The Eating Instinct Quotes

“Diets don’t work because they require us to live in a constant state of war with our bodies. “Whenever you restrict food intake, you’re going to run up against your own biology,” explains Dr. Sharma. “It doesn’t matter what program you follow. As soon as your body senses that there are fewer calories going in than going out, it harnesses a whole array of defense mechanisms to fight that.” When we’re dieting, our bodies try to conserve energy, so our metabolism slows down, the result being that you have to eat even less to keep losing weight. That becomes an increasingly difficult project because our bodies also produce more of the hormones, such as ghrelin, that trigger hunger. There is even some evidence that the bacteria in our guts respond when we eat fewer calories, shifting their populations in ways that will send more hunger signals to our brains.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“We feel especially compelled to apologize for enjoying food, for wanting seconds, for appearing to eat even a single bite more than we think we should.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“food became something to categorize—whole or processed, real or fake, clean or dirty—and to fear.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“diets fail us, not the other way around.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“Food is supposed to sustain and nurture us. Eating well, any doctor will tell you, is the most important thing you can do to take care of yourself. Feeding well, any human will tell you, is the most important job a mother has, especially in the first months of her child’s life. But right now, in America, we no longer think of food as sustenance or nourishment. For many of us, food feels dangerous. We fear it. We regret it. And we categorize everything we eat as good or bad, with the “bad” list always growing longer. No meat, no dairy, no gluten—and, goodness, no sugar. Everything has too much sugar, salt, fat; too many calories, processed ingredients, toxins. As a result, we are all too much, our bodies taking up too much space in our clothes and in the world. Food has become a heavy issue, loaded with metaphorical meaning and the physical weight of our obesity crisis. And for parents, food is a double burden, because we must feed our children even while most of us are still struggling with how to feed ourselves. When the feeding tube first went in, I thought the hardest part of teaching Violet to eat again would be persuading her to open her mouth. Actually, the hardest part was letting go of my own expectations and judgments about what food should look like—so I could just let her eat.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“Nutrition has become a permanently unsolvable Rubik’s Cube.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“We have to get reacquainted with our own innate preferences. We must decide for ourselves what we like and dislike, and how different foods make us feel when we aren’t prejudging every bite we take. It takes its own kind of relentless vigilance to screen out all that noise. It requires accepting that the weight you most want to be may not be compatible with this kind of more intuitive eating—but that it’s nevertheless okay to be this size, to take up the space that your body requires.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“So it’s our discomfort—and even disgust—with the joy of eating that frightens us. And that’s because of a culture that tells us, in a thousand ways, from the time we first start solid foods, that this comfort cannot be trusted. That we cannot be trusted to know what and how much to eat. We must outsource this judgment to experts who know better—first to our parents; then to teachers; then to food gurus and big brands, who sell us on diets, cleanses, food dogmas, and “lifestyle changes.” We cede our knowledge, our own personal relationship with food, to an entire world built on the premise that we don’t know how to feed ourselves.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“I also hear an apology almost every time I witness a female friend eating cheese. Or bread. Or chocolate. We feel especially compelled to apologize for enjoying food, for wanting seconds, for appearing to eat even a single bite more than we think we should.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“Apologizing around food—for our failure to make it good enough, healthy enough, for what we’re choosing to eat, for what we’re daring to serve others—has become an important ritual in today’s food culture.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“look in the kitchen cupboards of most American households and you are likely to find odd combinations of ingredients or bulk snack-food stashes that have little to do with nutrition and everything to do with childhood, memory, habit.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“Our eating instincts are disrupted by modern diet culture, in which food is supposed to be fuel, not therapy. Just as the PICU doctors and dietitians think of nutrition as a prescription they can write and then tweak for optimal results, we’re taught that a “healthy” relationship with food means that you only ever eat for sustenance. Enjoyment is allowed only when you’re eating certain kinds of foods blessed with the right kind of packaging, or better yet, no packaging at all. Otherwise, we’re supposed to ignore the sheer existence of food unless we’re hungry, and then eat only what we need to feel full, but never a bite more. You shouldn’t eat to combat depression, or stress, or just because something tastes good, if you are not also physically hungry. And yet—the physical sensation of hunger is emotional. Hunger triggers a huge range of feelings, depending on its severity—excitement, irritability, weepiness, confusion. And eating brings more: pleasure, contentment, satisfaction, bliss. We cannot separate these things. I’m not sure that we should try.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“But we don’t accept biology as the explanation because we’re so convinced that weight is about willpower. When we start feeling hungrier, or thinking more obsessively about food, we assume that it’s our own human frailty at work, yet again.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“All these weight-loss deterrents are hardwired into our biology because maintaining our body’s size and fat stores is essential to human survival. This makes sense when you consider how many millennia humans spent living in food-scarce situations. Today, your body doesn’t know if your pre-diet weight was too high; it’s programmed, through eons of evolution, to protect that “set point” at any cost. “It might be six months later, it might be five years later,” says Sharma. “Your body will continue to try to get the weight back. And eventually, it wins.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“Burgard argues that even attempting to classify obesity by type or origin is misguided: “We have this fundamental misunderstanding that everyone should be close to the same weight, and therefore higher weight bodies can never be healthy and well regulated,” she explains. “But what if most people’s bodies are regulating themselves fine, just at a wider variety of weights than we’ve been taught to consider acceptable?”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“For a movement that has organized itself around a series of gurus and their philosophies and rules, that part might not be so simple. It speaks to so many bigger cultural needs, like the need to separate messages about thinness as a beauty ideal from conversations about diabetes and blood pressure, and to accept that people who don’t look like our picture of health can still be authorities on their own bodies. The need to stop viewing processed foods as not-foods and start understanding the significant roles they play in people’s lives. And the need to end the white savior model of food activism and replace it with something more authentic.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“Farm-to-table cuisine wasn’t invented in Berkeley in the 1970s,” Shakirah says. “But we have this cultural amnesia that allows all these white narratives around ‘good food’ to exist.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“While it may seem paradoxical, hunger also plays a key role in the development of obesity. “I often hear things like, ‘Those people can’t be hungry—they’re fat!’” says Janet Poppendieck, Ph.D., the author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America. “But the least healthy, most obesity-inducing calories in our society are often the cheapest.” A study from the University of Washington found that junk food can cost an average of $ 1.76 per 1,000 calories, while more nutritious foods add up to $ 18.16 for the same amount. Food-insecure families may also be more prone to obesity because their bodies are essentially always in crash-diet mode, which ultimately slows down metabolism.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“Karen, and so many like her, will go on that diet—even though she knows it’s counter to her eating-disorder recovery goals, and even though she knows how unlikely it is to make her feel better. She’ll follow the new plan and cut out a new round of foods, because she’s still looking for what we all seek: A way to feed ourselves that makes sense. That feels simple and right. That doesn’t make us feel guilty about everything we put into our bodies. We no longer trust ourselves to know this intuitively, and maybe some of us never did. So instead, we’re searching for something external: an expert we can trust, a set of rules to follow, a literal recipe for how to develop this basic life skill. Many people within the wellness industry are searching for the same thing. But in the meantime, they’re happy to sell us their new plan.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“The bigger issue may be that even among clinicians who work on the mental ramifications of food, the belief is widespread that what a diet does to your body matters more than what it does to your psyche.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“But right now, in America, we no longer think of food as sustenance or nourishment. For many of us, food feels dangerous. We fear it. We regret it. And we categorize everything we eat as good or bad, with the “bad” list always growing longer. No meat, no dairy, no gluten—and, goodness, no sugar. Everything has too much sugar, salt, fat; too many calories, processed ingredients, toxins. As a result, we are all too much, our bodies taking up too much space in our clothes and in the world. Food has become a heavy issue, loaded with metaphorical meaning and the physical weight of our obesity crisis.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

“So it's our discomfort - and even disgust - with the joy of eating that frightens us. And that's because of a culture that tells us, in a thousand ways, from the time we first start solid foods, that this comfort cannot be trusted. That we cannot be trusted to know what and how much to eat. We must outsource this judgment to experts who know better - first to our parents, then to teachers; then to food gurus and big brands, who sell us on diets, cleanses, food dogmas, and "lifestyle changes." We cede our knowledge, our own personal relationship with food, to an entire world built on the premise that we don't know how to feed ourselves.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America