intuitive eating

I've been reading a lot about this concept lately. And, as yet, I'm still divided on whether I think it's totally bullshit, partially bullshit, or brilliant.

Basically, the concept is that your body knows what it needs and if you are only mindful of it, eating exactly when, what, and how much your body really actually wants, you'll be in your optimal state of health and energy and your weight will stabilize at what it's supposed to be (which, sadly, may not be what you might like it to be.)

Now, as anyone who's known me for a long time will remember, I've been through some, um, interesting dietary phases. Ten years or so ago, I spent a summer reading The Coming Plague and a bunch of other, similar books about how the microbes were winning, and one of the things that I became concerned about was that there'd be a serious mad cow outbreak in the US. This led to about three years of almost complete vegetarianism. It also led to me becoming pretty overweight. Part of that was because I'm totally convinced my body just does not handle that many carbs very well. Another huge part was that I was eating way more sugar and dessert-type things than I normally would. In retrospect, and maybe even at the time, I was aware that was because my body was craving stuff it needed and wanted that I refused to give it (steak! cheeseburgers!) and I was trying to pacify it with something else. That would be a point in favor of the intuitive eating concepts.

So when I became totally sick of not eating meat, enough to say, wtf, I'm gonna die of something anyway, bring on the probably unsafe food supply, and I wanted to lose the weight I'd gained, I went totally in the opposite direction. I spent two years eating very low carb: basically meat, fish, salad and other green veggies, cheese, oil, and nuts. And, you know, I did very well. I got down to a weight that was less than I weighed when I was 23. I felt great, with lots of energy, no bloating or any digestive problems, and my hair and skin looked great from all the fat I was eating. It wasn't even hard to do, on one level: I like meat, fish, cheese, and salad, and I didn't much crave stuff I wasn't supposed to eat. But it made socializing hard. It was difficult to eat at other people's houses, it made social drinking much less fun than it should have been, and restaurants, while not really problematical, were a much diminished experience. (Famous quote from this period, delivered deadpan by my ex-whatever: "Just because you can always get a chicken caesar salad, doesn't mean you should.") So, point against intuitive eating. While my body thrived on this regimen, I never would have eaten this way intuitively, and it focused all my attention on what I could and couldn't eat, which is not healthy in the mental health sense of that word.

Finally, there's the fact that my experience with hormonal food cravings (i.e. the time each month when I really need [or want] a certain combination of grease plus salt, best satisfied by Lays potato chips in the yellow bag) is that what my body is craving then doesn't have a true physiological basis. My evidence for this is that when I was on a certain drug I noticed, quite unexpectedly, that those salt + fat cravings that I thought were inevitable completely disappeared. The drug wasn't affecting sodium levels in my body, it was affecting my dopamine pathways. So, obviously, food cravings cannot simply be a function of what your body needs on a nutrient level; brain chemistry is involved. And I don't see how medicating your neurotransmitters with Lays chips leads to optimal physical or mental health. (It does cut the evil drug companies out of the loop, though, so that's something, haha.)

And, yeah, let me take a moment to admit that I honestly do know there's a certain douchery involved in thinking too hard about this, and that I am well aware that this is part and parcel of Stoopid Spoiled American syndrome. That I can not only eat as much and as often as I want, but that I can actually have a choice of exactly what that food is, is a privilege that the majority of humanity does not have. It's impossible for me to think or talk about this stuff without feeling I need to acknowledge that. I don't necessarily feel guilty about having that level of privilege, but I also don't think it ought to be taken for granted.

xoxo