Over at Chicken Tender, Chandelle talks about that moderation thing. She suggests that moderation is actually a radical practice in our culture:
It’s about enjoying a diversity of experiences and options and choices in one’s life, constantly adjusting and responding from an inner sense of trust and judgment. And it’s a very personal thing. By necessity, moderation can only be defined individually. This is why diets have such a negative psychological impact — they strip you of your ability to listen to internal cues and lead you to distrust yourself. Instead of eating when you’re hungry, you might force yourself to drink water instead, or chew gum or consume some voluminous food-like concoction to “trick” your body into a sense of satiation. Instead of responding to messages from your body, you’re reacting to rules from someone who most likely does not even know you.
One of the subtleties of this message is what’s really involved with “an inner sense of trust and judgment.” Too often this is translated to eating processed food … and lots of it. And initially, that may happen (in his podcast with Angelo Coppola, Charles Eisenstein suggests that sometimes that’s just ourselves testing to see if we really will allow ourselves to make the decisions).
But if we choose these foods and then eat them mindfully, or consciously, we my find that what we think we want is far less satisfying (here’s a great example).
BTW, speaking of moderation, here’s the backstory/context behind Evelyn’s (aka CarbSane) comment from Monday’s post.
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health, & food policy. And cats! 
Great post - this whole “moderation” debate is so interesting to me! The “moderation”/intuitive eating thing isn’t for me, but I think it’s something that needs to be discussed a lot more frequently in Paleo/ancestral health circles.
I think a huge problem with it though is that everyone defines “in moderation” differently, so when Chandelle talks about “moderation” and Melissa Hartwig talks about “moderation” they really seem to be talking about two totally different things. The W30 folks are criticizing “moderation” as an excuse to binge on junk (with the implication being that you’re obviously going to seize that excuse), but I don’t think that’s what the intuitive eating camp means when they talk about it. From what I understand of intuitive eating (I may be wrong), there seems to be a common initial “binge phase” followed by the eater chilling out, learning to trust herself, and no longer wanting to eat an entire gallon of ice cream in one sitting. And this is also defended as “moderation.” So from the W30 perspective, moderation relies on “willpower” (which is why they aren’t fans), but from the IE perspective I don’t think it does.
tl;dr: I wish we had some more precise definitions for this stuff; then maybe we could all get along a little better.
I think one of the things missing from the IE camp is a frank discussion of the implication of foods as nutrient sources … if you start every day with a Pop Tart, you’re clearly setting yourself up for issues down the road. This may be why some folks think that IE is better as an advanced strategy rather than a 101. That is a bit ironic though … as mammals, it’s a bit crazy that we just aren’t able to trust our own bodies!
OTOH, the thing often missing from the “clean” eating camps is an understanding that, for some, it is the very act of avoiding restricted foods (which also requires some — or a lot! — of willpower) that can lead to binges on junk.
So maybe it’s the buddhist in me, but I suspect that the middle way is likely to be a better lifetime approach for some, many, or maybe even most.
Agreed - and also a frank discussion of the fact that so many modern “foods” are deliberately designed to overwhelm your “intuition”! (that’s one of the things I did appreciate the W30 moderation post for pointing out). I certainly wouldn’t expect my body to self-regulate other deliberately addictive substances like opium or heroin. An extreme example, and I think there are degrees of susceptibility to addiction where some people might not have an issue with Pop-Tarts, but I wish it would be discussed more.
The thing is that for those of us who aren’t moderators, abstaining requires a lot LESS willpower. But I can see how if you’re a moderator trying to cram yourself into an abstainer mold, you’d set yourself up for binging. As Geneen Roth says, ‘for every diet, there is an equal and opposite binge.’
“As Geneen Roth says, ‘for every diet, there is an equal and opposite binge.’”
Wow, that’s totally brilliant.
“OTOH, the thing often missing from the “clean” eating camps is an understanding that, for some, it is the very act of avoiding restricted foods (which also requires some — or a lot! — of willpower) that can lead to binges on junk.”
And I think this is very true too, and applicable to most (I believe) people who try to adopt an extremely restrictive style of eating.
I was brought up in the 1960s in a home where we ate home cooked meals every day (with the exception of the divine Cammaro’s pizza, once every few months),NO white bread, very, very little sugar, no baked goods, very little in the way of processed foods, no candies, rarely cookies, pop once in a blue moon, etc. etc. My mother believed in what was quaintly called “health food” in those days. While my friends were all chowing down on bologna, Wonder bread and Kraft singles, we ate “healthy”.
BTW, this basically healthy diet did not make me slim. I have always been overweight, not “death fat”, but always plump to chunky. Many of my junk food eating buddies from primary school were slim. I am firmly convinced that, just as there are bushes and sequoias in nature, there are naturally fat, slim and in-between humans and there’s not much we can do about our heredity, short of starving or stuffing ourselves (depending on where we are on the bell curve).
All this being said, especially in North America, we are exposed to some mighty scary Frankenfood. And yes, it’s awfully tasty and a complete diet of such food is no doubt not good for our health.
But I have to come down on the side of moderation–at least as far as I’m concerned. I had “healthy” food drilled into me as a child. Have I ever bought Pop Tarts? No. Have I had one for breakfast in my life? Not sure, though I know I’ve eaten at least 2-3 in my life (and I remember specifically when I did, but that’s a long story and not worthy of mentioning here). Mostly, I eat a good variety of food, much of it home made. Usually, I don’t pig out. That’s because of the way I was raised.
I have tried to be a restrictive eater a couple of times, cutting out wheat or sugar to see what the results would be. I neither felt any better or lost any weight. In fact, when I religiously cut out sugar for several months, I actually gained weight because I felt so deprived that I overate on other foods. And this coming from someone who does not eat a lot of sweets in the first place.
Personally, I am sick to death of a culture that makes food into the enemy (I enjoyed the article to you linked to awhile ago on this topic, Beth) and exercising until you drop into the Holy Grail. More and more, I feel we live in a very sick society where “purists” pit themselves against the great Twinkie-eating, unwashed masses. Sorry, but there are many of us who do eat in moderation, enjoy a glass of wine from time to time, maybe even a bowl of chocolate mousse and generally eat good, decent food. I just came back from France and it was a real breath of fresh air to see the wonderful food you can eat there (including that chocolate mousse that I saw from afar, though did not partake in myself). Sadly, North American food paranoia is taking hold there too. One day in Paris, I was reading a magazine (in French) that had a hysterical cartoon showing a waiter about to take the order of a group of people. One of the diners says to the waiter, “I’m sorry, but we only eat sawdust now.” To which the waiter responds, “There’s a carpentry shop just down the road.”
Awesome comment, thanks! This reminds me a bit of the point I mentioned recently from Amy Pershing. Here’s the full quote:
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I think a piece of [why I do this work], actually, is that it is such a robbery of our lives – for women in particular, but increasingly, men – that we would say, “I can’t go on the beach because of my body,” or “I can’t wear a swimsuit,” or “I can’t do this or this or this because I would be too ashamed and my body would be unacceptable to someone.” That’s a robbery of our experience in the world. That makes me really angry – that that time and energy is taken away from anyone.
I saw that there was so much that was taken away from important women in my life and experiences that they denied themselves because they felt shame about their cellulite or the size of their hips or the tone of their skin or the wrinkles around their face. I think that’s not okay.
I stay pretty motivated and one of the things I tell my clients is that body image work requires rebellion. It really requires us getting angry. When we see something that is shaming – or women or men or children – we need to get angry about that. We need to say, “That’s not okay.” I think that’s a big piece of it. It really requires some rebellion and saying, “You know what? I don’t have to take in those messages. I can do that differently.”
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To me, the energy that some people have to expend to eat “cleanly” is similarly problematic wrt a “robbery of our experience in the world.” Is that really how we want people — women mostly — to live? I say if eating paleo or LC or LF or vegan or whatever works, is an “a ha” or comes naturally, then awesome. But if it’s not, then find a new approach and stop beating yourself up because you’re a square peg that doesn’t fit in a round hole!
Hey, thanks for the mention. I’ve been reading your blog for a while, so it was a nice surprise.
I did go through a period of deliberately immoderate eating on the way to moderation. My eating habits were so disordered, so many foods had become “triggers” for me, I was afraid to eat much of anything. So for a month or so, I ate EVERYTHING. Ice cream every day, tortilla chips, bagels, breakfast cereal, doughnuts, and yes, Pop Tarts. It was so scary, and I thought I might never come out the other side, but I did. Now ice cream sits in my freezer for weeks, chips go stale… Moderation comes naturally now, and for me that means that I neither restrict nor binge. I wouldn’t call it intuitive eating, per se. I read the book and the process seemed tedious to me, though I might be misunderstanding it. Mostly my meals are unprocessed, homemade “real food,” and occasionally there’s a cup of salted caramel Talenti, but I’m able to stop where it seemed impossible before, and really decide if I want it or not — turns out I actually don’t have much of a sweet tooth when I’m not restricting sugar. Things might change in the future, but hopefully only for the better — I never want to go back to being afraid to eat.