Why do I need to eat so much?

“I want to eat naturally and be able to stop when I’m not hungry anymore.”

Seems reasonable. The daily struggle to keep yourself from eating too much is a depressing affair. So is letting loose pretending you don’t care but silently hating your growing body.

Food shouldn’t be a land mine, it’s nourishment. The good news is that you can eat to satiation and not beyond if you start paying careful attention to what has been done to the food.

The more it's altered, the less likely you’ll be able to stop.

Another way to think about this is that whole, unprocessed food is perfectly designed to work with your body. It’s your ally in eating with ease.

Conversely, the more a food has been altered the more adverse effects it will have on your body.

Blood tests also revealed that, while on the unprocessed diet, people had higher levels of an appetite-suppressing hormone called PYY and lower levels of the appetite-stimulating hormone ghrelin

Weight gain, cravings, and an inability to stop eating are a direct effect of food processing (and added sugar, but that’s for another day).

I created this infographic for my Spring 2021 cohort to easily identify levels of processing.

It boggles my mind that this approach isn’t discussed more. It’s foundational to weight control.

I wish I had stronger language at my disposal, but here goes: don’t eat modern food if you want to keep any semblance of a healthy weight.

Everything in moderation does not apply to food engineered to make you over-eat, and that’s much broader than most people understand.

Big food (I define that as food companies large enough to have advertising campaigns) has to process food in order to have a product to sell you.

But, why does your food need to arrive as a product?

I say, don’t buy them. Opt-out. Even the so-called healthy ones are often equally processed, just with different ingredients.

You don’t have to live with the effects of these products. Buy food your great-grandmother would recognize and prepare it in your own kitchen.

You‘ll be able to enjoy it and put your fork down when you’ve had enough.