Intuitive Eating: Just Enough Isn't Enough

“Wait, so what is your goal when you eat a snack?” I asked my client Sophie after she’d recounted throwing away the last third of her yogurt, thinking that eating the whole container would be too much.

“My goal is to eat just until I’m not so hungry, then stop.”

Never mind that a snack could be a nice opportunity to take a break from work, find a little enjoyment, and eat something yummy. For Sophie, the goal had nothing to do with satisfaction or pleasure. It was about eating the bare minimum to stave off hunger a little longer.

And Sophie isn’t alone. Many folks I’ve worked with over the years have learned to stop eating the moment they no longer feel hungry. This is certainly learned and reenforced in diet culture, which insists that it is healthy and responsible to eat as little as possible. And, for the record, it’s not just diet culture. We’re often told we should be maximizing our potential. What’s the most output we can achieve in the shortest amount of time? How soon can we be back at work after an illness? How much time do we really need for ourselves at the end of the night? Barely meeting our needs is celebrated in diet culture, hustle culture, and Western culture in general.

Imagine if you had just enough money to pay your rent every month. This is living in scarcity, and it’s intensely stressful and harmful to overall wellbeing. Even if you never actually miss your rent payment, the worry over your finances saps a ton of energy. Intuitive eating is all about building trust with our bodies. But we can’t build body trust in an environment of scarcity.

Before I go on, here’s my standard disclaimer: This post is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individualized medical or mental health care. It does not constitute a patient-provider relationship. The content of this post might not feel useful to you right now—please take the information that serves you and leave the rest. 

PSA: 1600 calories per day is a semi-starvation diet.

We’ve all heard the numbers: 1800 calories, 1500 calories, even 1200 calories per day. Most folks in today’s diet culture will spend years, maybe their entire lifetime, chasing intake goals that can’t possibly meet their nutritional needs. These types of daily calorie goals are often based on overly simplified generic equations without any consideration for the complexity and adaptability of human metabolism. They rely on an outdated and disproven “calorie in calorie out” model. And they don’t account for hormonal and metabolic shifts that occur when the body is undernourished. Sure, maybe a two-week 1500 calorie diet might result in weight loss in the short term. But these types of low-calorie diets simply are not sustainable or realistic in the long term.

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment (1944-1945) examined the effects of semi-starvation on a healthy population to better understand the impact of famine during wartime, and to identify safe and effective treatment for nutrition rehabilitation. (Alas, I’ve never been able to find the original full text, but this follow up study offers an excellent overview.) The study followed 36 men through a 12 week control period (apx 3200 cal/day), and 24 week semi-starvation period (apx 1600 cal/day), and a 12 week rehabilitation period (no calorie restriction).

During the rehabilitation period, many men reported binge eating, with one man even needing hospitalization for gastric distention due to the quantity of his intake. They reported “weekend gorging”, sometimes eating as much as ten thousand calories in one weekend. The men experienced high rates of depression and “hysteria.” It’s also worth noting that the men became more preoccupied with body image, perceiving themselves to have gained excess weight even when they remained below the weight they’d started the study at.  

And yet, more than 75 years later, diet culture still insists that 1200/1500/1800 calories per day is sufficient. Even if you aren’t following a low-calorie diet plan, it’s likely that these numbers influence your intake. 200 calories seems like a lot for a snack if you’re holding a general sense that 1500 calories is the right amount to be eating. To be clear, I don’t encourage calorie counting – it’s imprecise and disrupts our relationship with food. But if you can’t turn off the calorie calculator in your head just yet, please consider aiming higher, a lot higher, than a semi-starvation diet. 

If you’re trying to up your intake, but you’re not sure where to start, consider these suggestions:

Eat breakfast

“Breakfast” literally means break – fast, as in breaking your overnight fast. It’s a critically important meal that lets our metabolism know it’s time to get going for the day. Eating breakfast also tells your body there’s plenty of food around, so it doesn’t need to stress about conserving energy. (Remember, abundance not scarcity.) If you aren’t hungry for breakfast that’s ok. Start with a small breakfast, maybe a granola bar or some berries. After a few weeks your metabolism will start to expect food in the morning, and your hunger will kick in. Once you’re ready for a more complete meal, practice getting a mix of carbs, protein, and fat at breakfast. This could be yogurt with fruit and nuts or an egg and veggie scramble with a side of toast.

breakfast

raspberries

yogurt parfait

Aim for a meal or snack every 3-5 hours

Plan for meals and snacks that allow your body to move through fed and fasted cycles without leaving you ravenously hungry. Start to notice big gaps in your intake. If you have breakfast at 6am thinking you’ll eat again at noon, then find lunch getting pushed to one or two, you probably need a morning snack. If you eat lunch at one, hit a group fitness class after work, and don’t have dinner until 8pm, consider adding a snack before the gym. Avoiding prolonged periods of fasting reminds your body that there is plenty of food around. (There’s that abundance again.) It helps prevent ravenous or urgent hunger and can decrease backlash behaviors like last supper mentality or f*ck it eating.

Try eating more, earlier in the day

If you’ve followed diet plans that relied on tracking calories, macros, or points, you may have learned to save your intake for the end of the night. Remember Slim Fast? A shake for breakfast and lunch, then a sensible dinner. Diet companies know we look forward to dinner – that there is a social importance to being able to eat a meal at the end of the day with our friends and family. So, diet culture encourages us to restrict during the day to allow for more intake in the evening. But this style of eating keeps our bodies in scarcity mode all day. Instead, try upping your intake in the morning and early afternoon. This might feel scary at first, especially if you experience backlash behaviors in the evening. But over time your eating will balance out and you’ll find yourself much more content by the end of the day.

If you’re stuck in a “just enough” pattern of eating, I suspect you spend a lot of your day stressing about food, feeling hungry, and counting down until your next meal. But friend, you don’t need to stay in this cycle forever. And if you’re having trouble upping your intake, please remember support is always available.

With compassion,

Stephanie