How to Become an Intuitive Eater (Without Ignoring Data) | Ep 446
"Just listen to your body" is the most popular nutrition advice for anyone tired of tracking.
The problem is, your hunger signals may be giving you bad data.
Chronic dieting, sleep disruption, hormonal shifts in perimenopause and menopause, and ultra-processed foods all degrade your appetite signals. A 2013 study found that intuitive eating only regulates weight when those signals are accurate. If they're off, the whole system breaks down.
Philip walks through what the intuitive eating research actually measures (psychological health, not body composition), four factors that wreck your hunger signals after 40, and a step-by-step framework for building real food freedom through structured skill-building, not by skipping straight to "eat by vibes." You'll also get a 3-question self-test to check whether your signals are calibrated enough to ditch the app.
Join the Eat More Lift Heavy waitlist to get first access and founder pricing on a 26-week coached program that builds your nutrition and strength training skills in sequence so you can build muscle and lose fat efficiently:
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Timestamps:
0:00 - Why "just listen to your body" fails
0:31 - What intuitive eating actually is
3:30 - What the research shows (and doesn't)
6:15 - The body composition blind spot
8:30 - Interoceptive accuracy explained
9:45 - 4 factors that wreck hunger signals
13:15 - Eat More Lift Heavy waitlist
15:00 - 4 stages of nutritional competence
18:17 - Self-determination theory and tracking
20:00 - Diet autoregulation vs. intuitive eating
22:34 - Flexible vs. rigid structure
26:00 - 3-question hunger signal self-test
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Philip Pape: 0:00
You probably heard this advice. Stop tracking, stop counting, just listen to your body. Eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full. And it sounds liberating, doesn't it? Except for a lot of you, it has not worked. And today I'm going to show you why your body's hunger signals are likely giving you bad information, why the research on intuitive eating has a massive blind spot that nobody talks about, and what you need to do first before eating intuitively will ever work for you. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, and I've been hearing from a lot of you lately. And the question comes up in different forms, but it's basically the same thing, and that is, Philip, I just don't want to track forever. When can I stop? When do I get to just eat normally? And I definitely get that because nobody wants to log every meal or weigh all their food for the rest of their life. Many people think that is kind of ridiculous that you would have to do that. And I don't want you to do that either. Now, if you like doing it, if you want to collect data, nobody's stopping you. I do it myself, but you don't have to. There is this idea floating around though, and it is everywhere now, that the answer is quote unquote intuitive eating, that you should trust your body, that you just ditch the data, you eat by feels, by vibes. I'm being a little bit facetious, but I think that is often how it's portrayed as this free, free loving thing that's just easy to do. And I think that kind of advice is actively harmful to a lot of people. It's almost the worst case advice for a lot of people, especially when you've been through multiple rounds of dieting, you've done a lot of the things like calorie counting, your body composition goals are serious, right? They go, they go beyond just like not having an eating disorder, right? That's a separate topic. We're not addressing that. They go to, hey, I wanna, I want to conquer the things I've had trouble with in the past. And I actually want to lose fat and look great and feel great and understand how to eat in a way that works for me. So today we are gonna look at what the intuitive eating research shows and what it doesn't show. We're gonna talk about why your hunger signals may not be trustworthy. They may be lying to you right now, which is why it's hard to go right into something like intuitive eating, especially as your body changes, especially as we get over 40, perimenopause, postmenopause, testosterone, all those hormonal changes that also affect your hunger, especially as life changes and gets more stressful. And then I wanna give you a framework for how to graduate to intuitive eating the right way. And I think that's a good way to think about it. You graduate into it by building those skills, by earning, earning it through that structured skill building first. And stick around to the end because as you know, I'm gonna have a really good tip for you, like I always do. It's a three-question self-test that you can do today to find out whether your hunger signals are calibrated well enough to eat intuitively. So it's it's kind of like you could test out of it and say, look, I'm an intuitive eater, or no, I've got a little more work to do. And here's what you're gonna walk away with today. First, the specific research gap in intuitive eating that should make you skeptical of anyone who says, Hey, just stop tracking, listen to me, buy my intuitive eating program. Second, the three things that wreck your hunger signals and why they hit harder as your body changes, especially after 40. And third, a step-by-step progression from structured eating with tracking to genuine food freedom, where you may not need that app anymore because you've internalized the skills. All right, let's get into it and put this popular advice under the microscope like we do. The advice is just stop tracking calories, stop counting macros, and eat intuitively. Listen to your body. And I want to give it fair treatment, right? In any good debate or any good argument, you have to acknowledge the, I'll say the other side and understand what is going on. Where is the truth here? There is a real framework behind this when we look at the history of intuitive eating. Intuitive eating was developed by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elise Resch. Have no idea if I pronounced those correct. And this is back in 1995. So it's not even that old of a concept. You know, what is that, 30 years? And there are 10 principles behind the formal framework. It's been very much studied, a lot of good research behind it. And if we go forward in time to much more recently, there's a 2021 meta-analysis that looked at 97 studies and found that intuitive eating is associated with better body appreciation, higher self-esteem, lower depression and anxiety, and less binge eating. Okay, you're intrigued. I'm sure you're intrigued. Because like, okay, well, it sounds like intuitive eating is a good thing, right? So why am I pushing back? Why's Philip doing here on wits and weights? Because of how we frame it and the language that we use and what we mean. When most people hear eat intuitively, they don't go read the research and those 10 principles and those frameworks and put them in place, which in and of itself requires structure. They hear, hey, I have permission to stop trying all these other things like tracking. Tracking's bad, data's obsessive, and I could wing it, and I could be sick, and I could be successful. And actually, I hear this a lot uh when it comes to diets that are not intuitive eating, but that are, they they make the claim that it's all you have to do is eat certain foods, right? Like keto, carnivore, all of those are attractive in many ways because of how they simplify and tell you you don't need to track. The Instagram version of intuitive eating is what I'm gonna call it, the one that gets shared as a meme, right? Like every food fits and listen to your body and all that, all of those, whatever flavor that is, is very different from the actual intuitive eating framework. Even Tribole or Triboli, again, I don't know how to pronounce her name. I apologize. She has said that using intuitive eating as a weight loss strategy is a misrepresentation of her work. That the framework, guess what it was designed for? To heal disordered eating relationships. It wasn't designed for, let's say, a healthy mind state without eating disorders who are trying to achieve body recomposition. It was not designed to help you build muscle or lose fat in a strategic targeted way, for example. And this is where the research gets interesting. Or where the research kind of drops off because there is a big blind spot in the research. So I want to talk about that next because the what I want you to know is that there's a single major intuitive eating study has never ever measured body composition, at least with anything objective, like I don't know, DEXA scans, body fat testing, things like that. The body weight data that you might see in intuitive eating studies is usually self-reported height and weight. We know a lot of that can be inaccurate, or maybe you just don't know. Regardless, the outcome they're offering measuring is BMI. BMI. And that tells you nothing about gaining muscle, losing fat, changing body composition. It's really more about general population health on the BMI scale. We're thinking about overweight and obesity. So when someone says, hey, no, the research supports intuitive eating, what they mean is the research shows that intuitive eating improves your psychological relationship with food. And that is valuable, but it doesn't tell you anything about whether it helps you build the physique you want or eat in a healthy way for sustainability long term to achieve your goals. Right? The evidence for that claim just doesn't exist. It's never been tested. And that's the case with a lot of this stuff in the world that we inhabit. It's very, it's either difficult to test these things or there's just not enough incentive or money to do so. The studies in the meta-analysis that I mentioned, the vast majority of them, like 89% of them, are cross-sectional. And so what that means is they took a snapshot at one point in time. And they can tell you that people who score high on intuitive eating scales tend to have lower BMI. They can't tell you that intuitive eating caused it, or you know, whether people who are already leaner find it easier to eat intuitively. And you're like, okay, but if it improves my mental health and it improves my relationship with food, isn't that worth it? And I would say, yes, 100% yes. I am not anti-intuitive eating when defined in the proper way. What I am is anti-skipping steps, trying to take shortcuts to get to something you think is intuitive eating that really isn't. And the step that most people skip is the one that determines whether intuitive eating will work for them. Okay, now we're now we're building on the logic here. So here's the question nobody asks. If intuitive eating means listen to your hunger and fullness signals, okay, I think I think maybe you would agree that's a decent definition. How do we know those signals are accurate? So there is a term in the research called interoceptive accuracy. Interoceptive accuracy. It's just a fancy way, or my kids would say, fancy Nancy would say, it's a fancy way of saying how well you can actually perceive what's happening inside your body. You might have heard the term proprioception. This is interoception inside your body. A 2013 study found that interoceptive sensitivity fully quote unquote mediates, okay, mediates the relationship between intuitive eating and BMI. What that means is that intuitive eating only works to regulate your weight when your hunger and fold signals are accurate. And when they're not, it doesn't. So here's the problem. For a lot of you, those signals are what? They're not accurate. Multiple things are happening that degrade those signals. All right, and I'm gonna share four things right now that have degraded them, just so you can get the context. The first one, of course, is chronic dieting and restriction. If you spent years cycling between restrictive diets and falling off the wagon, okay, yo-yo dieting, we call it, then your hunger regulation system has been disrupted over and over again. And we know the extreme of this is individuals with eating disorder histories and also chronic restriction have very large deficits in their interoceptive awareness compared to control groups that don't have such a history. So you've disrupted it already just by lots and lots of restriction in dieting. And most women in my audience here that are listening, you will have tried a hundred diets or more in your lifetime. Second is sleep. And this is brutal for anyone dealing with, for example, symptoms as we age, perimenopausal symptoms are a big one that I hear about all the time, where it just poor sleep leads to symptoms, symptoms lead to poor sleep, and it's a vicious cycle. People with sleep apnea, right? People with a lot of stress, the men with dealing with lots of stress and relationship issues, like the list goes on. We know that two nights of poor sleep, where you're getting, say, four or five hours instead of seven or eight, can produce a massive decrease in leptin, which is your satiety hormone, a massive increase, about 28% in ghrelin, that's your hunger hormone, and a 24% increase in subjective hunger. This is based on the study that I've talked about a few times in the past when we discussed appetite. And that's just from two nights of poor sleep. And these effects tend to be a little more pronounced in women as well. So that's the second one is sleep. And we know we as we get older, our sleep tends to get worse, not better, unless we do something about it. The third factor for degrading your signals is your food environment. There was a landmark NIH study. This was a randomized controlled trial. So it's it's one of the highest quality pieces of evidence we get. And it showed that people eating ultra-processed foods consumed 508 extra calories per day compared to unprocessed foods, even when the diets were matched for calories, macros, sugar, sodium, and fiber. This is a classic study that shows that we tend to overconsume, we overconsume when we are eating a higher percentage of ultra-processed foods because those foods literally override your satiety signals. You eat them faster, you feel full later, you consume more before your body catches up. It's essentially what happens. You just don't get full and you eat more. We all know this. A bag of chips is really easy to eat compared to a whole bunch of potatoes. And then the last one here is for women in perimetopause and menopause specifically, there's a hormonal compounding effect. As estradiol declines, ghrelin goes up, leptin goes down, or becomes a little more resistant, and GLP1 goes down as well. And then your hunger signals increase at the same time that your caloric needs are decreasing a bit by, say, two to 250 calories a day because of your declining metabolism from a loss of muscle mass and from less movement. And telling someone in this situation, okay, listen, you 25-year-old Instagrammers, to just listen to your body is like telling them to trust a, I don't know, let me give you a nerd reference. If you had a compass that's been demagnetized in the apocalypse, you're gonna, you're not gonna survive very long. Okay. So I don't know if that's a good reference or not, but that's what came to mind. So if you're hearing this, if you're recognizing yourself in what I've been talking about, maybe you've been stuck in a cycle of restriction. And then you give up and you eat by feel and by vibes, and then you restrict again, and nothing seems to stick. I want to tell you about something really cool that I've been building over the last few months. I'm putting together a structured coaching program. I say it that way intentionally, it's structured and it's designed for this progression from building your measurement system, right? The tracking measurement awareness system so that you can stop guessing through the real work of eating more food and lifting heavy with real human beings, coaches watching all of this data along the way, all the way to trusting yourself and making decisions independently, of you know, graduating or at least becoming very, very skilled. And so to me, that's the way it's done a beginning, a middle, and end to develop those skills. It's called Eat More, Lift Heavy. That's right, eat more, lift heavy. And it launches at the end of this month. If you want to be first in line and lock in the best pricing we're ever gonna have, go to witsandweights.com slash eatmore and get on the wait list. That is witsandweights.com slash eatmore. The link will be in the show notes. I'll have more details soon. If you're on the list, you'll hear them first. And it's something that I wished existed years ago because I do love having week by week. Tell me what to do to develop these skills so I can learn them in a very achievable fashion, given that I'm super busy and stressed and I don't have a lot of time. And I think that's many of you. All right, witsandweights.com slash eat more. Okay, let's keep going. So, what is the fix? You you can't just flip a switch and eat intuitively, right? If you can't trust your hunger signals. So, what do you do? Well, first you have to calibrate things, your signals. You have to build the skills that make intuitive eating reliable based on reliable inputs, based on reliable hunger signals. And then you graduate into the ability to sustain intuitive eating. I think of this as the four stages of nutritional competence. All right. Four stages of nutritional competence. And you might recognize this from learning theory. I love to borrow from different frameworks and theories out there, not just engineering. Stage one is you don't know what you don't know. You think that you're eating pretty healthy, or some of you use words like clean or good or whatever that the word is, but you're never actually looking at the data, or at least not sufficiently enough, to really understand what's going on. And this might be the person, if you're listening, eating 1100 calories with 40 grams of protein, who thinks she's doing fine because she's eating clean. So that's stage one. You don't know what you don't know. Stage two is you start tracking, sorry, you start tracking, and you realize that, oh, I had no freaking idea. I am way under on my protein. I am under eating by 500 calories. My fiber is a measly 10 grams. This is where tracking is a diagnostic tool. It is not a punishment, it is not meant to make you feel guilty or judge yourself. You are simply gathering information. It is a very powerful reframe. Stage three, all right, now you can hit your targets, but it takes attention. It takes some work. You are logging, you're making adjustments, you're learning what a 40 gram protein meal looks like on your plate, not just 40 grams for the day, right? But in one meal. And this is the conscious competence stage. Conscious competence. You are building pattern recognition. This is a crucial part of that, you know, 45-day window for a habit to stick, for example. And then stage four is hey, you don't need the tracking sheet or the app anymore. You naturally know how to portion and select foods, again, almost by feel and by vibes at this point, but it's really a skill that's been trained into your brain because you've done it enough times it's become automatic. And if you shift your goals, you know how to shift those selections accordingly. And this is what real intuitive eating actually looks like, right? It's not that you are ditching the data or getting rid of tracking your data, it's that you've internalized the data into your own brain. Your brain has become the data crunching and data gathering tool. And it will never be perfect. This is why people often, who I work with and myself included, will go back to a higher, more precise level of tracking at times, sometimes for long stretches, to retrain the brain or to level up that information. It also depends on how aggressive your goal is. If your goal requires a higher level of precision, you might need more data. But this is all a far cry from what the Instagram crowd talks about when they say intuitive eating. And look, I've had I've had people on my show who they don't use calories and macros with their clients, but they use another form of tracking. Even if it's a piece of paper of portions and what's on your plate and how much fiber, it's still tracking data. And that's the important piece. Now, everything I've just told you is supported by multiple lines of research. I wouldn't just be telling you out of out of my butt for kicks, okay? I I love I love connecting psychology and engineering and self-determination theory, which we're gonna talk about right now, into a system that really, really works for you and makes this all easier than it ever than you ever thought possible. It's never completely easy, and it's never really about discipline either. It's just a system. So self-determination theory, which has been studied a lot across, especially weight loss or weight management studies, shows that autonomous motivation is one of the strongest predictors of long-term success. Autonomous motivation. But this is the key part relying on like a rigid external prescription, somebody telling you this is the way you have to eat or this is the diet you follow, it can work temporarily, but then it undermines the development of your own motivational resources. So it undermines that very piece that shows long-term success. And that's why people fall off when they do stuff like that. And so the goal of structure is to build your internal competence, right? That conscious competence we talked about. You don't want to create a permanent dependence on the structure. You want to help internalize, learn from it, and then you move beyond it and you can always come back to it. Now, we had Dr. Eric Helms on the show several times, and on one of those episodes, he described this progression from a form of tracking to a form of much less tracking, being that he is an elite competitive, you know, award-winning bodybuilder. Okay. He's professional. He calls it diet autoregulation, kind of like training autoregulation, but this is for your diet. And he's he says, look, this is not really the same thing as intuitive eating. So this is where we can start to evolve our terminology, perhaps, in this industry for this nuance. He calls it diet autoregulation. It is goal-directed eating. So you have a goal that's directing what you do, and it's built on three trainable skills: nutritional competence, introsceptive awareness, and self-regulation, which we've kind of touched on all of these. You know, nutritional competence, right? So that's knowledge of nutrition science, interoceptive awareness, that's the awareness of your inside of your body, what it's doing, what we've talked about, the hunger signals, and then self-regulation, the ability to regulate your own behaviors. And his point is that these are not innate things. You have to train them. You train them, you build them through structured intention and practice. And then and only then does that structure become optional. And again, research on tracking supports this thought as well. There is consistently in the research a positive relationship between dietary self-monitoring and managing your weight. Dietary self-monitoring, what is that? That's tracking. People who track, it's not that they just lose weight, they actually develop the literacy around their nutrition. They learn what portions look like, they learn what their body needs because they're tracking and able to validate the reality of the situation as they go. There was one study that specifically tested this. They found that training in calorie estimation. So, in other words, training yourself to estimate calories significantly improved portion size accuracy. And then those skills transferred beyond that point. Now, here's the part that matters the most for this conversation. The research on flexible versus rigid restraint. Okay. Flexible dieting or flexible eating versus rigid restraint consistently shows that how you approach structure determines the outcome. What do I mean by that? Well, the structure itself can't be too rigid. Rigid control, all or nothing rule. Forbidden food lists, clean versus dirty, good versus bad, all of those correlate with higher binge eating, more food cravings, and higher BMI. Like you just don't get the result, even if you do in the short term, not for the long term. Whereas flexible control, having a moderate structure. So I like to say structure with flexibility, not having a list of forbidden foods. Okay, you might have your own personal rules for yourself, but not a big prescriptive list of forbidden foods that don't have a reason behind them. Things that have a graduated approach, like a system where you learn more and more till you don't need it anymore. All of those things correlate with lower binge eating, fewer cravings, lower BMI, and this is the best part, better long-term adherence. So tracking is not the problem. Obsessive, fear-based, rigid tracking is the problem. Flexible, I'll say curiosity-driven, time-limited tracking, right? When we do fat loss phases, we set a limit, not necessarily that you have to lose a certain amount of weight by certain time, but that we're not going to diet for longer than this amount of time, regardless of the outcome. These, this kind of approach is the single most evidence-based tool that we have for building the skills that eventually make tracking unnecessary. Now, I want to be clear about what I'm not claiming here because nuance always gets lost. I am not saying that intuitive eating is bad. As mentioned earlier in the episode, the framework has psychological benefits and aspects like removing food guilt and recognizing and learning about your hunger and fullness and rejecting the diet mentality are super, super valuable. I'm also not saying that you should track forever. I think I think I've been clear in this episode, that's not what I'm saying. Because tracking is a temporary scaffold, and temporary is as long as you define it. If you want to track for days, weeks, months, or years, that is totally on you. And for many people, that's a helpful thing they want to do and cool. But you build skills when you do that regardless. And then when you take that scaffolding down, you'll find that you have a lot more capability than you did before. I'm also not saying that your hunger signals are worthless. I'm saying they could be degraded from years of doing these other things and they have to be recalibrated. And that's totally, totally doable. You're not lost, you're not broken, it's doable. If you've been a dieter for many years, if you have sleep issues, if you have the hormonal changes, then there's going to be some intention and effort and structure behind it to do this. The last thing I'm not saying is that the popular version, the Instagram version of intuitive eating can't work for some people. I guess if you've never had a disorder relationship with food, you've never dieted multiple times, you have very solid interoceptive awareness already, your goals don't include specific body composition changes, okay, then eating intuitively from the start might work. And again, I'm a little bit sarcastic in how I delivered that, but that's because most of those things are not the things that you listening to this podcast, dear listener, have in place already. Like you don't have all of them in place necessarily. We want to build those skills. So then what I am saying is for most people, especially as we age over 40 who have specific physique goals, and you've been through years of dieting, and your hunger signals are disrupted by hormones, by sleep, stress, the food environment, the path to food freedom runs through structured awareness first. You have to test the system before you let it run. Now remember, I promised you a three-question self-test to check whether your hunger signals are actually calibrated. I'm gonna share that in just a moment. But first, if today's episode hit hard with you. If you're nodding your head throughout this episode and realizing what you need is not another diet, it's not more willpower, but simply a system with a structured process that builds real skills and then graduates you to independence. That's exactly what Eat More Lift Heavy is designed to do. You stop guessing, you do the real work, eat more lift heavy, and you trust yourself. It is a coached 26 week arc. That's six months. It's a 26-week arc planned out for you with a beginning, middle, and a defined end. Go to witsandwaits.com slash eat more to get on the wait list. You'll lock in founder pricing that way as well. Go to wits and weights.com slash eat more and enrollment is opening very soon. All right, here is the quick way to test whether your hunger signals are reliable enough to guide you forward without needing the tracking or the data anymore. Question one. If you skip a meal, can you tell the difference between actual stomach hunger and just feeling tired, bored, or stressed? All right. We know that research shows hunger has at least 11 distinct dimensions to them, to it. And most people are confusing one for another, like fatigue or irritability for hunger. If they feel the same to you, then your signals do need some work. Okay, so again, if you skip a meal, can you tell the difference between real physiological stomach hunger and one of these many other things and these emotions? Question two When you sit down to eat, can you stop at about 80% full and feel satisfied 20 minutes later? Or do you consistently either overeat past fullness or under-eat and feel starving an hour later? All right, if your enough detector, like I've eaten enough and I can tell, it's if if if that doesn't exist or it's off in either direction, again, that's a calibration issue. So can you stop at 80% full and feel satisfied 20 minutes later, or are you always overeating or even under-eating and then you're hungry later? All right, question three. If I asked you to create a plate, if I asked you to get a plate and create a meal with about 30 to 40 grams of protein and a couple of servings of vegetables, and you don't have to look anything up or go into an app or anything, could you do it and be within 20%? Could you have 30 to 40 grams of protein and and two servings of vegetables within 20% if we then log it in a food log and compare? If the answer is no, then you haven't built the pattern recognition that makes data free eating reliable. And I say 20% because that is roughly the error that experienced nutritionists and dietitians have versus the general population, which is just massive 40, 50, 60, 80% error. So that's the interesting thing is once you develop the skill, you're still gonna be off by 20%, but that's okay. Like that's close enough. If you answered no to any one of these, you're not, you're not broken. Just keep that in mind. That's all what I'm saying. I'm saying that you have some calibration to do first. That's a problem to be solved, and that's okay, right? That is exactly what structure tracking is for. So again, if you want to get on the list for eat more lift heavy, witsandweights.com slash eatmore. Until next time, guys, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, real food freedom is not the absence of structure. It's what you earn on the other side of that structure when you internalize it. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.
