Do Your Clients Have a Psychological Drive to Eat Undoing All Your “Good Work”?

Is Psychological Eating Ruining Your Clients’ Appetite?

We all have our natural appetite. The way we are always driven back to eating when we are forced from time to time when we can’t ‘be good’ any more. The way you let yourself eat at the weekend. Or the way you return to eating when we are exhausted from your latest willpower kick. These are all examples of your ‘default’ appetite.

What does your default eating pattern look like? What kind of eating do you always return to when you have just fallen off the latest health or weight loss kick? Your default eating is your natural appetite. This is how you need to eat to feel ok again in preparation for your next round of being extra-good.

You can also envision what your default appetite is like by imagining how you would genuinely choose to eat if you suddenly found out that food didn’t influence your weight or health at all. Ask yourself, how would you eat if food wasn’t a thing that affected your body weight or health? Would you choose undressed salads or pizza (insert your favourite ‘forbidden’ food here)?

By thinking like this you can figure out how large your appetite is. How much food and of what kind you need to truly satisfy your appetite. If food didn’t affect your weight or health and you can honestly say you’d still choose healthy stuff most of the time and only fancy ‘pizza’ every now and then? Or are you more the kind of person who feels they could eat great quantities of ‘pizza’ all day every day?

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I’m now going to let you into a secret. I said to imagine that eating doesn’t influence your weight or health at all. What if I said that actually eating doesn’t influence your weight or health at all? That what you eat isn’t meant to be connected to body weight or health at all. What if I told you eating is purely a physical mechanism of the body, where the body tells us exactly what foods and how much it needs to function? In fact, the body makes it impossible for the person to overeat or eat what it doesn’t need (ie ‘unhealthily’.)

So, eating has nothing to do with body weight or health. It just happens that when the physical body is in charge, the body weight and the health (element affected by the eating) remain optimal. When solely under the control of the physical body – using physical hunger and taste satisfaction as it’s inside guide – the eating drive is only that of what the body actually physically needs.

So, if this is true (and it is) the only reason someone would be driven to ever eat more than (or differently to) their body’s physical needs is if they also had something other than the physical body driving the eating. This other ‘something’ is a psychological component of their eating drive.

This is why from time to time, and increasingly as your life goes on, you are forced to fall ‘off the wagon’ when we have been trying restrict the appetite we hate so much.

But where does this psychological – overeating – driver come from?

The main psychological driver of eating comes from the thinking mind – which always overrules body’s physical capacity of perfectly and unthinkingly controlling the eating from inside the body. But the main psychological driver not only makes you want to eat more and different to what the body needs, they also make you need to eat this way.

The main psychological eating drivers come from you thinking consciously about your eating (and your exercise for that matter) when you link your eating to anything like your weight, health or any other ‘reason’ for eating ‘better’ or even adding exercising in the name of counteracting your eating. When you override your physical control of the eating with your thinking control – you lose some or all or you physical eating drive driving you to eat only what the body needs. In other words, you lose your natural protection against overeating.

Basically, the more you think about your eating (and exercise) and controlling it (them) in relation to an outside ‘goal’ the greater your drive to overeat gets. Quite the opposite of what you are told by every medic, health professional, personal trainer and especially if they are a member of the weight loss brigade.

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So why do the psychological drivers make us eat more than the body physically needs? And what do they look (feel) like?! Oh, and how do we get rid of them to make us only need to eat what the body physically needs?

Psychological eating drivers – the overeating drivers – are sensed as discomfort in the mind. And it is this discomfort that makes us need to eat more than the body’s physical requirements.

But where does this discomfort come from and why does it make us need to overeat? The discomfort in the mind comes from all the conscious control of the eating we’ve been doing all these years and continue to do every day (except when we need a break from it). When you are restricting your appetite and are trying and keep it at bay you are not getting the food you – your appetite – NEED(S). This not meeting your appetite – your – needs puts you in a psychological state of ‘deprivation’. And it’s this state of mind that is uncomfortable. It can build up to be highly uncomfortable. Some people describe it as ‘anxiety-like’. This is what a real craving is. A feeling so unpleasant that you just have to do something about it. And the something you have to do about it is EAT. And the reason only eating will ease this feeling is because the feeling was caused by all the eating restricting you’ve done and are doing. Only eating those things in large quantities can make it go away.

The relief from the discomfort achieved from overeating is only temporary because you jump right back on the wagon again because you now feel like your default appetite has gone away. But as soon as you start restricting again the discomfort builds up again. Your default appetite is always there, bubbling under the surface to bring the kind of discomfort that means you just HAVE TO overeat again to feel ok again.

This is where the phrase ‘comfort’ or ‘emotional’ eating comes from. But as you can see it isn’t just uncomfortable emotions that we need to ease with food (although having a large appetite does cause much emotional discomfort which drives the appetite too), it’s the fact that we have appetites larger than we want and we aren’t allowing ourselves to eat to satisfy them. We are in a constant state of often painful deprivation. And we are encouraged to keep doing it by all our trusted professionals.

Try Freedom are in the business of eliminating all your psychological eating drivers (yes there are a few more). Counteracting all the damage done by everyone telling you to restrict, restrict, restrict and exercise, exercise, exercise to keep in shape. Leaving you with the want – the need – to only eat what the body physically needs.

If you think you any of your clients’ default appetite is larger than it physically should be, please get in touch.

By Alison Hall

Alison Hall is an Intuitive Eating counsellor and owner and founder of Try Freedom.

THE SCIENCE – for the skeptics, read the science here:

Appetite Effects of Restricted Eating

Inefficacy And Harm From Weight Loss Interventions

Interoceptive Awareness – the Science

Intuitive Eating – the Science

Reactance – the Science