Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating

by Christy Harrison

Under normal circumstances (not dieting), people respond to difficult emotions by losing their appetite. For nondieters, a lack of interest in food is a common symptom of grief, depression, and anxiety, among other negative emotions. This makes sense from a biological standpoint: in the short term, our ability to respond to something bad happening is more important for our survival than eating is. In those situations, we’re programmed to stop thinking about food and start dealing with the matter at hand. Eventually, once we’ve recovered from the initial emotional blow (or, in our ancestors’ case, eluded that angry lion), we start thinking about food again. With chronic dieters, though, something contrary happens: negative emotions provoke an increased appetite and desire to eat.9 Dieters develop the response opposite to what we see in intuitive eaters. Psychologists believe this is because for dieters, eating is under conscious cognitive control (as opposed to intuitive eaters, who take their eating cues from their bodies and exert no cognitive effort to control their intake), and negative emotions disrupt and deplete that cognitive control. Once the inhibition is gone, the appetite that was being suppressed emerges in a big way, like Roger Rabbit bursting through a brick wall. Negative emotions inadvertently break down the barriers that were holding dieters back from their true desire to eat.