As Ellyn Satter says, food is one of the great pleasures of life – but only one of them.

It is important, but it has its place – which is to say you should not have to be thinking constantly about it. And you want the thought and attention you do give to be of the useful and pleasurable sort, not of the fretting and obsessive variety.

In this lesson, I’m going to talk both literally and figuratively about putting food in its rightful place.

Let’s get the literal out of the way first, because it is astoundingly simple.

Put it away.

Yes, that’s right – put your food away. Be neat and tidy with it. Organize it a bit.

Don’t leave random stuff laying around on counters, coffee tables, desks, bookshelves. Don’t put food somewhere it will hover right in front of your face, especially if you are slightly food-preoccupied due to chaotic eating and lack of permission, a history of dieting, or just because you are a primate who is immediately attracted to tasty, tasty food, regardless of whether you actually want it at just that moment.

Because if any of these are true, having it constantly before you gives the food more power than it deserves. It interferes with genuine decision-making. It calls to you in that really annoying food-voice.

In a sense, the food begins to boss you around.

We don’t want that. You’re the one in charge here. You get to decide what you eat, what you like, and how much feels good.

You don’t want those important decision-making criteria pushed into the ditch by RANDOM COUNTER COOKIES!!!

Now, it’s one thing to think, “Yeah, some cookies would be awesome right now,” and then you go and get some cookies, and indeed they are awesome.

It’s another thing entirely if you pick cookies by default because they were there and you didn’t have any better ideas.

If they’re right in front of your face, you will probably never come up with tastier or more nourishing ideas, because you’ve got an easy out – something sweet, perennially tasty (even when you’re not particularly feeling cookies), and that requires no thought, effort, or preparation.

You’re human, which means you are an animal. Animals like to conserve effort wherever possible – including when it comes to acquiring food. So of course you’re going to take the easy way out.

However, a strong aside:

This is not a trick to get you to eat less.

This is, however, a trick to help you be the one making the decisions about it. I really don’t care how much you eat, because that is none of my (or anyone else’s) fucking business. That’s entirely between you and your stomach. I only care about your eating being enjoyable, nourishing, and satisfying.

At the same time, especially if you’re of the “Oops, I forgot to eat lunch!” variety, it’s important that food be reasonably convenient to you, so that you can continue having regular meals at regular times.

That still doesn’t mean it should be staring you straight in the face. It means that, if you’re busy and don’t have much time or energy to cook, you should find some quick and easy meals, even frozen or instant stuff…and then put them away until it’s time to eat.

It means that, if you sit at a desk all day long and often forget to take a lunch break, or bring a lunch to work, you should get some tasty, filling snacks…and put them in your desk drawer until it’s time to eat.

Or create a snack box.

I have a snack box. It’s where I store the food that I eat with my clients during sessions. Because we’re dealing with food issues like guilt, or shame, or vague fears about “unhealthiness,” a lot of this food is of the delicious, immediate-gratification variety. Otherwise known as “junk food.”

I discovered long ago that leaving this food just sitting on my desk – a Snickers here, a bag of chips there – instigated both Jeffrey and me to primal feeding sessions of the type not seen since Wild Kingdom. Which was rather inconvenient, since then I would have to go back out and buy the food all over again, and also since we’d not be very hungry for dinner. Which is a crappy feeling.

The solution cost like two bucks at Ikea – one of those cardboard cassette boxes with a lid.

I set that puppy on my desk, all the tasty snacks went in there, and it was just…no longer an issue. Not because we were disallowed from eating the tasty food (we can still raid it, in a pinch, and we still sometimes do), but because it suddenly just didn’t occur to us anymore.

This works because, first of all, neither one of us is a restrained eater, meaning we’re not abnormally preoccupied with food – and second, because it is no longer bossing us around by gazing into our hungry ape souls.

When we do decide to open the snack box, it’s because we really want that food, and it’s going to be awesome enough to be worth the hassle. Win-win.

That said, now for the figurative aspects of putting food in its place.

Food is only one important aspect of your life.

It is necessary for survival, yes, just like sleeping and going to the bathroom and drinking water. But, ordinarily, none of those activities consume our thoughts when we are not doing those things, or preparing to very soon do those things.

When we do start to become preoccupied with them, it’s usually because something is out of whack – we’re stuck in traffic with no bathroom in sight; we’re burning the candle at both ends to get a project done, or to nurse a baby; we’re hiking in hot weather and the water bottle is empty.

So, what does that mean for food? When you are preoccupied with it, outside of planning for meals to happen, or actually sitting and eating, then it could be a sign that something is out of whack.

Normally those things are either 1) you’re not getting enough to eat, or 2) you’re not getting enough permission to eat.

If you’re not getting enough to eat, it may just be a practical issue – you need more time. You need more money. Or you need to be a bit more organized about getting groceries into the house and food on the table.

You need to make getting fed more of a priority, just like most people normally do with sleep and going to the bathroom.

When you gotta go, you gotta go – and when you gotta eat, you gotta eat.

It may also stem from a lack of permission, which is the second issue, and which is something I see very often in my clients.

You need to give yourself permission – by saying explicitly to yourself that you have it, and then following through as though you believe it – to eat as much as you want. To eat the food you really, really like. And to eat frequently enough that you’re not starving in between times.

Sometimes a lack of permission is present even when you are getting enough (or sometimes too much!) to eat – though that sounds totally counter-intuitive. Even so, merely the hint of a thought of possible future food restriction, maybe, at some point, on the Fourth of Vague – that can be enough to set off the alarm bells in your crazy monkey brain.

And here’s how it responds:

“OMG SHE DISAPPROVES. MAYBE SHE WON’T FEED ME AGAIN. WHEN WILL WE EAT? WHAT WILL WE EAT? WILL IT BE GOOD, OR WILL IT BE THAT BLAND CRAP SHE EATS WHEN SHE FEELS BAD ABOUT HERSELF? WILL IT BE ENOUGH? CAN WE GET DESSERT JUST THIS ONCE? MAYBE WE SHOULD EAT THE LEFTOVERS RIGHT NOW JUST IN CASE.”

This is not only the sound of crazy-monkey-alarm-bells, it is the sound of food taking over your life in a completely inappropriate, and totally useless, way.

How do you get over it? Present yourself with enough tasty food at regular times, and then give yourself the permission to eat it. Even give yourself the permission to overeat it, since that is probably going to happen anyway for a while, until your crazy monkey brain starts to trust you again.

You may as well short-circuit the shame spiral, right now, and interrupt the feast-famine cycle. And since it’s hard to interrupt the panic eating part of the cycle, target the thing you can control, and stop beating yourself up about it. And for God’s sake, stop threatening yourself with thoughts of future restriction.

Once you’ve calmed down and stopped obsessing, you can work on directing your attention toward other things – like pre-planning some of your meals for the week. Like asking yourself what you’re hungry for, and then putting in some effort to make that happen. Like making a list of what you need to stock your cabinets and fridge, and then actually going and buying those things.

Like eating with a reasonable amount of attentiveness, and pausing to give yourself explicit permission.

You know – useful stuff. In manageable quantities. Right where it belongs.

Even in the intuitive eating world (see #7), it’s presented as something undesirable, something that indicates you’re emotionally unstable and Not Very Good at Eating, but most of all, something that causes you to get fat. I’ve even heard emotional eating blamed for the Obesity Epidemic ™ (I’m not going to address that here, except to say: I Really Doubt It’s That Simple.)

But, to be honest, eating is inherently emotional. First, in the sense that it provides us pleasure, otherwise we probably wouldn’t take all the time and effort to find food, prepare it, and eat it. Because it is so essential to our survival as a species, it has, of course, become embedded in our brain’s pleasure-pathways as something intensely enjoyable (much like, ahem, other species-propagating activities.)

So whether you think you’re eating for emotional reasons or not, whether you’re doing it intentionally or not, all eating is fundamentally emotional.

On top of that basic biological foundation, we can place the obelisk of culture – all cultures use food as a way of bonding, expressing aesthetic values, celebrating regional flora and fauna, and marking both sad and happy occasions. To attempt to divorce food from this context and view it purely as biological fuel is not only overly simplistic, it is practically impossible.

This is a large reason why strict diets often do not play well with real life – because as primates, we live social lives, and as Homo sapiens, our social lives are organized into culture. We run into it at every turn: going out for coffee or lunch with a friend who needs some quality time; eating as a family on a Wednesday night; popcorn at the movies; holiday dinners; Shrove Tuesday; casserole to a grieving neighbour; cake at a birthday party.

When dieting turns you away from these traditions, or significantly complicates them for you, that is isolating. Sometimes it’s necessary, when it comes to a food allergy or therapeutic diet, or ethical and religious food restrictions, but its impact can be minimized, or it only centres around a limited set of foods to begin with, and the outcome is vital to survival or one’s moral values.

But I cannot help feeling that, when a voluntary weight-loss diet (by cutting out or significantly reducing broad swaths of the diet) imposes such demands on you, it’s destructive. It’s isolation from the larger culture and a way of bonding with others, done through emotional blackmail of the evillest sort: No one will love you unless you’re thin, or at least repenting of your fatness by making a visible, distinctly pleasure-renouncing effort to become thin.

Which makes dieting, itself, a form of “emotional eating” – eating a certain way in an effort to gain love and acceptance.

But, the way that emotional eating is most commonly understood and portrayed is eating directly in response to an acute emotional upset – stress, trauma, anger, sadness, rejection, worry. This type of eating is institutionalized in media through the trope of Sad Girl Eats Ice Cream from Container; or Harried Woman Eats Chocolate with Eyes Closed; and even Woman Laughs Alone with Salad.

(Which brings me to an important pet peeve, that “healthy eating” is never portrayed in images by anything other than FRUITS AND VEGGIES!!! and, most often, a white lady eating/cooking them. However, one cannot live by salad and laughter alone. Not for very long, anyway.)

I find this annoying because it presents emotional eating in a good-food, bad-food light (and images of orgasmic chocolate experiences have become part of that good-food narrative now that chocolate, or specifically, dark chocolate, has been officially approved by the Foodguilt-Industrial Complex), but also in a very gender-stereotyped way.

Women eat when sad. Women orgasm for chocolate. Women eat virtuous salads.

Men eat things like Manly Steaks and Beef Jerky and Dos Equis and Delicious Bacon and Dr. Pepper Ten (and they wash their faces with soap that comes in gunmetal grey packaging, and their shower gels don’t contain moisturizers, they use HYDRATORS, and they don’t even wash, anyway, they DETAIL because their bodies are machines, MANLY EMOTIONLESS MACHINES.) And they do it all between kickin’ ass and takin’ names. Women, meanwhile, eat and moisturize between bouts of laundry and bathroom-scrubbing.

Why yes, I have been drinking many cups of coffee. Emotionally.

Anyhow. The thing with emotional eating is that we, as a society, are in denial about it. Because it’s bad to have and express emotions, somehow, and that leads us all to do this thing that every single person in the world and all of human history has done at some point, in a secretive, guilty, furtive way.

Herein lies the problem.

When you are secretive, guilty, and furtive about your eating, it is not satisfying.

I absolutely agree that eating cannot solve life circumstances or emotional problems, but it can provide pleasure, comfort, a shared experience, and enough distraction to distance you temporarily from the problem at hand – and this is not a bad thing. We all need things like this in our lives – it is a legitimate coping mechanism for when things get a bit overwhelming. And, if anything, food is one of the more benign substances we can use for this purpose.

Used exclusively for escape, no, it is not healthy. But, ironically, forbidding emotional eating may actually cause people to use it this way – forbidden fruit syndrome being what it is. Forbidding it is also going to distract us from doing the thing that can help – using emotional eating as a trigger to investigate our emotions, and to acknowledge what is actually going on that food can’t fix.

Because we will be too busy feeling guilty and trying to hide the evidence to matter-of-factly assess the situation – or even to enjoy the goddamned food in the first place.

So – emotional eating: learn to do it well. Here’s how.

1) Acknowledge that something is going on for you emotionally. Take a moment to name it, if you can. It can help to write this down on a piece of paper – even just one word or phrase, like “sad” or “bored” or “freaking out.”

2) Pick a food that is really, really enjoyable – not just the random thing sitting on the counter, or even the thing that you always go to, out of habit, without asking yourself “What do I really want right now?” Get enough of it, too – you can always save extras for later, by storing them in a convenient but not distracting place (we’ll talk about this next time.)

3) Find a comfy place, without external distractions, to sit. (Put on pajamas or comfy pants too, if practical.) A recliner or couch is awesome. Turn off the TV and the computer, or turn your chair away. Close the book or the magazine or the newspaper. This will only take a few minutes, and then you can go back to what you were doing.

4) Remind yourself that eating is morally neutral – you are not doing something “bad” by eating delicious food. You are simply being human. (And if you have worries about the ethics of food production, you can address those things with more upstream, systemic approaches – beating yourself up at the point of food-on-plate, or depriving yourself of foods that matter a lot to you, won’t fix a problematic food system.)

5) Give yourself full permission to have as much as you want. Say it out loud if you can, or say it internally, sort of like saying grace before a meal.

5) Eat the food. Pay attention to how it looks, smells, and tastes, how it feels in your mouth and throat, and how it settles in your stomach. Give yourself the mental space to just have the physical experience of eating.

6) Pay attention to whether the food reminds you of anything, has family or other associations, brings up familiar feelings and memories.

7) Your mind will wander to random things – let it. Just check in, periodically, with the food and your body.

8) Eat until you are truly, honestly satisfied. Even if that means going back for more.

9) Afterward, assess how you feel again – have you felt comforted? Do you have a little distance? Is everything feeling a little less…intense? What else do you need to take care of yourself? Go and do that, or make a promise to yourself to do it later, when it’s practical. Write it down.

In short, emotional eating can be healthy and useful – if you do it with your eyes open, and short-circuit the shame spiral with permission.

This will take practice – guilt is not something you can unlearn with one try. If you do it consistently, daily or a few times a week, even when you are not in emotional distress, you will be ready for the times when you are.

If you’ve been dieting for a long time, or just eating chaotically and inconsistently due to practical or emotional constraints, you are very likely out of touch with hunger signals. It can help to have a primer to guide you in first identifying them for what they are – and what counts as hunger might surprise you a little.

Ellyn Satter describes the drive to eat as both hunger (physical) and appetite (aesthetic and emotional.) Hunger is what drives you to seek out food in the first place, to just get the job done with feeding, but appetite is what mostly guides the type of food you choose – something salty, something crunchy, something meaty…or something creamy, soft, and sweet.

Other intuitive eating approaches describe these drives as “mouth hunger” and “stomach hunger,” which makes a lot of sense and is easy to remember, but which, I think, leaves something to be desired.

For one thing, splitting the two into stomach and mouth leads to the tendency to de-legitimize and de-prioritize “mouth hunger.” It seems frivolous to our ears, because, in this culture we tend to give short shrift (at least theoretically, if not in practice) to mere food wants and desires, and give precedence to real, honest-to-goodness Nutritional Needs and Physical Requirements – of which your stomach alone is the judge.

Through personal experience, I’ve come up with a different version of the hunger/appetite, “mouth hunger”/”stomach hunger” dichotomy – both of which closely parallel mind/body dualism, which I still use to describe things to my students, since it is the language we largely speak as a culture, but which I try to get away from in theoretical work.

It’s a bit more complicated, but to me it legitimizes three different forms of hunger, all of which deserve equal attention. They are:

1. Mechanical Hunger
2. Aesthetic Hunger
3. Chemical Hunger

Mechanical Hunger is the easiest to understand, and sometimes to recognize – it’s the feeling of an empty stomach, often accompanied by growling or churning, or a sense of hollowness or tightness in the stomach. (Keeping in mind the physical reality of the stomach – that it hovers higher up than most of us visualize, just below where your ribcage parts, close under the bust.) This is the hunger that, if you ignore it long enough, can go away altogether, or get really uncomfortable and lead into the desperation of Chemical Hunger (we’ll talk about that in a minute.) It’s something that many people I work with haven’t felt in a long time, but which is probably the most obvious of all the types of hunger.

Aesthetic Hunger is the longing for food – similar to what Ellyn Satter refers to as appetite, and what intuitive eating approaches refer to as “mouth hunger.” I use the word “aesthetic” because I believe the need for pleasure in food mirrors the human need for beauty – in this sense, the beauty of how food tastes and feels. But it’s more than just needing the taste and physical feel of food, it’s also eating for emotional reasons – celebration, grief, comfort, nostalgia. It is the need of enjoyment, since enjoyment is actually a critical part of good nutrition.

In national food surveys over many years, people consistently answer that the number one reason they choose food is because of how it tastes – enjoyment. The enjoyment of food is intrinsic motivation to eat, pure and simple – which means it’s more productive to work with it than against it. The need for enjoyment drives people to seek out flavours and textures, which in turn leads to experimentation and nutritional variety – a critical component of nutritional excellence.

Aesthetic hunger also drives people to practice their regional and cultural foodways, which in turn comprise a crucial part of one’s cultural identity and sense of social belonging (one of the fundamental steps on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.) And it drives emotional eating – again, a cultural practice institutionalized in the form of birthday parties, holidays, wakes, but also a legitimate psychological coping mechanism. And this is where eating competence parts ways with many other eating approaches.

Eating competence recognizes and legitimizes comfort eating as a thing that can actually do some good. It is not the dirty, shameful little secret that you think you’re hiding – it is something that all of us do. The problem, as Ellyn Satter explains, only comes when people do it poorly. They do it furtively, guiltily, without proper attention and enjoyment, and end up with more shame than comfort when all is said and done.

When done well, comfort eating can’t solve the underlying problems you’re experiencing, but it can distract you, soothe you, and provide a bright spot of much-needed – and harmless – pleasure on a dark day. Compared to many of the other distractions people may seek when they need an emotional lift, comfort eating is truly benign and can even be helpful. More than that – it is damn near universal. Lesson Four will go into more detail about comfort eating, and how to do it well.

Bottom line – aesthetic hunger is a legitimate need, since emotional health is a hugely important part of overall health, and because “when the joy goes out of eating, nutrition suffers.”

Chemical Hunger refers to the feeling that lies beyond the garden-variety grumbly stomach. It is generally subtle, but if not attended to, can become a deafening roar. It is the sense that “something is missing” or something didn’t quite hit the spot. I often get this feeling when I haven’t eaten the amount of fruits and vegetables I need for several meals or several days. I also get this feeling after a stretch of illness where my appetite is shot and I can’t eat very much – when I start to recover and refeed myself, even when I eat enough that my stomach is physically full, there is still a gnawing sense in the background that my needs are not fully met, and it’s going to take several more meals before I get there.

Lastly, chemical hunger can come in the form I referred to earlier, in Mechanical Hunger gone too far – low blood sugar. That shaky, weak, lightheaded feeling you get when you’ve forgotten to eat entirely, or gotten stuck in traffic between work and dinner. These are not feelings that come directly from the stomach, but from your blood, your glycogen stores, and even sometimes depleted vitamin and mineral stores.

When chemical hunger is fulfilled, you won’t only get full, and the food won’t only taste and feel good, but you’ll feel satisfied for a while after eating, and maybe even get an overarching sense of vague well-being that follows you around over the days or months that your eating continues to be consistent, varied, tasty, and nourishing.

When you put regular meals, and the permission to eat them, into place, you will start to feel these signals more clearly. You will also start to learn what you need to do in order to satisfy them, by non-judgmentally observing what various foods do for you. You’ll notice which foods give you an emotional lift or satisfy a flavour craving, which foods and amounts give you the sense of fulness you like to have in your stomach, and what foods and combinations provide that sense of having “hit the spot.” You’ll also be far less likely to get into desperation hunger – the chemical hunger that indicates an acute deficiency of glucose, or longer-term deficiency of micronutrients.

When you make your hunger happy – in all forms – you’ll be healthier physically and emotionally. And you’ll be a lot closer to eating competence.

Even after you start giving yourself permission.

I imagine that, inside all of us, is a small, vulnerable animal (one of my wonderful students calls it the “fuzzy self”) who just needs to know it will be taken care of, and that it will be fed.

And who’s responsible for the care and feeding of fuzzy self? Yep, it’s you.

If you no longer feel clear hunger or fullness signals (aside from desperation hunger or uncomfortable overfullness), there’s probably been a breach of trust, and it’s probably been going on for a while.

If you want to get back to a state of normalcy with hunger and satiety, and to regain comfort with the idea of eating, then it’s time to repair that relationship.

But rebuilding trust requires more than just saying the words of permission; it requires action.

One of my favourite quotes from Epictetus is -

“True happiness is a verb. It is the ongoing, dynamic performance of worthy deeds.”

Part of growing up emotionally is accepting that actions speak louder than words. It is accepting that happiness is not a passively euphoric state of mind randomly visited upon you by the fates – that true happiness is, indeed, something you build from the raw material of your behaviours, and the nitty-gritty of your daily choices. None of which may be all that fun in the immediate-term, but produce tranquility, contentment, and satisfaction over time.

Happiness is an investment of effort.

Love, including self-love, works the same way. As an adolescent, love is the crushing force of intense, uncontrollable sentiment. As a grown-up, you take up love as a practice, something you repair and build over time with kind words, kind actions, responsibility and consideration.

“Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.”

-Erich Fromm

And that’s where we come to the damaged relationship between your mind and body. In order to heal this relationship, you need to express self-love in the form of action.

Even on days when there are no attendant warm fuzzies, you need to stand by a commitment to care for yourself – even if, at first, you must start from the humble position of promising just not to harm yourself any longer. Guess what?

Not eating, whether you do it intentionally or through neglect, is an act of self-harm.

When it comes to food, here is how you fix your relationship to your body: commit to feeding yourself on a regular basis.

It sounds ridiculously obvious, perhaps even simple, but you wouldn’t believe what a struggle it can be, both for practical reasons and for emotional ones.

In a practical sense, the way you implement regular meals and snacks is going to depend a lot on your schedule and where you spend most of your time. Working from home is a lot different than being in an office, or on the road, or at school.

It’s probably the hardest step to take, and it is also probably the most critical. It is the way you live out your intention to stop dieting, to stop restriction, to break the scarcity mindset around food, and to actually communicate to that small, vulnerable animal inside: “I want you to live. You are worth taking care of.”

If you are not eating at regular times already – if you are either grazing constantly throughout the day, or forgetting to eat for long periods of time; simply not eating enough altogether, or alternating eating too little with eating way too much for comfort – the way to begin doing this is to take one step at a time.

Pick one time of the day when you will eat. Pick a time that you know will be the easiest to implement – when you already have a scheduled break during day, or before the day gets busy, or after all your other commitments are finished.

Treat it the way you would treat a standing appointment. It should be something that you know you can make happen, at roughly the same time (give yourself an hour of leeway, because life does happen) every single day.

I literally need to mark my eating times in my daily appointment book because my schedule varies so wildly, and because I eat meals and snacks with students as part of my work.

Write in your day planner, set an alarm on your phone, an appointment reminder on your computer. A piece of paper taped to the fridge, a reminder on your desk. A string tied around your finger. Whatever works.

When I worked a typical nine-to-five job, I made a commitment to take my legally-entitled morning, lunch, and afternoon breaks. When I had an even less structured schedule than I have now, I used a rough interval system of eating every 3 to 4 hours, based on what time I woke up and had breakfast. I checked the clock, and at the end of each meal, I made a mental note that I would need to eat again at X o’clock. Then I simply moved on until next time.

And when I say “meal,” all I mean is the food you would normally eat, gathered together at one time, in one place. You do not have to cook anything, or use real silverware, or sit down at the table. Eat whatever you want to, wherever you want to. If you were going to graze on chips and cookies throughout the day anyway, put the chips and cookies together in front of you and eat them at the appointed time. Then put them away and move on.

The food itself is not important at this stage of the game – we are still working on the bottom level of the hierarchy of food needs.

Through the rest of the day, let yourself eat however you would normally eat – graze, forget to eat, whatever – but when it comes to that one time you have marked aside for an established meal, put food in front of yourself, give yourself permission, and take a least one bite. That’s enough to establish and maintain the habit. Take that bite while you’re working, while you’re standing up, while you’re sitting in your car in the parking lot – I do not care.

Mindfulness is not what we’re working on right now – just make eating happen at one, specified time of the day.

Do this for a full week. Then add one more time during the day that you can make eating happen, and do the exact same thing for another full week. Eat whatever you are already eating, or whatever sounds good to you.

Don’t worry about nutritional balance for now – that will come later. Taking some time for now to set up the framework, even if your diet looks wildly unbalanced for a while, is not going to hurt you. Your body has the ability to balance out nutrition over the long-term – months or years – so that having a perfectly balanced diet at every meal, on every plate, is unnecessary. In fact, right now, trying to do that could trip you up.

Add in meal after meal, snack after snack, week by week. Give yourself permission to eat whatever and as much as you want, and then put food in your mouth at predictable times every single day. That’s it.

Take your legally-mandated 15-minute breaks at work and have a fucking snack so you’re not completely useless at work. I know it looks better to somehow be inefficiently shuffling paper and making rash decisions in the office, but trust me, you’ll be more effective at your job if you just have some damn cookies or half a tuna sandwich and move on, already.

Eat while you’re working, if you have to. Sneak food, if you have to – but just eat.

As you build on meals and snacks by the week, pay attention to times during the day when you get consistently tired, cranky, spacy, or preoccupied with food (for me, this is the afternoon.) This is a sign that you need to work a meal or a snack into that time – so do it.

Most people end up eating between four and six times a day – this is completely normal.

If you need an afternoon snack before you head home, so that you can be sane enough to get dinner, do it. Turn off your computer for the day, or turn your chair away from it, and eat a little something before you leave work. Eat on the bus or the subway, or while you’re walking. Sit in your car for five minutes in the parking lot and have a granola bar. You’ll be safer on the road, and making dinner won’t seem like such a gargantuan chore.

This is eating like a grown-up – being matter-of-fact about your needs, and taking the time to meet them. It is loving yourself in the most important sense of the word.

You do this for your pets, your children, sometimes even the other adults around you – you can certainly do it for yourself, and for the small, scared animal inside who needs to know you are trustworthy.

It can be a long, drawn-out process, full of tears and frustration and mistakes. There’s also good stuff in there, but make no mistake, it is not an easy task.

And that’s why writing is so nice. It’s more abstract, it’s less emotional, and it helps me to reinforce the nuts and bolts of what I do. So, both for myself, and for all of you out there who just want to know how to do it, already without all the hand-holding and emotions, here you go. Here’s how it works.

Lesson One: Permission

There is one golden rule to normal eating, and it is this: no one decides what or how much goes in your mouth but you.

You are an adult. You are an autonomous human being. You make your own choices with food. I do not care how much you weigh, or whether you have a disease or an allergy – you have unconditional permission to eat anything in any amount.

There are no laws, legal or moral, to stop you.

That’s what being an autonomous human being is all about.

Even if you have a disease or an allergy, it is your choice to either follow the therapeutic dietary recommendations for your condition, or not. (It is also your choice to figure out what works for you, personally, since not all therapeutic diet recommendations are written in stone. Some may not even be based on good evidence.)

Would I recommend that you eat something that will cause you immediate death or illness? No, of course not – but that is not my choice to make. It is yours, and only yours.

Even in the most extreme scenario, you make that choice. Is it a fun choice? If it’s between peanuts or death, no. It’s not fun at all. But from a philosophical perspective, it is still a choice, and you are still the only one who can make it.

You also have the unconditional right to eat. Eating is a human right, no matter how fat you are, no matter how screwed up around food you think you are, no matter how much you know or don’t know about nutrition, no matter what your concerned family or friends say, no matter who harasses you on the street.

You have the right to eat, because you are a human being.

You also need to eat, because you are a human being. There is no person out there, fat or thin, who can live a healthy, functional life without eating a reasonable amount of food.

There is a misconception that somehow being fat beyond a certain arbitrary line drawn in imaginary BMI sand means you have the superhuman ability, and the moral obligation, to live without food. Which is total bullshit.

Quick nutrition interlude: your body, every cell in your body but particularly your brain, runs on sugar. Glucose is the preferred day-to-day gasoline that makes you go. And, believe it or not, our body only has a short-term store (usually measured in hours) of glucose to draw on.

Which means? You need to eat. Regularly. You’re not going to be able to think clearly for very long without it, and you’re going to feel like ass, physically.

To sum up:

• You need to eat.
• You have the right to eat.
• Only you can choose what you eat.

All of which can be distilled into a single concept: permission. Unconditional permission to eat whatever, and however much, you want. Healthy food? Junk food? A lot? A little? It’s your choice. You have permission.

Because we don’t live in a world that naturally encourages your autonomy around food, you will need to put this into practice. To put permission into practice, you need to say it to yourself every time you sit down to eat:

“I’m allowed to eat this, and I can have as much as I want.”

Permission works both ways, too – you do not have to eat anything you don’t want.

Ever see a toddler spit out strained peas against his mother’s best efforts? That’s you.

You do not have to eat anything you don’t like, don’t want, or aren’t in the mood for. No matter who is pushing it, who thinks it’s for your own good, or what magazine says it’s the new superfood. You do not have to.

You don’t have to count calories, or Points, or measure portions out and leave the table feeling hungry. You also don’t have to get so full that you feel uncomfortable, just to assuage someone’s insecurity about their cooking, or their guilt for being an absent parent, or whatever.

You do not have to clean every plate in sight because someone, somewhere in the world, doesn’t have enough to eat. You are not the Human Garbage Disposal, and you can’t solve world hunger by eating leftovers.

You are responsible only to yourself, and your stomach. You are allowed to eat only what feels right, in amounts that feel right.

Say it to yourself – “I’m allowed to eat this, and I can have as much (or as little) as I want.”

Say it like you’d say grace over your food. Even if you don’t believe yourself at first. Even if it feels stupid and pointless. You do it, and you do it again and again and again.

Why? Because it is absolutely true.

So, here’s the takeaway – write a permission note to yourself, right now. Put it on a Post-It, or make a big sign, or embroider something. It doesn’t matter.

Put it in your own words. Put it somewhere you’ll see it and remember it. And then say it, either out loud or in your head, every time you eat, as often as you can remember.

Ahem.

This is kind of last-minute, but the long weekend really threw me off.

For a long time, I’ve been doing individual sessions teaching people how to eat normally after giving up dieting (in addition to writing this blog, of course.) Doing individual sessions means that they are pretty expensive, and it limits the number of people I can help.

Luckily, back in 2008, someone had the brilliant idea of doing the same program I do, but for small groups. They published this paper on it (it works.)

So, at the end of July, I started seeing small groups. I see more people this way, and it’s cheaper for them.

It also works, and has the bonus of being EXTREMELY FUN.

It’s sort of like going to fat camp, except online, and the point is not losing weight.

Mostly, the point is figuring out how to eat well, while at the same time laughing your head off with other fat people.

So this is what I’m doing now, and some new groups are starting for the fall. We’re calling it Eat Without Drama because, well, that’s what it’s about: eating without all the drama.

One group starts TOMORROW NIGHT (Saturday morning, if you’re in Australia or NZ), and the others start on Monday the 12th.

For the sales pitch, the times, the price, and the big buttons to push, go here.

If it’s not for you, no worries. You don’t need to buy my shit! We’re cool.

That’s all. Thank you for your attention.

*mic screech*

• The bottom line is that you provide yourself the opportunity to eat at regular times.
• The bottom line is that, at those times, you give yourself free reign to eat WHAT and HOW MUCH you want.

Until you’ve got those things down, don’t even bother with “nutrition.” It will only fuck you up.

Eating at regular times doesn’t mean “three measured meals with no snacks in between.” That is some depriving, dictatorial bullshit right there, pushed by groups like Overeaters Anonymous. Do NOT mistake any of what I’m saying here with any of the many, many tricks diet programs have pulled on you to try to get you to eat less.

I don’t want you to eat less. I want you to eat well.

Eating well means eating in a way that feels good, both emotionally and physically. It, emphatically, means getting enough to eat, and getting enough of the foods you really like.

Eating at regular times means, for most people, three meals with one or two or three snacks thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, most adults have somehow internalized the idea that snacks are bad.

Stop right there. Snacks are not bad — snacks are essential.

Snacks are just as, and sometimes more, important than meals. Snacks get you through the period of desperation between lunch and dinner. Snacks give you a chance to eat some of the fun, bizarre, ridiculous, delicious, non-staple foods (like Cheetos) that it might otherwise be hard to incorporate into a fully-orchestrated meal. (They can also help to regulate your blood sugar, if you want to get all technical.)

They legitimize the hunger that you naturally feel at the mid-morning lull, the mid-afternoon lull, and the late-evening munchy time in front of the TV. We all feel hunger at one or all of these times. There’s no sense in denying it, so we may as well admit it, make it official, and get on with our lives.

Snacks are legitimate, snacks are official, and when you decide that you are going to eat them and make them a non-negotiable part of taking care of yourself with food, you can stop feeling guilty about them immediately.

So let’s do that right now: you are going to eat snacks. (Or snax! Because it’s so much more fun to say. Snax!) Why? Because snacks — official, pre-planned snax! — are part of life. They just are.

Providing yourself with regular opportunities to eat means that you will either pick rough times (like 6am, 9, 12pm, 3, 6, and 9pm again), or pick rough intervals (two or three or four hours) at which you will sit down with food in front of you.

You do not have to eat. But you have to sit down and look at that food and give yourself real, unconditional permission to eat if you want. And to go back for seconds, or thirds, if you need them. Or to eat half of it and change your mind and throw it away. Or to take a couple of bites and hand it to your husband. (Ahem. What?) Or wrap it back up and stick it in the fridge or freezer for another time.

Sound ridiculous and pointless? It’s not. It’s a crucial part of rebuilding trust with your body. It’s caring for your body as you would care for a child.

It’s making a promise to yourself: I will feed you. I will love you. I will let you grow.

Until the promise is made, and kept, and a relationship has been re-established, you cannot go forward toward the top of the pyramid without feeling scared, rebellious, resentful, and suspicious of yourself.

For now, build the bottom of that pyramid. Next time, we’ll dance at the top.

I do tend to score high on the validated eating competence inventory, but I am far, far, faaaaar from perfect. In fact, I’m not sure perfection in eating even exists. Or that I’d want it to.

I’d like to consider this blog more than just a lot of blah-blah where I tell people what to do. As you know, I’m not super-big on anyone telling anyone else what to do. But when you put yourself out there with the big old n-word (“nutritionist”), there come a lot of expectations, and also the assumption that You Know What You Are Doing.

All I really know is that I have an idea of what makes eating work for me, and what research and clinical observation has shown to make eating work for lots of other people. But what that actually looks like in each person’s day-to-day life is different.

Frankly, eating well doesn’t happen for me every day. Hell, there are periods of weeks or even months where my eating looks pretty damn incompetent. When I went through a big old nasty depression and alternated forgetting to eat entirely with eating to the point of numbness; when I lived in a place where the kitchen was tiny and inhabited by roaches; when I didn’t have money to eat much other than oatmeal, bananas, tuna sandwiches, beans and rice.

What I’m trying to say is, though I teach this stuff for a living, I’m still working my way through it. And likely will be for the rest of my life.

I consider this blog a series of reminders to myself of the lessons I have learned about eating:

• That we all have the right and the need to eat, no matter how much we weigh.
• That we must give ourselves truly unconditional permission to eat whatever we want, in whatever amounts we want, in order to find out what food works for us in what amounts. (Even though that is scary as hell, I know.)
• And that “discipline” should only ever enter eating when it comes to the nuts and bolts of self-care: buying groceries. Making food. Taking the time to eat it, and to settle in and notice that we are, indeed, eating it. And sitting with the uncomfortable feelings, maybe even the shame and guilt, that come along with doing those things in a world that tells you to avoid eating at every opportunity.

For the record, I think of eating competence not as an objective measure of what or how you eat, but as eating in a way that supports you both physically and emotionally.

For a lot of people, the formal description of eating competence (feeling good about food, eating food you enjoy in satisfying amounts, and doing the work to ensure you get fed regularly) is that way. And when I describe my own incompetence with eating, it has less to do with the objective behaviours than how it make me feel — tired or rundown, physically uncomfortable, taking little joy or comfort in eating.

It does not mean that I am a bad person eating in a bad way, or that it causes long-term harm (you might be shocked at some of the diets people manage to survive on, well into old age.)

What it does mean is that I’m eating in an unhappy way. And not that I’m obligated to do better, but that I do deserve better. We all do.

We also deserve to be trusted that we will do better, when we’re willing and able to.

I guess I had my suspicions about what issues would be most popular. I expected maybe people would want to learn how to stop eating when full? And, yes, that was a pretty popular wish. Or maybe, how to eat nutritiously (or, to use the phrase from Satter’s Hierarchy of Food Needs, “instrumentally”) without driving oneself bonkers? And, yes, that came up too.

But the most popular wish of all, the one that came up most often, was one that wasn’t even really on my radar when I asked the question – despite the fact that it was something I have struggled with myself, and something that was a key lesson I learned when I went through the Learn to Eat process myself several years ago.

You know what it was?

How to eat in front of other people.

By this, people do not, of course, mean how to put food in their mouth with other people present, or what foods they should choose when eating with others, but how to stop feeling so damn self-conscious about eating in public. Or with friends and family. Or with strangers at a party.

This not only makes perfect sense to me, having tussled with the same thing in the past, but it’s something that comes up again and again, now, with my clients.

So, I thought, yes – of course! Let’s write a little primer on how to eat in front of other people. And I have.

It’s a pdf, made with love…and with absolutely no clue how to make a pdf. I’ll email it to you if you fill in the form (the one that says “Join THE LIST”) over there on the right.

Alrighty then! If you take a look, let me know what you think. Or if you have things to say about eating in public, please do so in comments.

What scandalizes me is how people often interpret this message. Over and over again, this is how people respond:

“I can’t do that because I would eat cake 24/7.”

“But you’d overeat all the time!”

“I’d eat such an unbalanced diet I’d make myself sick.”

And I can only figure that when I say, “Eat food. Stuff you like. As much as you want,” what people actually hear is:

This interpretation says some pretty breathtaking things about our culture’s assumptions about food.

For one thing, it says that we believe tasty food and healthy food are not the same thing. And that, if you were to eat exclusively tasty food from here on out, you’d be eating a nutritionally reprehensible diet for the rest of your life.

To which my internal peanut gallery goes, “Buuuuh?”

Not only does every food, including junk food, contain useful nutrition, but more importantly — nutritious food is often fucking delicious. If this is not your experience of food, then one of a couple of things might be going on:

Maybe you need to reassess what “nutritious” means to you by learning a bit of Nutrition 101 — What’s a carb? What’s fat? What is protein? Where do you find them? (A: anywhere there is something edible.) And what do they do for you? (A: pretty much everything.)

Or perhaps you haven’t ever encountered “healthy” food in anything other than a guilt-ridden context — and thus have always felt resentful toward it and, as a result, your primary nutrition concern is to either be on the wagon, or off it and eating as rebelliously as possible.

Maybe you’ve truly never learned to enjoy more than a very few foods, and your palate needs expanding. Maybe you’re under some kind of therapeutic restriction that you haven’t yet been reconciled with.

Or maybe you only allow yourself to eat when you are desperately hungry — in which situation you are more likely to reach for calorically-dense “bad” foods because you’re at the bottom of the pyramid. And, at that stage, getting enough food = getting enough calories.

Any way you spin it, something is interfering with you and your food.

For a second thing, those assumptions indicate that we believe everyone wants to overeat, all the time. I don’t know if this is an assumption borne of a lifetime of restrained eating and constant hunger, or a misunderstanding of how much food it is actually appropriate to eat (A: however much supports your health and leaves you feeling satisfied, regardless of weight), or a belief that food is addictive, or whether it has a moral underpinning, but either way — it’s an inaccurate and pretty shitty thing to believe about humanity (and food) in general.

If you are like most human beings, you probably seek pleasure and avoid pain, within certain moral constraints — you like to feel good and you dislike feeling bad.

When it comes to food, at least in the immediate term, it’s pretty obvious that people like food that tastes good, and dislike food that tastes bad. But there is more to food than just our immediate experience of it.

Those of you with lactose intolerance, especially, will understand when I say:

If you’ve never, ever stopped to think about how food makes you feel after eating it, maybe you’ve been so caught up in the shame-spiral of restraint and disinhibition that you haven’t had much mental real estate to devote to the idea. Or maybe you’ve been eating according to externally-imposed nutrition rules and guidelines without really pausing to notice how you actually feel when you eat that way. Or you’re in the midst of the great divorce. And you’re not alone.

But learning how food makes you feel, both immediately and a little way down the road, is a fundamental part of learning how to care for yourself.

In my mind, food that makes you feel weird or off — no matter how good it tastes right now — isn’t food you can unconditionally love. Amounts of food that make you feel bad aren’t amounts of food you actually want to eat. And if you find yourself continually sacrificing your well-being for the lovely, immediate feel and taste of food, it’s a sign that something has gone wrong.

I eat, without reservation, basically whatever I want. Having a really relaxed attitude toward food, and unconditional permission to eat it, has allowed me to stop thinking so much about what I should or shouldn’t eat, and instead to notice how food tastes, as well as how it makes me feel. Here’s a brief sample of the observations I have accumulated, as a result:

I like the taste of Coca-Cola a lot. But it also makes me feel thirsty and a little weird sometimes, so I drink it occasionally, along with food, and often along with plain water and lots of ice. I feel better if I eat a high-fibre breakfast that contains a good dollop of fat (in the form of butter or cream) — it’s more satisfying, tastes better, and stays with me longer. I feel better, more energetic, less run-down, and more satisfied if I eat vegetables with dinner. I need a good serving of protein with lunch and dinner. If I don’t eat an afternoon snack, I feel sleepy. I feel and function better when I drink at least two big glasses of water each day. I really like strawberries, and I prefer eating them whole, fresh or frozen. Aside from strawberries, I don’t much like eating fruit all by itself because simple sugars alone make me feel funny. Adding cheese or nuts makes it work better. Sugar-sweetened cereals taste really good, but don’t satisfy me and often scratch up my mouth. So I think of them mostly as snacks or desserts, instead of as breakfast. I love chocolate and it leaves me feeling fine, so I eat it when I want it, but I rarely eat enough to make me feel ill or uncomfortable. Light popcorn pops up better and is crunchier than extra-butter flavour popcorn. If I want more butter, I’ll melt some real butter and add it after popping. And I really, really dislike the feeling of being either desperately hungry or uncomfortably full.

These observations allow me to eat what I want, in amounts that I want — which means that I get to eat food that both tastes good and feels good. I get to satisfy my hunger without disrespecting my satiety, and I take care of myself with food instead of hurting myself with it.

To me, “wanting” something means more than just liking how it tastes — it also means considering how it makes me feel. The two variables comes together in a sort of split-second cost-benefit analysis, each time I eat, to answer the eternal question, what do I want?

No matter what I end up choosing in any given situation, the answer is always the same: I want to feel good.

But when I saw the advertisements for A&E’s new show Heavy (in between advertisements for Hoarders and Intervention, in case you were wondering about the tenor of the show), I really wanted to watch it. And, this time, to avoid yelling at the television, I decided to yell at the internet instead.

Episode one, “Tom and Jodi,” opens with this quote:

And here’s our first fact-check, before the show even properly begins. While 1/3rd of Americans are “obese” by the BMI (BMI of 30 or greater), only 5.7% are considered “extremely obese” (BMI of 40 or greater. I’m one of them. Hi!) The people featured on Heavy are in this weight category — it’s the highest one. Tom weighs 638 pounds and has a BMI of around 94. Jodi weighs 367 pounds.

If your BMI is 30, do you consider yourself debilitated by your obesity?

At a BMI of well over 40, I may sometimes move and bend a bit differently than thinner people, but I don’t really feel debilitated.

The most limiting thing about being “extremely obese,” for me, is being afraid to exercise in public because I am likely to be harassed (and have been. Thanks, random lady joggers and dudes in cars! You have successfully encouraged me to exercise and get healthy!)

That, and certain seatbelts. But at least the seatbelts don’t call me names.

The people on the show are not only fatter than 94% of the population, they exhibit very obvious signs of compulsive or binge eating. (Which the show repeatedly refers to in terms of “addiction,” something I have a problem with.) Whether or not they meet the clinical criteria for an eating disorder, these are disordered eating patterns. Most fat people do not binge eat, and many binge eaters are not obese. Conflating compulsive overeating with fatness is not just inaccurate, it can be dangerous.

Fat people going to doctors for non-eating-related complaints may be told to stop binge eating, even if they don’t binge eat. (I have been.) And thinner people who do experience binge eating — which is a type of eating that is not exactly optional, voluntary, pleasant, and definitely not the result of gluttony, greed, or general immorality — may go undiagnosed and untreated.

None of this is to minimize OR marginalize what Jodi and Tom experience. My intent is only to put into perspective a serious condition that the show’s creators obviously have tried to render commonplace — perhaps epidemic? — by suggesting that fully one-third of the US population lives and suffers like this.

If anything, this attempt to make the exceptional seem typical diminishes the seriousness of what these people experience. An audience of (potentially) 100 million “obese” individuals is likely to try and relate their experience as relatively unimpaired fat people to those on the show. And since many of those fat people will not have experienced compulsive or binge eating, or the immobility and physical challenges of being extremely large, they may be unable to empathize with these issues, and the fact that recovery is more than a matter of “willpower.” And, let’s be frank — like Hoarders and Intervention, this is likely to become a point-and-pity affair, not something that the majority of the audience can truly relate to.

Jodi and Tom are clearly in pain, and their weight definitely appears to contribute to that pain, both emotionally and physically. Their eating habits likely to contribute to their weight — but “contribute” is not the same thing as “cause.” Furthermore, the drive to eat compulsively is not under one’s control, and may even be the result of an underlying physiological imbalance, not just a psychological one.

Much of the emotional suffering described on the show is not even directly caused by the physical reality of extreme obesity. Rather, the pain described is often the pain of discrimination, social ostracization, and prejudice. Jodi describes giving up her career as a singer in a rock band because of the discomfort of standing on stage, knowing that people in the audience were judging her. Tom hasn’t been to the doctor in fifteen years — anyone want to take a wild guess as to why?

The physical pain is another matter. Some of it, maybe a lot of it, is caused directly by weight, but there are other issues at play as well. Tom exhibits signs that look (to me) like exercise-induced asthma, a condition that weight can exacerbate but does not cause, and that discourages people from moving because, untreated, it can be life-threatening. He also has high blood pressure — again, a condition that can be exacerbated by weight, but is not caused by weight alone. Jodi has had a mini-stroke, and the same can be said for weight’s role in that condition.

So what other issues might be at play? Lack of fitness, as a result of finding movement uncomfortable or inaccessible (for either physical or social reasons), independently contributes to physical suffering and immobility. Emotional stress, such as that caused by living in a world that does not physically accommodate you or socially accept you, can also independently contribute to physical health problems like those described.

These are complex issues for which weight is only one factor.

Next time, maybe I’ll yell at the blog about the month-long weight loss program presented on Heavy.

Previously: Watch me eat a Cadbury Creme Egg.

P.S. If there’s a food you want to watch me eat, leave a suggestion in comments.

It seems to me that everyone has a little tyrant living inside them. The tyrant, if it cannot be exorcised, must be exercised — much like a two-year old must be worn out (with safe activity, away from uncovered electrical sockets) in order to let you have a moment’s peace.

My tyrant has, in the past, been a touch…overbearing. Especially during The Great Diet of ’00, wherein the Tyrant allowed me to eat a strictly allotted portion of calories spread over a strictly allotted assortment of food groups — preferences and cravings be damned.

I’ve seen other Tyrants playing fast and loose with other people’s diets. The Tyrant who disallows Suspicious Ingredients. The Tyrant who eschews fat in all its forms. The Tyrant who cannot countenance pepperoni, much to his ardently pepperoni-loving host’s despair. The Tyrant who insists you must eat salad, even if you hate it. Especially if you hate it.

In order to live with the Tyrant, I’ve decided to put him to productive use. Namely, I’ve used his seemingly boundless energy and unbreakable rigidity to build structure around my eating. Then, once erected, I’ve barred him from entering the tabernacle, the holy abode of my body’s wishes and wants.

Simply put, I do this by eating meals.

To the beginner, it helps to think of meals not so much as meals, but rather as “eating appointments” — defined times or intervals during the day kept sacred to the act of feeding oneself. No matter what eating may or may not occur outside of these appointments, the appointments must be kept. Sitting must occur, and a single bite or drink of something placed in the mouth.

But whether the plate is balanced, according to the Food Guide, or looking more like Sunday brunch at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory — in this the Tyrant has no say. If I eat one bite or go back for thirds, it is entirely my choice.

If building structure is defining the space within which things can happen, the appropriate use of discipline is to build and maintain that structure — and then let go of what happens within it.

Up till now, I’ve just been too lazy to pick out some of the gems for you, but I’m going to start. There are too many hilarious, touching, and/or informative vignettes to let them pass without extra notice.

Today’s accolades go out to Arwen:

I remember reading it [Fit for Life] one hungry day – I did most of my reading of diet books to remind me why I was staying hungry – and there was something about how “people aren’t really meat eaters: you don’t see a squirrel in a park and want to kill it and eat it.”

And I thought, oh, man, squirrel. I bet that would be delicious.

So I’m just going to do this instead:

ALL FOOD CONTAINS NUTRIENTS. NUTRIENTS ARE GOOD FOR YOU. NO, REALLY. I’M SERIOUS.

Thanks for playing. Hug it out in comments.

During that time, I encountered Ellyn Satter’s approach to nutrition in the first book I read on fat acceptance, Losing It by Laura Fraser. Reading that book brought me the realization that I no longer wanted to diet, and, because of the interview with Ellyn Satter, I also realized I wanted to work in nutrition, helping people to overcome chronic dieting and disordered eating.

So, just the other day, a conversation on one of Lesley’s posts at Fatshionista brought me to the point where I had to introduce the idea of eating competence.

A lot of what I’ve written on this blog has been leading, slowly, up to this. But I haven’t broached it yet, because it’s been critical for me to first build the foundational argument that it is your right as an adult to eat whatever, and however you want.

And that it’s no one’s business to tell you to do otherwise. End of story.

So, what of eating competence? Also known as ecSatter, it’s a concept developed by Ellyn Satter (and protected by her — this will become important later) that’s based on her clinical observations of how people who do well with eating…eat:

I consistently found prescriptive dietary interventions to undermine my patients’ foodways, to destroy their ability to intuitively regulate food intake, to worsen their nutritional status and to spoil their attitudes about eating. Because eating is so central to life, my patients were not only demoralized about eating, they were demoralized overall. Because it was so glaringly clear to me that the harm far outweighed the benefit, I changed my ways. Rather than trying to control or subvert their natural tendencies to regularly provide themselves with ample and enjoyable food, I learned to build on those tendencies by emphasizing permission and discipline:

• The permission to choose enjoyable food and eat it in satisfying amounts.

• The discipline to have regular and reliable meals and snacks and to pay attention when eating them.

Basically, eating competence describes how “normal” eaters eat. It’s descriptive in that sense, and prescriptive only for those people who are uncomfortable with their current eating, or who worry about their nutrition and health, and seek to make a dietary change.

People who already feel they are doing fine? Excellent.

This is not a set of “shoulds,” nor is it a prescription to change the way you currently eat. Discard at your leisure.

But the people who come to me to learn to eat don’t feel they’re doing fine. They have considerable anxiety around food, and feel lost or resentful when it comes to nutrition. And the purpose of my work is to help them get good at eating.

I do that by using the best-researched approach available, which is the eating competence model — and, not, incidentally, Weight Watchers:

Even Weight Watchers, which many people tout as the best of the diet centers because of its reliance on real, fresh food and flexible menu choices, doesn’t help people learn to develop a sense of inner competence about eating. ‘What it comes down to is the issue of trust versus control,’ says the nutritionist Ellyn Satter…who treats what she calls ‘dieting casualties’ in her practice. She believes that people need to learn to trust that they will get full, even on food they consider highly desirable, and know that they can reliably regulate their own food intake, rather than depending on outside rules to manage those choices. ‘Weight Watchers is pretty good at liberalizing food choices, teaching people how to eat attentively, and encouraging them to increase the variety of food in their diet,’ says Satter. ‘But it’s still fundamentally a control stance they use.’ When people rely on outside rules, scales, and diet cops to regulate their eating, their relationship to food remains brittle.

-Laura Fraser, Losing It

As it turns out, there are four factors that comprise eating competence:

1. A good attitude toward food and eating. People with good eating competence enjoy eating, and they don’t feel guilty about either food or their enjoyment of food. They are pretty relaxed about it.
2. They are also decent at trying new things, and at eating not-super-favourite foods when the situation calls for it. They are not afraid of food — even “unhealthy” food — and, as such, they manage to eat a decent variety.
3. They are pretty good at internally regulating how much they eat. They can feel hunger. They can feel satiety. They can comfortably eat until they are truly satisfied, both physically and emotionally.
4. They plan ahead to feed themselves. They do the work necessary to ensure there is food on hand, and they have regular meals. They give some thought to nutrition, as well as taste, when selecting food. They make the time to eat, and to give some attention to their food while eating.

What are the outcomes for people who tend to eat this way? Well, they tend to have stable body weights (even if they are fat.) They also tend to have better blood pressure and blood cholesterol levels, which translates into a lower risk of heart disease.

The basis of Ellyn Satter’s message is that good nutrition depends on the enjoyment of food, first and foremost. She is famous for saying, “When the joy goes out of eating, nutrition suffers.”

From the perspective of ecSatter, enjoyment and pleasure are primary motivators for food selection, and nutritional excellence is supported by enjoyment and learned food preference based on subjective reward from eating.

-J Nutr Educ Behav. 2007 Sep-Oct;39(5 Suppl):S142-53.

That’s why, when it comes to teaching people eating competence, the first priority is to enhance their enjoyment of food, and reduce their anxiety and guilt about eating — before any thought to nutrition enters the picture.

Population food surveys have consistently shown that people’s first priority in selecting food is how it tastes. This is not going to change just because the nutrition establishment thinks it should — instead of fighting against people’s desire to eat pleasurable food, the eating competence model works with it.

And, instead of fighting against your own body’s natural weight tendencies, eating competence also endorses self acceptance.

This has just been a brief introduction to the concept. We’ll discuss it in more detail in posts to come.

Let’s back up for a moment to detail my reasons for drinking coffee. Reasons which, I think, probably apply to the vast majority of coffee-drinkers.

• I like the taste.
• I like the caffeine buzz.
• I like the ritual, and the emotional comfort of it.

You notice what’s not on that list?

Antioxidants.

That’s why it tripped me out to notice the big label on the can.

I mean, it’s been there a while. Sure, I’ve noticed it before. But I never really noticed it until that morning.

Inspired — and in a half-awake undercaffeinated haze — I decided to grab the nearest thing and look for a similar label.

Since we ran out of milk the day before, and since we drink Canadian-style wussy coffee (meaning with milk or cream, plus sugar — black coffee is an abomination unto the Lord and shall not defile this house), the nearest thing was a delicious powdered non-dairy creamer. Which we keep as back-up to avoid a potential coffee crisis.

(Priorities, people. We have them.)

So I grabbed it, and guess what?

CHOLESTEROL FREE, YO.

Which, you know, I suppose is useful information if you have significant dyslipidemia (that is, high blood cholesterol levels) and are sensitive to cholesterol in food (which not all people are, especially not at levels as low as a spoonful of cream or milk in your coffee. Saturated fat is now pretty well-known as the culprit in raising people’s blood cholesterol, and it’s been established that the dietary cholesterol panic of the 80s turned out to be misguided.)

The lactose-free label, well…I take no issue with that. It’s something useful to have, front and centre, if you want to expand your market to include the many folks wishing not to endure a torrent of gaseous mishaps in the course of enjoying their morning brew.

So, quick analysis, what’s up with these largely irrelevant labels on things? Especially things that I wouldn’t really think of as “food” in the first place, and which don’t contribute significantly to your total intake? (I mean, coffee is largely non-nutritive, and a teaspoon or two of fake coffee creamer is pretty damn close to non-nutritive. And, in any case, most people don’t drink more than one or a few cups of the stuff in a day.)

My hypothesis is that, rather than the default cultural attitude toward food and food-like substances being “it’s fine to eat this, and it probably has things in it which are good for me, or, at least, are not actively harmful” we’ve reached a point, collectively, where our default attitude tends to be, “Should I eat/drink/ingest this? Is it poisonous? Am I allowed?”

Coffee (and caffeine itself) has become a particularly loaded substance in certain dietary circles. When I was dieting, I also avoided drinking coffee…for no specific reason I’m aware of. Because it was The Thing to Do. Because coffee was vaguely regarded as A Bad, Unnatural Thing.

Part of the package of virtuous self-denial included giving up coffee (and diet soda, and and and…whatever not-particularly-harmful or not-particularly-nutrition-impacting thing someone enjoyed just for the sake of it. Because food had become a tool, and only a tool. Everything consumed required instrumental justification.)

That’s a whole lot of anxiety to carry around. Enough that it’s going to make you second-guess your habitual purchases. Which is not very good for the folks who sell instant coffee.

So, what can the food-industrial-complex use to smuggle its products through the barbed-wire fence of ambivalence erected by its twin sister, the diet-industrial-complex?

A label.

A label that, despite seeming to give you straightforward, useful information about antioxidants and cholesterol, is actually telling you, “Just this once, you’re exempted from guilt. You are granted permission to drink this coffee for Specific, Nutritional Benefits — not for the evil caffeine buzz, not for the comforting emotional associations. Not just because it’s enjoyable. Because it has antioxidants, and it’s cholesterol free.”

In short, it’s a Get Out of Jail Free card. From a jail I believe they helped build.

To you, the guilt-ridden consumer, from the food industry with love.

ETA: Awesome reader Bookwyrm made an equally awesome Get Out of Jail Free card. Read it and weep.

And telling people to eat whatever they want is…well, it’s incredibly controversial.

It’s just not done.

You know why I think it’s controversial? Not just because we live in a culture that’s messed-up, food-wise, but because we, as a culture, seem to take the worst possible view of human nature.

Let me explain.

It should come as no surprise to anyone reading here that our culture views food as a moral issue. A potentially dangerous moral issue. And, setting aside the very-interesting-but-not-to-be-had-right-now discussion of ethical and religious foodways, food just…isn’t.

Food isn’t moral. It’s not immoral, either. It’s morally neutral.

But, sadly, we live in a time and a place where it seems Twinkies = Eternal Damnation. (Notice, here, how the supposed moral value of food pretty snugly overlaps its supposed nutritional value. This is not a coincidence.) And we tend to take the most pessimistic view of human nature.

So, when I say “Adult human beings are allowed to eat whatever, and however much they want,” what people actually hear is: “GO OUT AND CRAM YOUR FACE WITH BAD, BAD TWINKIES!!!!!!”

I’m here to plead with you on this: first of all, people aren’t stupid. Please stop thinking that — it’s unkind and incorrect. Also, Twinkies aren’t bad. Even if they were, they couldn’t make you bad by association.

You know what else? This may come as a huge surprise, but if you’re willing to let go of those negative assumptions about human nature for one second, you might realize that pretty much no one wants to eat that way, anyhow.* Or not for long.

We’re animals, which means we’re pretty highly motivated to stay alive. We want to stay alive, okay? Which means means:

We want to be healthy.

We want to eat food that’s good for us.

Those desires, being tied to the ultimate desire — to survive — are pretty damn strong.

But you know what we want more than either of these? To be free. To not be told what to do. To not be bossed around as though we are perennially six years old. To not be manipulated, coerced, or condescended to.

Being un-free is a fate worse than death to an animal. It means either you will be killed, or you will be tortured and then killed, or your entire life and all of your efforts will be used exclusively in the service of someone else’s desires. And that service is probably going to be pretty unpleasant and continue indefinitely, until you die (see: tortured and then killed.)

Ever wonder why animals are willing to gnaw their legs off to get out of a trap? Why prisoners are willing to risk death in order to escape?

We’re all sensitive to threats to our freedom, even if, practically speaking, those threats don’t seem as bad as being trapped or imprisoned. We’re able to detect the merest whiff of a threat to our freedom, and we respond appropriately. To a strong and imminent threat, we’ll fight to the death. To a threat that’s just a whisper of a shadow of a threat, we’ll dig in our heels a little bit. Stop listening. Roll our eyes and take a step backward. Procrastinate.

In the case of rewards and punishments used to induce certain behaviours, there’s a distinct manipulation at work. Freedom is taken by force or given up willingly in exchange for some savoury reward. But, either way, it is lost, whether you gave it, or it was taken from you.

We don’t like this. Even if we think we do at the time. Even if we go along with it.

I won’t go off on my whole long tangent about intrinsic motivation again, except to say: there is a body of research showing that humans acting under the threat of punishment or the promise of reward do sub-par work.

Whether that work is solving puzzles or learning information or exercising and eating well, the fact that an external, overriding consequence is actually the driving force behind the behaviour — rather than one’s own intrinsic desire — means that that behaviour is not actually free. It is coerced and manipulated and induced.

And going through the motions in order to reach the carrot or escape the stick actually takes something away from the benefit of those motions.

Exercising to lose weight makes fitness not as fun or useful.

Eating to lose weight makes nutrition not as fun or useful.

And, when things are not fun (meaning, intrinsically rewarding), it’s pretty much guaranteed that you will stop doing them, rendering your time “on the wagon” pretty much a loss. Because you’ll lose whatever long-term, intrinsic benefits might have come from doing those things voluntarily.

Besides which, who wants to ride a shitty wagon that keeps throwing you off? You’re better off on foot. (Maybe rollerskates.)

So, when I say “Eat food. Stuff you like. As much as you want,” I don’t believe you’ll dive into a vat of Twinkies. Or, if you do, it’s only going to be to see what it would be like to dive into a vat of Twinkies.

I trust that you’ll climb your way out again.**

The bottom line is — freedom is important. In fact, it’s necessary. Without it, you can’t sustain anything that’s supposed to be good for you. Therefore, freedom is good for you.

And because I believe humans are reasonable beings who care about their own health and survival, I trust you to decide what you eat.

What if you’re not reasonable, and don’t care about your own well-being? Well then, my friends, not only is it still not my place to tell you what to do — telling you what to do wouldn’t fucking work in the first place.

Readers have been clamouring a bit for me to just tell them how to eat already. And while, yes, I have a very specific training and a very specific set of beliefs about how to approach food, my first job is to clear the slate, set aside all the rules we’ve been handed about food, and establish a foundation of trust — trust that I am not going to take away your freedom, or your food, even when I have suggestions about what might be a good thing to try.

Trust that, ultimately, you’re the one who must decide what to do.

So, in the service of that, I offer you this:

Far from being irresponsible, this is, in fact, the only unsolicited advice anyone has any business to offer another person.

And until you’ve accepted it as your irrevocable right as a human being, my opinions on nutrition don’t really matter much.

*Barring some kind of underlying medical condition or eating disorder, in which case a weight-loss diet is the last thing you need, anyhow.

When you needed food, you felt hunger, thought of food, and cried or reached out for it in one motion. There was no ambivalence, no questioning your own motives, no shame. You needed something — end of story. And if you were lucky enough, you got it.

I look back on the time I was dieting as a period of falling-out with my body. We fell out of synchronicity, and out of favour, with one another. We were no longer on speaking terms. And though the diet was a dramatic physical manifestation of the rift that had formed between my mind and my body, I believe the fault that led to the rift started much earlier.

The fault began to form when I started to feel the gaze around the age of 10 — when I began viewing myself from an external viewpoint, filtered through the preferences of my culture, and learned to continually measure myself against that standard.

The fault deepened when I first encountered food rules. Whether they came from the USDA or my parents or the school lunch program, the message was the same: there is predefined, normative standard for what and how much to eat. Any deviance from that standard leaves you vulnerable to criticism, ridicule, forceful re-education — possibly even social ostracization and loss of love.

In short, there is a right way to eat. Anything that doesn’t exactly fit that standard is, by definition, wrong.

Right is good; wrong is bad. And so, by extension, are you.

Ellyn Satter is probably most famous for her theory of The Division of Responsibility. It applies to feeding relationships between parents and children, and it states that while parents are in charge of deciding where, when, and what food to provide, children alone must be in charge of deciding how much and whether they will eat from what’s provided.

As the American Dietetic Association says:

Perhaps the best advice regarding child-feeding practices continues to be the division of responsibility between adult and child advocated by Satter (64). According to this division, the role of parents and other caregivers in feeding is to provide positive structure, age-appropriate support, and healthful food and beverage choices. Children are responsible for whether and how much to eat from what adults provide.

It’s a profound concept — one that successfully negotiates the gray area between guidance and control, autonomy and anarchy. And, as it turns out, it can be applied to any relationship where there is some kind of power differential.

The thing is, when you step all over someone’s autonomy — someone’s right to choose how much and whether — you have breached their boundaries, and you have done them violence. They may react to this by rebelling or, as in many cases of abuse, by taking on the role of doing that violence to themselves.

One thing is for certain, though, whatever the response: trust is lost.

A rift is established. Your mind and your conscious will, those parts of you that are indoctrinated into society, separate themselves from the rest of you — the body with its physical needs, the unconscious will and motives. The mind reins in the body to secure safe passage through society, and to synchronize its efforts with the larger body of humanity. The body is dressed, trimmed, made presentable, and its needs are secreted away in the private pockets of life.

Rules that attempt to tell us how much and whether (FIVE A DAY!!!) violate our boundaries. We, in turn, rebel in a desperate attempt to regain autonomy, while simultaneously learning to flagellate ourselves, to take on the role of the abuser in our own minds, and to view our behaviours from an external vantage point — the gaze that continually judges what we eat against our culture’s ideal of the mythical, perfect diet.

The mind has overstepped its boundaries, aided and abetted by cultural pressures. You begin to monitor your eating in ways that go beyond providing pleasurable food and adequate nutrition for yourself, beyond choosing and then respecting mealtimes. You count calories, or assign points. You deny pleasure, and embrace nutritionism.

You hush your body’s cries of hunger and fullness and desire until, eventually, you may find yourselves no longer on speaking terms.