Eating Interoception – has your client lost their natural eating “off-switch”?

Personal trainers depend on a client’s willpower to get them to do the things that bring about weight loss – eat less/differently, exercise more or both.

But for people who gain weight by eating more than their body physically needs don’t lack willpower, they have just lost their eating “off-switch”. In other words, they have lost the body’s ability to make them only want to eat what their body physically needs and so have to rely on their conscious mind to help them.

The eating “off-switch” – this ability to have the body force you – the conscious person – to only eat what the body physically needs – is called “Eating Interoception”.

Eating Interoception involves the person’s brain detecting physical hunger, and fullness (among other sensations I’ll discuss at another time), and the reaction to these sensations being to make the person either start (hunger) or stop eating (fullness). Eating Interoception also, even more cleverly, makes the person want to only eat the foods that contain the nutrition that body physically needs. So, those with full power Eating Interoception have an “auto make-you-only-like-healthy-food switch” too!

All of this is an awesome, automatic skill of the unconscious body-brain connection that we were all born with. It makes eating more of an instinct than the behaviour we as personal trainers – and the rest of the world – treat it.

Unfortunately, some people lose some – or in many cases all – of this instinctive ability. And without a super-strong and very genuine – instinctive – preference to not eat without physical hunger, to not eat unnecessary nutrition, and not to overeat driving you, you are forced – driven –  to overeat and eat nutrition other than the body needs.

Eating Interoception should be the true definition of “self-controlled” eating and not the conscious effort to fight an appetite created due to a lack of Eating Interoception which it currently is defined as.

The loss of Eating Interoception can happen very suddenly as a child if the person is brought up by dieting and critical adult. Or they can develop gradually it as they more exposed to dieting for weight control throughout life. They lose it because the control of eating is taken out of the instinctive brain-body connection and into our brain by using conscious effort to control the eating as a behaviour.

The most common reason for the eating turning into behaviour and not left as a natural instinct is when we think about what we eat in relation to our weight (or health) rather than leaving it to the body alone to make us eat for physical requirements.

This is the likely position your ‘weight loss’ clients are in. Without instinctive control, they have no choice but to overeat and eat less nutritious foods unless they try and override it with conscious effort. The conscious effort takes the form of self-imposed eating restrictions – actively resisting eating even though they feel a drive to, not eating the food they feel drawn to or replacing it with an alternative food, or eating less food in general. And the more conscious effort, the more erosion of instinct.

If you further encourage these clients to continue to try and override their appetite – and that includes doing exercise to counter it too – this will only further erode any eating instinct ability they have.

Some people have absolutely no Eating Interoception left inside them to keep their eating normal and so even though they are using an inhumane amount of effort to fight their eating drive they still gain weight.

Solving this problem is a task for a specialist who can make them forget – unlearn – all connection of eating (and exercise) to the control of weight (and health for that matter). This is no mean feat in today’s weight-centric, willpower-based world. This is what Intuitive Eating^TM counsellors do. They first heal all the emotional damage caused by having to have both feet always on the willpower pedal. Then they restore the skills making up Eating Interoception which gives the person back their body-brain ability to have their conttolled from within. Once this is complete, the physical damage done by the up and down pattern of eating can also heal too.

As you can see, it’s not as simple as you might think to cure someone of their overeating for good. And when you think about it, an intervention which involves the usual goal-setting, motivation building, consciously changing eating or exercise behaviours, the usual for the personal trainer, is like advocating the cause of the problem to try and solve it.

Can you honestly say you understand (over)eating enough to not cause further damage, let alone cure it?

If you have clients you suspect are in this situation – or maybe you yourself on the slippery slope towards losing your eating instinct – please get in touch.

By Alison Hall

For a free consultation and discussion about how it is for you or your client, always without obligation, contact Alison Hall at Try Freedom.

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

There are now over 150 studies on Intuitive Eating showing benefit.

There is also a plethora of evidence of the wider topics of Interoceptive Awareness, Food Restriction/Dieting/Binge Eating/Inefficacy Harm from Weight Loss / Reactance Theory. Click below to see the science:

• Appetite Effects of Restricted Eating Restricting the eating leads to appetite increase.
• Inefficacy And Harm From Weight Loss Interventions Weight loss programmes fail and cause harm.
• Interoceptive Awareness Being aware and responding automatically to your body’s signals.
• Intuitive Eating There are now over 150 studies on Intuitive Eating showing benefit.
• Reactance Theory Restricting the eating leads to discomfort which drives the eating.