What If We Treated FOOD The Same Way We Treated AIR?

Hi friend,

Imagine you’re holding your breath under water.

At first, you’re only focused on whatever it is you’re doing… you’re thinking about the feel of the water against your skin, the weightlessness of your body, the motion of swimming, or the pretty stuff you went underwater to see.

After a short time though, you start thinking about breathing. You know you can stay down there a little longer, but you’re no longer quite as fully present with your underwater experience, because a growing part of your brain is focusing on air— when you’ll really need it, how you’ll get it, and how good it would feel to take in air.

Soon after, the mental balance shifts so that you’re no longer really being present with your underwater experience at all, because your body is getting uncomfortable and your mind is entirely focused on your oxygen situation. 

If you continue resisting your brain’s urging to come up for air, you’ll soon find that you can’t think about anything else. If you wait long enough, your body will start thinking you’re in danger, and send out massive quantities of the stress hormone (cortisol) and adrenaline, so that you’re suddenly not only obsessed with wanting and getting air, but you have a whole bunch of energy to go get to it. 

When you finally break the surface, you’ll find yourself gasping for air, automatically drawing in huge deep lungfuls of it, with both a pacing and an intensity that are both completely out of your control, and way higher than usual.

This is normal, of course. Your brain registered a threat to your survival while you were underwater, so it took over to protect you and keep you alive, first by making you want to breathe, then by making you obsessed with breathing, and finally by making you take in an absolute shit-ton of oxygen—an amount you would never normally want—really quickly once you could breathe again.

I’m bringing this all up today because the exact same thing happens when you don’t get enough food. 

When you don’t get enough calories, your brain and body go through the exact same process with food that it does with oxygen, in order to keep you alive. 

At first, things are fine and you’re focused on other things, because we can go short amounts of time without adequate nutrition, just like we can without adequate oxygen. (It’s only the time scale that’s different, since we can go much longer without eating than we can without breathing. But if we adjust for a different time scale, we can see that the process is identical!)

After a few hours without food, the body will nudge us and tell us that we want to eat. It does this by sending us hunger signals, causing us to think about food, and making food sound more appealing than it did previously. 

If you ignore these early signals and don’t eat—perhaps because you don’t feel like you “should” be hungry yet, or because you’re worried about weight gain—the mental balance will start to shift. 

You’ll find yourself struggling to focus on other things because you’re too distracted by thoughts of food and the physical discomfort that accompanies being really hungry, and if you continue resisting it will eventually become difficult to think about anything else.

These thoughts about food and eating are normal and healthy, because they’re just your brain’s way of signaling to you that you really need to eat… exactly the same way it would signal that you really need to breathe. 

But thanks to diet culture, healthism, and anti-fat discrimination, a lot of people call these kinds of thoughts “food noise,” and think of them as a problem.

For what it’s worth, “food noise” is a term that has been popularized over the last few years by the marketers of GLP-1s (weight-loss medications), in an effort to categorize these kinds of thoughts as anything from a personal failing to an unnecessary nuisance. 

Through the weight loss lens, food noise isn’t a crucial signal from your body that you need food, but rather a pointless annoyance; a glitch in your programming that can be easily remedied with weight-loss medication. 

So now let’s suppose that, despite the increasing mental obsession with food and physical discomforts of hunger, you ignore the “food noise” and continue to not eat.

Your brain, who has by now started to assume that there’s a famine and you’re in danger of starving, will eventually step in, override your conscious will, and force you to eat. 

But because this is your emergency backup survival system that has been activated, it won’t allow you to just eat a “normal” amount of food, or at a “normal” pace. No, this system is designed only to protect you during a crisis, and we need something different during a crisis than we do in normal life. This is the same system responsible for making you huff and puff and gasp for air the moment you broke the surface to get your brain the oxygen it had been deprived of, remember? 

Well, it does the exact same thing with food: making you take in huge quantities of foods very quickly, with a priority for foods that are either high in calories overall, or high in the kind of nutrients that can be immediately turned into fuel, like sugars and carbs.

Just like with breathing, this “hijacking” of your conscious control is a normal and healthy response to being in danger. But again, diet culture and weight stigma have convinced everyone that this is just called “bingeing,” and it represents a personal failing or problem to solve with willpower.

It has to be noted here that this whole exact process plays out if you’re consistently undereating over the long term, too.

If you’re eating regularly, but your overall caloric intake is a bit below the level that your brain and body have decided you need, then you will go through all the same stages of this process, just a bit slower. 

At first it won’t impact your ability to focus on other things, but you’ll find that you feel hungry or think about food more often than you used to, or more often than other people seem to. This is your body’s gentle nudge to eat more, and if you ignore it, the mental balance will start shifting. 

Over time, if you continue to undereat—even if it’s by a very small margin—you’ll find yourself becoming increasingly obsessed with food, and unable to stop thinking about it. 

At this point, if you’re not aware that you’ve been undereating, or if you’re undereating on purpose (ie: dieting), then you might start thinking there’s something wrong with you: that your appetite is out of control, or you’re addicted to food. But nope! This is just your brain telling you what it needs to survive, with increasing urgency, because you didn’t listen when it asked nicely.

Eventually, if you continue to take in less calories than you need, your brain will make the shift into crisis mode, and eating will suddenly go from voluntary to involuntary. 

If you reach this point, you’ll likely start feeling “out of control” around food. 

You might develop some “weird” eating habits now (like a vicious sweet tooth, an inability to stop mindless snacking, or a tendency to eat until your belly hurts), or you may start experiencing full-on food binges, in which you going into a sort of dissociative “trance” around food, or eat a lot of food very quickly in a way that feel mindless, urgent, and involuntary.

Again, if you’re not aware of why these things are happening, you’ll most likely view all this all as a personal failing. Proof that you’re weak, bad, or out of control. Proof that your body is broken. Proof that there is something wrong with you. 

But actually, this is all just a normal and healthy response to undereating. 

Now, if you’re reading all this and thinking “ok Jessi, but I experience all that stuff and I eat tons of food, so that can’t be the reason!” I get it. 

There are exceptions to this rule, and it’s possible you’re one of them. (For example, “mental restriction” around food can lead to the same outcome, even without physical restriction!)

But 15 years of experience has taught me that the vast majority of people who report feeling obsessed with (or out of control around) food are chronically undereating, even when they think they’re not.

There are so many reasons why someone might not realize they’re undereating. Sometimes a person who is very physically active will simply not realize how much food they need, for example, or a person’s schedule will simply make it too difficult to get in enough calories during their mealtimes. 

More often than not though, this happens because diet culture has taught the person to believe they need less food than they actually do. 

In a world where women are constantly given the message that they should only eat 1,200-1,800 calories per day (and everyone you know is dieting) it’s easy to think you “shouldn’t need” more than that, or to arbitrarily come up with an “upper acceptable limit” for how many calories you think you should need.

But the truth is that most adults need a lot more than that just to meet their brain and body’s basic needs, and everyone’s metabolism and activity levels are different, so their energy needs are different too! 

When I say the vast majority of people who struggle with food obsession and bingeing are chronically undereating, I’m talking about chronically taking in fewer calories than their brain and body think they need. 

And for a lot of people, that number is often significantly higher than what they think it is, or think it “should be.”

To wrap this up, I want you to imagine if we conceptualized our need for oxygen the way we conceptualize our need for calories. 

• What if we thought that taking in as little oxygen as possible without dying was a sign of strength, health, or goodness, and put people who managed to take in less oxygen than everyone else on a pedestal?

• What if we were taught that we couldn’t trust our bodies to regulate our breathing, and that our bodies are inherently greedy and will try to get more oxygen than is healthy for it— so we have to stay vigilant, and consciously manage how much air we take in using discipline and willpower?

• What if we spent our lives unable to be fully present or focus on more meaningful things, because we were constantly distracted by thoughts about air and breathing… but then we started calling those thoughts “air noise,” and tried to control them with medications?

• What if we felt like a failure for taking in huge lungfuls of air after holding our breath, because that “undid” all the hard work we put into holding our breath in the first place?

I hope that sounds as silly and strange to you as it does to me, but that is literally what a lot of people are doing when it comes to food!

We need adequate calories to survive in the same exact way we need adequate oxygen, and our bodies are designed to ensure that we get enough of both, no matter what we consciously believe. 

It’s absurd to think that we should (or even could!) override our body’s plan for getting exactly what it needs to survive in both cases. But society has taught us that air is morally neutral, so it’s ok to let our bodies sort that one out, whereas food is morally charged, so we have to try to consciously control it. 

Sadly though, all you get for attempting to outsmart your body in this way is a fucked up relationship with food, a deeply negative view of yourself, and a complete inability to be present in your life. 

May we all let ourselves eat the same way we let ourselves breathe, and start trusting our bodies around food again.

Big hug,

Jessi

PS. If you need help improving your relationship with food, I’ve got you. Apply for coaching with me here, or hit reply to ask about working together!