THE PROBLEM WITH INTUITIVE EATING

Intuitive Eating may be all the rage right now but its glaring weaknesses can cause the same despair and hopelessness you get with diet culture.

If you don’t already know, Intuitive Eating is a program with 10 guidelines that no thinking person can argue with. Yet two of these guidelines are almost guaranteed to increase hunger and encourage overeating.

I know this because, as a personal weight loss coach and author of several health-related books, I have many, many clients that turned to me after their attempts with Intuitive Eating failed miserably.

Intuitive Eating’s First Failure

Let’s take a look at the first of the movement’s unhelpful guidelines. Here it is, word-for-word from the movement’s two founders, Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole:

Honor Your Hunger

Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise, you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for rebuilding trust in yourself and in food.

Now, what could be wrong with “honoring your hunger?” What could be wrong with ‘eat if you’re hungry and don’t if you aren’t?’ Plenty, if you understand the latest research coming out of neuroscience.

Brain researchers conceive of hunger as two related states of being.

“Natural Hunger”

The first, for a lack of a better term, is “natural hunger.” That’s a traditional understanding of our desire for food — your belly is empty, your body needs fuel, hunger arises. This is what Intuitive Eating addresses with its “Honor Your Hunger” guideline. And it does it rather well, I might add.

However, Intuitive Eating doesn’t address the second type of hunger scientists have observed; the kind that gets most of us in serious trouble.

“Manipulated Hunger”

In this state, it doesn’t matter whether your belly is empty or full, or whether you have a biological need for fuel. You experience hunger because somebody or something brings it out in you.

Our hunger is constantly being manipulated by outside forces, faulty beliefs and self-sabotage. Here are just some (of many) examples you have no doubt experienced:

• You’re not hungry but you believe that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” (faulty belief) so you eat. You figure you’ll have a piece of dry toast but the toast makes you hungry and you end up eating bacon and eggs. What happened? You elicited your hunger with a false belief.

• You’re not hungry but the bag of potato chips on your kitchen counter catches your eye and the next thing you know you’ve polished off the bag (self-sabotage).

• You’re not particularly hungry, but a commercial for deep-dish pizza comes on and suddenly you find yourself tapping the takeout app. Your hunger was manipulated by an outside force (a fast food franchise trying to sell you something).

In each of these cases, hunger wasn’t ‘natural.’ It wasn’t generated by an empty belly but an outside force, self-sabotage, or faulty beliefs. Scientists refer to these kinds of manipulated hunger as “conditioned responses.” This is when hunger, highly suggestible to certain stimuli, is “conditioned” to respond.

It’s this characteristic of hunger, as a conditioned response, that brings physiologists and neuroscientists to a rather surprising conclusion: Much of the hunger we experience on an everyday basis isn’t “natural,” it’s manipulated.

Is that the kind of hunger Intuitive Eating wants us to honor? Hunger that arises not from natural cycles but from outright exploitation?

If you don’t make the distinction between natural and manipulated hunger (and Intuitive Eating doesn’t) the guidance to “Honor Your Hunger” becomes “Give In To The Manipulation.”

You can see where this is going. If you follow Intuitive Eating’s advice and “honor your hunger” after seeing a Pizza Hut commercial your weight is going to be tossed higher than the pizza dough. If you “Honor your hunger” after seeing the cookies you left on the counter you’re not honoring your hunger; you’re honoring self-sabotage.

Here’s the thing Intuitive Eating doesn’t tell you: Food doesn’t just satiate hunger, it can bring it about. If you’re not hungry when you see food (through a pizza ad, nachos at a Superbowl party) the chances are you’ll get hungry. If you’re a little bit hungry when you see it, you’re likely to get a lot hungrier.

This is not the kind of hunger you want to honor; it’s the kind you want to avoid, disarm or neutralize. I teach my clients how to do that with science-backed techniques and so could Intuitive Eating — if they simply acknowledged that not all hunger should be honored.

Intuitive Eating’s Second Failure

The third guidance in the Intuitive Eating program can ruin your relationship to food. Let’s take a word-for-word look:

Make Peace with Food

Call a truce; stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, binging. When you finally “give in” to your forbidden foods, eating will be experienced with such intensity it usually results in Last Supper overeating and overwhelming guilt.

Making peace with food and giving yourself unconditional permission to eat what you want is critical to shifting your relationship to food in a positive direction. I consider them “first principles” in my coaching classes and I don’t think anybody in this space would dispute them.

HOWEVER.

Much of the food we eat is designed to addict us. In Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions, author Michael Moss makes a convincing case that overeating isn’t just a matter of personal choice, lack of willpower or self-discipline; it’s caused in great part because of a hidden and powerful manufacturing process designed to make us lose control.

By ordering laboratory scientists to manipulate chemicals and food substances into their highest “bliss points,” food giants can knock down the natural guard rails we have to prevent overeating.

Here’s what I mean. Our taste buds operate under a phenomenon called sensory specific satiety. It’s a fancy way of saying they adapt or habituate to flavors quickly and easily. This is why the first slice of pizza always tastes better than the third.

Food giants know this so they manufacture foods that can override sensory specific satiety. How? By combining flavors, especially salt and sugar. This delays the quick habituation taste buds are famous for, setting the stage for you to eat a lot longer than you normally would.

Then, Big Food eliminates most of the fiber in these sensory specific satiety-skipping foods so they’re slow to fill us up, encouraging us to eat more.

This sets up a vicious loop. Overriding sensory specific satiety drives the eating but the lack of fiber delays the fullness so we end up in a pattern reminiscent of a substance use disorder. We need to eat more and more to get the same high (a full belly).

A natural craving for cookies might compel you to eat three or four. But the way they are manufactured compel you to eat eighteen. THIS is the kind of food Intuitive Eating thinks we should make peace with? THIS is the kind of unconditional permission Intuitive Eating thinks we should give ourselves?

That’s like telling a drug user to “Make peace with your addiction.” Or giving them “Unconditional permission to shoot up.”

Why would you give yourself permission to let Big Food control your cravings? How do you make peace with food designed to make war with your wiring?

You don’t.

You can’t.

Yet that’s exactly what Intuitive Eating asks us to do.

There ARE ways of making peace with food that don’t involve falling into addictive cycles. There ARE ways of giving yourself permission to eat whatever you want while protecting yourself from Big Food’s predatory practices, but that’s another column I’ll soon write. In the meantime, you can join my ongoing conversations about this subject here.

For now, I just wanted to point out why Intuitive Eating, despite its noble virtues, has failed so many people. I’m a big believer in its core concepts (my books and my teachings reflect that), but I also believe it needs to evolve if it’s ever going to live up to its promise.

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Personal weight loss coach Michael Alvear is the author of Grand Theft Weight Loss, available in hardback, paperback, ebook, and audio.