Eat When Hungry: Journey into Food and Fires
Dr. Lisle and I continue our discussion around the science and art of personal change in our Eat When Hungry series. In Journey into Food and Fires, Dr. Lisle brings personal and professional expertise about the human mind and body, and I share more of my story about discovering my own mind and body to make the lifestyle changes necessary to lose half my weight and center healthy eating.
This episode focuses on processes for personal discoveries, individual differences and human fallibility in a corrupt food environment. While our individual discoveries may include differences, focusing on processes for learning about ourselves can be valuable. As Dr. Lisle recommends, we can run experiments and learn.
Learning to Avoid Garbage Fires In a Corrupt Food Environment
Dr. Lisle and I dig deeper into hunger and the complex processes that I went through to understand my hunger drive and to make lifestyle changes in myself. In doing so, I moved from fueling myself with the explosive garbage fires of junk foods to the slow-burning fire of satiation with a plant-based lifestyle. As always, Dr. Lisle brings powerful science and deep wisdom to our conversation.
Processes are important in self-discoveries, and there can be important variations to understand about our individual hunger drives. To that end, I focus heavily on sharing my own processes and my individual learning which may include different details from others.
Recognizing the Connections Between Foods and Agitation: Going on the Prowl
My internal agitation around food comes from what and how much I eat. When I don’t eat right, I feel agitated and go on the prowl, which means looking for the richest foods in my environment. For decades, these were corrupt junk foods that caused garbage fires in me — in the form of overeating and binge eating. And, while I still overeat more than I should at times, I have a much more regulated hunger drive. Success does not require perfection.
Dr. Lisle and I explore what it means to find the power to succeed in a corrupt food environment — a world designed for failure around a problem humans were not designed to solve. Yet, we can solve this problem in ourselves in a challenging and worthwhile journey where we are the center of our own power — especially if we look at this problem realistically around our individual lives and who we are.
Junk foods of the modern food environment cause garbage fires in me — raging cravings for more. Food reactivity is a dimension of my hunger drive that I needed to understand in myself in order to find success.
Discovering Food Reactivity and Going on the Prowl
Understanding food reactivity as a dimension of my hunger drive helps me succeed. My personal reactions to foods spark explosive garbage fires in me – leading me to go on the prowl for the richest foods in my environment. In my case, salt, oil, sugar, and spices throw gasoline on the fire that I build with the foods that either regulate or dysregulate my hunger drive.
Finding Success and Failure: Avoiding All-or-Nothing Thinking
Success required that I understand the cause-effect relationships of foods, my body, and all-or-nothing thinking in myself (which I discovered for myself in the literature on perfectionism). All-or-nothing thinking pervades human experiences in an idea that Dr. Lisle aptly terms the Ego Trap. In talking with others, I hear many variations of how all-or-nothing thinking defines many of our experiences around health, wellness, and weight loss.
Seeing all-or-nothing thinking as part of my morbid obesity transformed my approach to success. This led me to making a failure plan that I still live by.
When I was morbidly obese, I thought I had to get everything right around my food and health, so I shut down saying “I will start tomorrow.” Now, I give myself space to fail, so I don’t get trapped by setting my own expectations too high. While I still occasionally start tomorrow, I have learned to act quickly.
Finding Power: Individual Differences Can Be Important
This episode is an individual journey into science and how it plays out in one body and mind. More broadly, all of us make our own individual journeys and there are differences that can impact our successes and failures.
Finding our power from the inside out is a message that Dr. Lisle and I have for others as they navigate their own pathways in a journey that tests all of us around own human fallibility.
Eat When Hungry: Considerations for a Complex Process
My goal in Eat When Hungry is to provide clear ideas for consideration without reducing anything to quick fixes or easy answers. In many ways, the topics covered here are ongoing active processes that I continue to use to make and sustain change in myself.
Discovering the trigger foods that agitate my hunger drive was a complex process that occurred through absence. Sugar, salt, oil, and spices are all individual trigger foods that agitate and dysregulate my hunger drive, so when I avoid eating them I lead a more peaceful and free life where it is easier to eat when hungry.
Learn More
Stay tuned for the next episode of Eat When Hungry. In the meantime, you can learn more about me on my website and social media. Follow along on Facebook and Instagram to learn more about my adventures and challenges in maintaining this lifestyle.
A bit more about Dr. Doug Lisle: he and his friend Dr. Alan Goldhamer wrote The Pleasure Trap, which is about the problem of supernormal foods in our modern society and how to override these forces. Dr. Lisle is a clinical psychologist and founded Esteem Dynamics where he works with Dr. Jen Howk, and the two of them are writing a book. Dr. Lisle is a regular guest on Chef AJ and shares his wisdom in myriad ways with others.
In our Eat When Hungry Signature Series, Dr. Lisle brings this professional expertise in working with these hunger, health, weight loss, and personal changes for 40 years while I bring my personal experiences and educational background. The result is a rich tapestry of ideas that simultaneously tell stories and provide considerations and possible insights for other self-improvement journeys.
My Venn diagram and the Complexity of Losing Half My Weight
The following Venn diagram overviews the complexity of my journey and serves as a way to organize all the processes of change that I noticed in myself. The fact that there is a 97% failure rate around losing and sustaining long-term weight loss means we have to look and think differently about this problem.
I fought my weight for most of my life. To be healthy, I had to lose half of myself. My chart shows what I had to understand about why I struggled with obesity. Then, I could focus on what to do and how to do it. Your details may be different, but something may help in your own journey.
To Eat When Hungry, I had to REFLECT and ACT around all the following areas:
FOOD ADDICTION & THE HUNGER DRIVE
FOODS & WELLNESSS
WEIGHT & GENETICS
IDENTITY: SELF & OTHERS
