If you are thinking intuitive eating is a new revolution, you might find you are mistaken. Intuitive goes by many different names and terms. It is appropriate, for the sake of this article, to outline what I am discussing so you wont be left to your own assumptions.
Free eating in research is usually discussed under the phrase Ad libitum. Ad libitum is derived from the latin which means “at one’s pleasure.” This has been around for a long time and even discussed in controversial German studies during Hitler’s reign. The way we eat freely and what we choose to do so with is of constant amazement to scientist in both humans and animals.
Some argue that eating freely isn’t what intuitive eating is about in the first place and that this sense must be trained. The comparative difference from research is free eating (Ad Libitum) is with no regard to thought or programming. Intuitive eating on the other hand is about getting in tune with your senses, hunger, tastes, and the general reactions of your body to food and its surrounding environment.
Doesn’t sound too bad either way really? But, is it realistic and can it apply to fat loss?
Stress Expenditure and Intuitive Eating
If you have ever sat and written for over 5-hours straight or been on the receiving end of a customer service environment, you know that you can expend a lot of stress energy in the absence of physical exertion. Since energy intake needs to be correlated with energy output for body composition, this brings a problem that a lot of people are having a hard time dealing with. Back in the day our stress was mostly related to direct movement expenditure. Meaning if you were tired and stressed out it was because you physically moved all day long. In this day and age, we can become physically and mentally exhausted without moving at all. Our stress expenditure is high and our energy expenditure is low. This is leading to a movement of intuitive medicating.
Intuitive medication
Self-medication is literally taking your emotional and physical matter in your own hands. There is the conscious form of self-medication which is taking specific drugs in effort to help a specific problem only. Aid of a doctor or not, you pop the pill, you are self-medicating. There is another phenomenon which occurs that is a subconscious self-medication. This can be in all forms and the term “medication” becomes very lax. One example is the interesting research in those with undiagnosed A.D.D having a extremely higher rate of taking up smoking or the use of stimulants to self-medicate their attention and anxiety issues. Another example, and more relevant to this conversation is people who have issues with depression, insomnia, and excess stress taking up the use of fast acting carbohydrates to provide energy and mental relief in their lives.
In an interesting 2008 study [1], people participated in a double-blind, placebo controlled study to determine which drink selection helped most with their mood. The study was pretty interesting. The operators would play an audio for the participants that went like this…
“As you can hear, there is music playing in the background. The music is to help you attain an unpleasant mood state. I’d like you to close your eyes, listen to the music, and try to remember the time when … [sad memory prompted, e.g. your parents told you they were getting divorced]. Try to really intensely get into the feelings of the music and your memory. It’s very important that you try to develop an unpleasant mood state that is as intense and as real as you can possibly make it. I want to remind you that we have a procedure to bring your mood back up to normal at the end of this experiment. So don’t be afraid to really intensely get into this mood.“
Intense eh? I don’t know about you, but that wouldn’t be a fun time for me. Afterwards the participants were offered a choice of beverages. The choices were between a carbohydrate dominant w/protein and a carbohydrate only drink. The study spanned 2-weeks and the participants were served various drinks and various days and asked to rate the drink that affected their mood the best. The results showed in pretty overwhelming favor of the carbohydrate dominant drink. I also want to take a moment to give props because as far as studies go, this was a good one. They really tried to do everything they could to toss out manipulation and variable factors in this study.
The above wasn’t the first study that took a look at carbohydrate/food medication to stress environment, but it certainly was the most valid and interesting. It goes to show there is a strong correlation between how we feel and how what we eats makes us feel in correlation.
What does this mean towards intuitive eating and weight control? Can you channel into the proper way of eating for body composition? I think for most people, no, but here is why…
The connection between emotions and food is obviously a strong one. Not just food either but drugs, alcohol, sexual habits, etc. It comes back full circle to state the question of what comes first, “The chicken or the egg?” In this case, there isn’t a question. Your mind, your life and your actions are always going to come before food selection. My point is, we are intuitively eating and that is the problem. Once you enter onto self-awareness and control it alters the process. It becomes a learned behavior, which isn’t a bad thing. We live life and we learn as we go. That is how we become the people we are. Intuitive, it isn’t.
In the end, we have genuine physical reactions that stress us physically and mentally. A lot of teachings of intuitive eating tells us to avoid feeding the very chemicals are body is asking to be feed and to receive the response we want. The simple truth is that feeling you have, that feeling of being overly stressed out, sad, and depressed, it really does want a candy bar. It doesn’t just stop there either, in a couple of weeks I will have a big article on the affects of sleep on carbohydrate and excessive eating desires as well.
My point is there are real chemical forces at work here, not just emotional “fuck its.” It is intuitive, it is nature, and it is correct. Trying to step in and fight against these urges is kind of a dying battle. Sure there is will power and a level where you say what you do. I think you will find more success not putting yourself in that position in the first place. The point should not be to eat with your intuition, but to eat with strategy and education. Your body may signal candy bar, but it will respond better with other foods. Expect a lot more on that in my next discussion on this topic.
The real nail in the coffin for intuitive eating for fat loss?
Fat loss isn’t healthy nor is it desired by your body. While it may led to a healthier outcome, the process isn’t healthy or a natural reaction. Chemo therapy might save you from dying from cancer, but I don’t think anyone thinks it is healthy. While I am not saying fat loss is on the level of chemo, it does come with side effects and makes for a difficult physical journey. In intuitive eating you are supposed to come in touch with your satiation and hunger and act on its behalf. This is great for maintenance and I think being of aware of this can be helpful, but in fat loss you have to realize that the feeling of your stomach eating you alive, the dizziness, the insomnia, and the random sugar cravings are your intuitive fat loss signals. Sometimes the worst it gets, the better you are doing. It’s just the way it is.
Your body sends signals to deny yourself from eating less. From headaches to paranoia, your mind and body will manipulate you to eat naturally, because it is the will to survive. Nothing is more intuitive than that. The will to live trumps a paperback book, everytime.
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2632958/
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Brilliant!
Well put thoughts on intuition.
Succes is a battle of willpower against the instincts of the animal brain.
But with practice habits can be formed and then succes may look like something intuitive, but at first there has to be some intentional change.
Great post Leigh, makes a lot of sense.
Stellar post.
I know I can’t rely on hunger signals when it comes to crisps and chocolate. Maybe eating only vegetables and meat it would be possible to maintain going by the body’s signals, but then cutting out entire food groups probably makes it un-intuitive. We just haven’t evolved enough in the last fifty years to cope with the influx of mass-produced, mass marketed high-fat/sugar/salty foods to know when we’ve had enough.
There is a balance, I will certainly be discussing it in the future.
This makes so much sense to me! I have always failed at this style of dieting because I got hungry. Regardless of what “trick” strategies I use or how much veggies I eat, I feel the hunger. Looking forward to information in the future.
Leigh do you think a book like this http://www.amazon.com/Intuitive-Eating-Recovery-Rediscover-Pleasures/dp/0312957211 would still be helpful if I use my hunger signals to not eat? Does this make sense?
I haven’t read that book so I can’t speak on it personally. I can say that yes, you can use your hunger signals to your advantage and other side effects of fat loss. I will be speaking on this more.
Wow, this is so me that I can’t even say it hits close to home. Because it’s hitting home dead on.
Great post, Leigh! If only you could spread the info in the last two paragraphs to the rest of the world then dieting might make a lot more sense to people.
Knowledge is power, thanks for empowering us!
I needed (but wish I didn’t) to hear the last lines.
I wonder if part of the problem is that we’re so out of touch with our physical need to move. During a really stressful period when I was 20, my sister randomly suggested walks as therapeutic. It stuck with me for at least a decade. Later when I was working a desk job but had a gym where I could do a quick 10 minutes on the elliptical (usually without changing any clothes), I also found it much easier to resist the random junk.
We absolutely are out of touch with our physical need to move. I speak about these things often and is why I consider Non-Exercise Activity to be so important.
Thanks, Leigh. I think my point was lost, though. I wonder if “intuitive eating” would work if we “intuitively moved” as well. i wonder if ingesting extra carbs are part of our body revving up to get our body moving – we do the first half, but not the second. I don’t think NEAT is the answer for me, I think access to 10 minutes of heart pumping is.
RG, yeah of course intuitive eating would work if we intuitively moved….
1. no food
2. go hunt a buffalo (intuitive moving)
3. eat the buffalo (intuitive eating)’
4. no food = intuitive fat loss
5. repeat #2
we’re a long way from the cave, for better and worse
Totally makes sense Leigh! I love that you highlighted the study – thanks for finding that, very interesting.
Just to make sure I’m understanding you correctly, though, would you say it’s possible to eat in a deficit without weighing/measuring your food provided you are still feeling the effects of the deficit (i.e. hunger pangs, headaches, etc.) Not really intuitive eating to get you to a place where you are thriving, per se, but intuitive deficit eating?
Also – thanks for always writing on timely topics from the forums! It feels like we are all having the conversation with you!
The short answer is yes. The longer answer is it takes a different kind of mind/body training. Like I have discussed before, if you can get away with not counting calories, macros, and being tied to a device, then the better I think you will feel. That being said when you just want to get something done, it is a more full proof method and returns better results 9/10 times. If you can nail down the strategy of educated ignorance, it is truly blissful. This is what I will be talking in the next article on this as well as in the download for members.
awesome! Can’t wait for the article/podcast
Great article, wonderfully written, and powerfully delivers your point.
I was wondering much of what Tames was wondering – Can you use this to your advantage to go AGAINST the grain? Would love to hear your thoughts on that. I was following this thread in the forums and was hoping to hear what you had to say on the topic. I on the book listed above, I doubt you would be a fan
Writing is getting better all the time. Keep up the great work Leigh!
please see what I wrote to Tames.
Thank You Thank You Thank You.
I use caffeine to focus when I need my brain to be “on”. I am in a depressed state right now due to some grieving over things that happened to me in my childhood and youth, and I can’t seem to handle ANYthing from the stress of it all. Add to the mix my learned behaviours of binge eating and all too accessible comfort foods, coupled with the living arrangements of being in my Mother’s house where all those behaviours developed and WHAMMO:
Lynda is one messed up, crazy-assed chickita right now.
Leigh, I can’t say it enough.
Thank You.
Hope things get better Thrasher.
Gosh, your articles are amazing.
Will any of your future articles on this topic include strategies for people who want to “logically” try intuitive eating? Not as a means for fat loss…just for living? Because I really would like to achieve more balance in my life where I’m not purely thinking in terms of “it’s meal time/I must consume X amount of calories with X amount of protein.”
The short answer is yes they will and you can see what I wrote to others, specifically Tames.
Amazing article! It would segue well into an one about why we may not be able to get the body of our dreams if we’re settling in other areas of life.
I feel better for myself and my mother knowing that its not her fault that I grab for the carrot cake when I get stressed at work!
Thanks Leigh!!
“We have a procedure to bring your mood back up to normal at the end of this experiment”
Am I the only one who got stuck on this phrase? I looked at the article and didn’t find any more details on what this procedure is (other than drinking carbs). cognitive-behavioral tools? Other than picturing my boss as the attacker when I’m doing kickboxing?
Interesting perspective – seems like the question depends on how you define intuition. If you define it as body and body urges, then no, intuition is not going to get far with fat loss, considering we have access to candy bars, stress etc. But I think proponents of intuitive eating are not necessary calling the ‘give me a candy bar’ voice intuition. You can also define it more as will, intelligence, even including education and strategy. Intuition becomes the higher voice telling you the candy bar isn’t going to yield the best long term results on any level.
As Tames mentioned, intuitive deficit eating – basically a strategy of creating a deficit without measuring – is sort of another question. I think it can be done, people do it all the time. You know you’re reducing, so you expect some hunger pangs, it’s a change for the body.
I see a couple scenarios: a) person who eats a lot of junk or stress eating, using intuition/strategy to eat healthier, ends up losing since, well they had plenty of extra cals to work with. b) person who eats very carefully to begin with, wants to achieve ultra low body fat. In the first scenario, intuitive eating could actually help them both feel better and reduce body fat, as long as you expect an adjustment phase which does not feel good. In the second scenario, whether they use an intuition-strategy or weighing to create a deficit, it’s going to suck. Leigh, I feel like you’re speaking a little more to the second scenario, really pushing the body and not just using wisdom to let go of some bad habits.
Natalie I would like to talk about this more and hope to get a good response to you tomorrow.
Great article Leigh! Intuitive eating doesn’t work for me – I gain weight. I was wondering if I was very strange or messed up because of that.
Obviously not. We have to look at each situation and environment. Your personal mental and physical make-up are going to change everything and your response will need to resonate accordingly.
Leigh,
I admire your approach very much and I found this a particularly thoughtful and informative article. My initial thoughts on this approach:
1. In the situations most of us find ourselves in most of the time, our decision making about eating tends to fail us more often than not.
2. We choose the wrong behaviors more often than not even though at some level we may know better. That is, while knowledge may sometimes be the limiting factor, more often it is the decision process that hurts us rather than not knowing the right thing to do.
3. There are probably good historical reasons why “intuition” tends to take over our decision making for survival behaviors, and good reasons why eating is treated as a survival behavior by the body.
4. Fighting against this “intuition” by trying to reason through every situation tends not to work in the long run for most people.
5. “Intuition” in general can itself be retrained, modified, even for survival-related behaviors:
a. We have to first make the unaware decision process more explicit so we can see where it is going wrong and how it needs to change, and
b. We need the tools for retraining it to get the outcome we want
c. We need a workable plan to break down our goal into actionable steps and a way of getting accurate feedback about our progress relative to goals.
Case in point: anorectics manage to retrain their intuitive eating patterns significantly to successfully achieve weight loss, but they don’t achieve a healthy outcome because the feedback they get about themselves is fundamentally distorted as well. Rather than having a plan, they just establish a direction and keep heading toward it unerringly but with an illusory goal.
Recognizing our “intuition” is a big part of success here, retraining it intelligently keeping larger goals in mind is the other part. That’s why I am so impressed by the troubleshooting approach.
[...] did two articles recently that covered intuitive eating and the side effects of weight loss. I received a lot of email and many links to blogs or forum [...]
[...] know I posted those two links (No Calories, no scale? No problem and Intuitive Eating for Weight Loss: the Flaws & Realities) weeks ago but I did want to at least share my initial thoughts on my interpretations of the [...]
Martin Berkhan wrote an article explaning how he got to single digit body fat without ever feeling hungry, moody, light headed or anything like that.
He says that before learning few things he would become moody, hungry, maniac, irritable, spacey when trying to lose weight and never achieved stubborn fat loss.
The things he learned and that made his extreme fat loss totally symptom-less are:
create a small deficit and accept a fat loss that will take more time
refeeds 2 or 3 times per week
The transition to maintenance was smooth.
I don’t think symptoms of weight loss are unavoidable. I read of many people from the intuitive eating, intermittent fasting, simplify nutrition and fitness quarters who have transformed their body, changed their body composition, lost lot of fat and never felt hungry, light headed or irritable ever.
Nothing against Martin, but are you really trying to argue one person’s experience as a reason? N=1 much?
Side effects are going to come in all forms and different for everyone. It will also depend on the deficit.
No doubt, some people eventually find the perfect strategy for themselves and sail through to their objective, or at least it feels like that in retrospect. For most of us, it’s learning from things that went wrong that’s the key to long term success. Side effects are either feedback for change or they are expected (and even in a sense welcome) information that something is happening, depending on the strategy.
For the perfect strategy approach (no expected side effects), there is a percentage of success. Personally I suspect it is fairly low for most strategies, though some better than others, and higher percentage for all strategies taken collectively for all people because of matching strategy to person).
For the resilience strategy of learning from mistakes and expecting side effects, adjusting, and never giving up, there is no failure, there’s only an extended learning period.
That’s why I think the troubleshooting approach is so important, even if we have a handful of really good strategies that we think might avoid the usual pitfalls.
[...] 8. Intuitive Eating For Weight Loss: The Flaws and Realities [...]