious when I’m already uncomfortably full. As a result, I gain 10 pounds a year pretty steadily.
I have no real choice about it, because it turns out that I have spoons for exactly one of ‘control my eating’ and ‘every single other thing in my life’. But in terms of physical health, yeah, it’s kind of spectacularly failing.
(Obviously, ‘this doesn’t work for me’ doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work for many or even most other people.)
LikeLiked by 2 people
Hyzenthlay said:
Some people seem to have a mechanism in their brain that says “okay you’re full now” and a switch gets flipped where food just isn’t that tempting anymore and they naturally want to stop. And some people don’t have that. And I don’t think it has much to do with willpower in the traditional sense of the word; if anything, people without that mechanism have to exert a lot more willpower.
I wonder how much of that is genetic and how much is a result of the mechanism becoming broken or messed up through dysfunctional eating patterns during early life. Many people who struggle with overeating seem to have childhoods with parents who alternately express their love with food and guilt-trip their kids for eating too much food.
I guess, as with most things, it’s usually a combination of genetics and experiences but at a certain point it becomes hardwired and can only be fixed chemically, even if the main cause was experiential. Unfortunately a lot of diet pills (at least the effective ones) seem to have really bad side effects.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Pingback: Rational Feed – deluks917
AG said:
I’m currently doing intuitive eating, and it’s working out pretty well.
One of the key things, though, is that I’ve read about a huge diversity of foods and food practices. So when I got to a point where snacking was no longer desirable, I had the 2-day juice cleanse in my toolbox, or the morning fast, or making veggie-heavy Asian cuisine meals.
The other thing is that intuitive eating may cause long term issues. I have co-workers who just absolutely love traditional dairy and carb heavy dishes, and now that they’re getting older it’s non-stop health problems, regardless of their fitness otherwise. These people aren’t obese or anything, they were able to still do a level of hard manual labor.
So I think that it’s key for people to know what food is out there that is relatively healthy and still delicious, and to still have a generous but hard ceiling on certain soft measures, like “times per quarter I got to a point where eating unhealthily was making me feel miserable”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Walter said:
Instead of an angry response this time I’ll just do the thing where you agree too hard.
Hey, while you are deciding not to feel guilty or bad about your diet choices, can I recommend extending this to everything? Choosing to feel sad or angry is a bad choice, and I don’t know why so many people make it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
melboiko said:
Guilt is a good thing when it stops undesirable behaviour, particularly unethical behaviour. It is pointless when a) the behaviour is actually fine, or b) the guilt fails to reduce or stop it.
LikeLiked by 2 people
fallowsthorn said:
Despite the other problems I have with how I was raised, I have to commend my mother (who is fat) for vigilantly and staunchly avoiding all diet talk around her kids. I grew up with, literally, “eat when you’re hungry, don’t when you’re not” as a rule of thumb, and I didn’t realize until my mid-teens that this was not most people’s relationship with food. I’m especially grateful for it since I’m at risk for an eating disorder and it provides almost no foothold for that toxic mindset.
LikeLiked by 2 people
monadgirl said:
Huh… this is literally what I’ve already been doing as long as I recall without ever thinking about it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hoffnung said:
Doing this, for myself, lead to binge eating EVERY SINGLE DAY and getting fat.
I simply had to put restrictions upon myself, and now I’m very much not enmeshed in Diet Culture, but still.
LikeLike