Rebroadcast: Satisfaction From Eating

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 220 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at seven-health.com/220.

Hey, all. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. Today I’m doing a solo episode, and it’s all about the idea of satisfaction.

This actually started as a topic I was going to do a blog post on, but then I started to think more about it, and there was really too much to cover in one long blog post. So I thought I would do a solo episode on it. It’s an area I’ve been finding I’m focusing on more and more with clients, and it’s something that I feel is very undervalued. This is the case whether someone is wanting to give up dieting or they’re in recovery from disordered eating or an eating disorder. Really understanding and embracing satisfaction is key, and I want to highlight that as part of this show.

For me, the idea of satisfaction is something that was really brought to the fore by reading Intuitive Eating by Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole many years ago. As part of Intuitive Eating, there are 10 principles, and one of the principles is Discover the Satisfaction Factor. Interestingly, while this was originally Principle 6 of the 10, when Elyse Resch wrote the Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens, she made it the second principle, so the principle after Rejecting the Diet Mentality.

Even in the adult workbook that both Elyse and Evelyn wrote together, in the section on satisfaction, there’s this great graphic with satisfaction in the middle and all of the other principles coming off it. So satisfaction really is the hub of Intuitive Eating and is the core component that then attaches everything else.

I also think this is a key message as we go into the holiday or festive season. Things will undoubtedly be different this year because of COVID, so there’ll be less office Christmas parties and socialising in comparison to other years, but nevertheless there will be events and certain foods available that can make this time of year especially difficult for certain people. So I’m hoping that this episode can help and can give you some things to consider.

There’s a number of areas I want to touch on today as part of the show. First I want to look at what satisfaction is and what the term means. I’ll go through different aspects that go into making up satisfaction. I’ll talk about the difference between satisfaction and fullness, as I’ve found that when clients are able to recognise and understand this, it can be really helpful.

I’ll then cover many reasons why satisfaction is feared or is undervalued or someone may say that they are satisfied when in reality it’s somewhat different, and then finally I’ll talk about some of the ways that I use the concept of satisfaction when working with clients or things to keep in mind to assist when making satisfaction more at the fore and an essential part of your eating.

00:03:25

What is food satisfaction?

Let’s start with the question of what satisfaction is. Obviously, there is a broader definition of satisfaction and then there is the idea of satisfaction as it pertains to food, which is really what I want to focus on here.

I couldn’t actually find a really nice, neat definition of satisfaction with food because it is a concept that isn’t something that’s easy to sum up in a couple of words (hence why I’m doing a whole podcast on it). But of the many incomplete definitions of food satisfaction, they included words like ‘fulfilment’, ‘contentment’, ‘pleasure’, ‘appetising’. How well a meal or a food matches up to expectations is also part of this. If a food is less enjoyable than anticipated, it likely can feel less satisfying. If it meets or exceeds expectations, satisfaction is going to be more likely.

To best define satisfaction, I’m going to make reference to a paper that appeared in the journal Appetite in September 2015. It’s called ‘Pleasure as an ally of healthy eating: Contrasting visceral and epicurean eating pleasure and their associations with portion size, preference and wellbeing’. I’ll link to the article in the show notes if you want to read the whole thing.

As part of it, they contrast two different types of eating pleasure. One is visceral eating pleasure and the other is epicurean eating pleasure, with epicurean meaning based on the work of Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher, which I’ll get into more in a moment. But let’s first focus on visceral eating pleasure. For some of this I’m going to just quote directly from the paper.

They define visceral pleasure as ‘short-lived hedonic relief created by the satisfaction of eating impulses’. As part of this kind of pleasure, there are a number of components. It is dictated purely from a taste or palate perspective, so there’s no importance or consideration given to the ceremony of eating or eating with other people or savouring textures or flavours. It is purely about meeting a need for a specific taste.

This kind of eating can also feel out of volitional control and impulse-driven. While people use the term ‘binge’ to describe many different types of eating, and really it is a broad term because of this, this style of eating is connected to a binge where it feels like there’s a loss of control.

I want to say before I go any further, I’m not judging this kind of eating. For many clients, this is where they find themselves. If you’ve listened recently to my solo episode on restriction (if you haven’t, then I highly suggest that you do so), then you understand what makes this kind of eating more likely. Visceral eating is more likely to occur when restriction of any kind is taking place, whether that be physical restriction or impending physical restriction or mental restriction. It’s also more likely to occur when you get overly hungry.

There’s no moralising or judgement of any of this; it’s just this is one type of eating pleasure, and there are certain aspects that make it more likely that this is going to be occurring.

Another component that is connected with visceral eating is external eating. External eating can encompass many things. The mere sight or smell or taste of a pleasant food can trigger visceral urges that you want to eat, and this eating can be even in the absence of apparent hunger. It can also be the tendency to clean a plate, irrespective of hunger levels. In a sense, you’re more at the mercy of food cues rather than feeling like you’re making genuine food choices about whether or not you want to eat something or how much of that thing you want to eat.

But again, this is going to be more likely if you are say trying to eat less than your body needs or you’re going a long time between meals. In this scenario, your body is in a state where it is on the lookout for food, and when it finds it, the goal is to get in as much as it can.

Visceral eating is also connected to emotions. Again, I have a real issue with the demonisation of emotional eating. I would also say that the vast majority of times when clients tell me that they emotionally ate or that they are an emotional eater, on closer inspection they’re really just hungry and restriction is at the core. They may not think of certain signs and symptoms as hunger, but with time, they do realise that this is what is happening. Again, this is something I touched on in the podcast with restriction, so if you haven’t listened to it, then check it out.

What the article talks about is just the degree to which eating is influenced by emotions, and the pleasure and reward of eating is used as a broad brush to deal with negative emotions. This again can feel less in someone’s control and somewhat automatic. Again, this does not happen in a vacuum. This is typically connected to restriction and having ideas about good and bad foods and this restraint style mentality around food. In this state, emotions, particularly negative emotions, are more likely to be soothed with food. Even positive emotions can be a cause for using food as a reward.

In short, visceral eating is about pleasure, but in this very narrow range where it’s about scratching an itch or an impulse and it’s about palatability and external cues and emotion modulation. The overwhelming cause for this kind of relationship with food and with satisfaction that I see with clients is restriction and restraint. So that’s visceral eating pleasure.

At the other end of the eating spectrum is what is known as epicurean eating pleasure. To quote the article, “It was the great philosopher Epicurus who first distinguished between the pleasures of the body and the pleasures of the mind.” It goes on to talk about the difference between the pleasure of eating simply to relieve hunger versus the pleasures of the table, which takes in a whole host of other components that lead to satisfaction and enjoyment.

Some of these components are still connected to the food and the taste experience of eating, but others are more about the environment and the wider experience of eating.

I’m going to flesh out all of these various components in a moment so I can go through them one by one, but in a simple sense, epicurean eating pleasure is pleasure derived through eating where there is an appreciation and a savouring of eating because of how it impacts on all our senses rather than simply taste, as well as the value of a meal outside of just the food.

The analogy that comes to mind with this is the experiments that were done with rats to ‘prove’ that sugar is addictive. You take a rat and you keep it in a cage and you deprive it of all its other needs that it has, and you then offer sugar water. Unsurprisingly, the rat loves sugar water. It can’t get enough of it. This is the equivalent of visceral pleasure. But alternatively, if you have a rat that is able to live with lots of other rats and they live in a larger cage that has fun things to do, when they are offered sugar water, they have a very different response. They may have some sips and enjoy it, but it’s not all-encompassing.

For many people, their relationship with food is similar to a rat in a cage that is devoid of any enjoyment except sugar water. It’s only on very infrequent occasions that they even offer themselves the proverbial sugar water, so most of the time eating is devoid of pleasure and satisfaction, and it’s only when they are so overcome with hunger that pleasure happens.

Then it’s no wonder that eating has become a visceral experience and is largely experienced at that end of the spectrum. It’s either devoid of pleasure, which is what’s happening most of the time, or when pleasure does come in, it’s this visceral experience where they’re overrun and it feels out of control – to the point where they might not even think of using the word ‘pleasure’ as part of this experience because it has so much negative association that comes along with it.

00:12:11

Factors that affect satisfaction

I now want to go through all the different components that can affect eating satisfaction to flesh out what is meant by epicurean eating pleasure. There are lots of different things here, and many of these ideas have come from the Intuitive Eating books. As part of putting this together, I referred to the normal Intuitive Eating book, the adult workbook, and the teen workbook. But I’ve also added in a number of extra categories of my own, areas that I’ve noticed through working with clients, and then there’s others that were made up or came because of the research paper that I’ve just referenced and we’ve just gone through.

Something I want to mention as we go through this is I’m going to be naming and making explicit all of these different factors that go into satisfaction, but when I personally sit down for a meal, I’m not going through this checklist to make sure I’m ticking all the boxes. This stuff is simply engrained in how I eat. For a ‘normal’ eater, this is the case. It largely happens automatically.

But if this isn’t how you’ve been eating and experiencing a meal, in the beginning it does need to be more explicit and thought out, where there is more attention paid to these different factors. If there is this fear that now every meal is going to be this huge and exhausting thing where you have to keep in mind all of these different factors, that’s not the case. There is a time when it’s going to be more front of mind, but in time this does become automatic and it does drop into the background, and you don’t have to focus on all of these at once. It can be a process where you focus on one or two at a time and then the next one or two.

When working with clients, I often use the analogy that it’s like they’ve been in an accident and they’re now going through the process of relearning how to walk. Most clients instantly want to be a ‘normal’ eater, but like someone who has to relearn how to walk, there’s no amount of wanting that changes this. To get to this place, rehab needs to occur. In the short term, they need to do things that normal walkers don’t do because they’re building up strength, they’re teaching their legs how to walk again, engaging the nervous system. This can be slow and it can be frustrating.

With time, it does improve. You can get to a place where you are a ‘normal’ eater and you no longer need to be doing the proverbial physio rehab. You simply eat. But this takes time, and you need to go through that process. I think having that analogy in mind can be useful just to remember why you need to be doing these things, even if a ‘normal’ eater doesn’t have to.

Getting back to the idea of satisfaction, obviously there will be meals that are more satisfying and meals that are less satisfying. That’s life, and sometimes food just needs to be food and it’s more functional. So please don’t feel like this podcast is trying to say that every meal has to be this amazing sensory experience that is going to be forever memorable. It really doesn’t. But even with the more mundane or functional meals, satisfaction can still be occurring and taken into account when making food choices.

Let’s go through the components that impact on satisfaction. With each of these, they can be thought about in advance of the meal to help in the decision-making process and working out what to make or what to order. It can also be noticed during the meal to see how expectations are matching up to the actual experience of the meal. It can also be noticed after the meal and how it’s left you feeling, and if satisfaction has occurred.

00:16:00

Components of satisfaction: Taste, type, texture, + temperature

The first component is taste. There are five main tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savoury or umami. But there are other taste descriptors that you can use, like buttery or rich or tart or astringent or smoky or hot and spicy or bland or mild. This is obviously an incomplete list, and undoubtedly you can think of other descriptors around taste.

When thinking about this and about what you want to eat, you can reflect on these different aspects of taste and what seems most appealing. Or when you’re eating, what are the tastes you’re noticing and how are you finding them?

Maybe you wanted something sweet, but now you’re eating it and it’s actually too sweet. Or you wanted something buttery and rich, but this feels lighter than how you’d imagined it. Or you wanted something savoury and salty, and this actually matches up with what you wanted.

To do this, you do have to be present. With all of these different components that I’m going to touch on, the key is eating in a way that you are paying attention. For someone who is a normal eater, this presence is likely to be automatic and may barely feel conscious, but as you are relearning to notice satisfaction, this will take more attention and be more of a conscious act.

The next category after taste is something I’m calling type. This relates to specific types of food. For some meals, there might be this obvious food that you want. Rather than thinking, “I want something sweet” or “I want something salty” or “I want something bitter”, you have a craving specifically for a steak or a burger or an ice cream or a jacket potato or a baked potato or for watermelon. If this is the case, trying to eat something else that is similar typically won’t work. Trying to break down the component tastes of what makes up a steak and then eating an alternative thing mostly won’t work.

If there is a specific and clear type of food that you feel like eating, rather than trying to reverse engineer it, go with that clear signal that you’re getting. When you do, notice the experience. Does it match up to how you anticipated? How are you feeling afterwards?

Texture is the next category, and this is the texture of the food when you put it in your mouth and you chew it. I’m going to copy some examples here from the Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens in terms of different types of texture. You have soft and gushy. This would be risotto or cottage cheese or guacamole or chocolate pudding. You have crunchy – pretzels or potato chips or carrots. Lumpy could be rice pudding or oatmeal. Smooth could be yoghurt or crème brûlée or tofu. Chewy or tough could be dried fruit or beef jerky or biltong. Sticky could be caramels or cotton candy. Crispy could be fried chicken or bacon.

Also connected with texture can be the sound that food makes while eating it. For example, hearing the crunch of pretzels or popcorn or crispy bacon or potato chips can also impact on the enjoyment and the satisfaction.

The next category then is temperature. This refers to the temperature of the food. It could be hot, it could be room temperature, it could be cold, or anything along the temperature spectrum. Your desire for different temperatures of food can obviously be affected by the season that you’re in. In winter, it’s more common to be desiring hot or hearty and warming foods, and in the summer you might be wanting things that are cool or cold or frozen so they can be more cooling for the body.

Something I typically do when looking at clients’ food logs is I try to imagine I have no idea where the client lives or what season it is, and would I be able to guess simply by looking at their food log? If I’m looking at their log and my impression is that it feels like they’re on some hot tropical island and yet they’re living in New York or Ontario and it’s January time, this can feel like a bit of a mismatch and something worth talking about.

This isn’t always appropriate in terms of the seasons impacting on the kinds of foods that people are having. If you are in recovery and it is the middle of summer, there can still be a need to get in high numbers of calories, and more hearty or warming food can be making up a larger chunk of this. But equally, there could be more ice cream or other cooler foods that could also be energy gens. So temperature isn’t only dictated by seasons, but it’s also part of it, so it’s worth considering. That is the temperature of food.

Interestingly, if you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘mouthfeel’ in respect of food, it’s the combination of texture and temperature that makes up mouthfeel. As the name suggests, it is about how a food feels in the mouth outside of taste. There are certain components that I mention in taste – say sour or astringent or spicy – that can also impact on mouthfeel, but mouthfeel is typically thought of as a combination of texture and temperature.

00:21:45

Components of satisfaction: Aroma + appearance

The next category is aroma or smell. Aroma can affect things in two ways. There is the smell and how this impacts on the anticipation of eating something, and then there is the aromas and how they affect the taste of food. This becomes acutely obvious when you have a blocked nose with a cold and food ends up tasting bland. The aroma really does impact on the taste of your food. So it’s not just about the anticipation; it can also impact on the actual eating enjoyment and the taste of it.

There was a really interesting paper about aroma that came out in 2013 that I will link to in the show notes. It has the very catchy title of ‘Categorical dimensions of human odour descriptor space revealed by non-negative matrix factorisation’. It really just rolls off the tongue. As I mentioned earlier with taste, there are five basic tastes – sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and then savoury or umami. This paper, what they were attempting to do was the same thing with aroma: to identify, are there basic aromas and then everything else is built on top of that?

The paper identified that there are 10 basic aromas, and they are fragrant, woody/resinous, fruity other than citrus, chemical, minty/peppermint, sweet, popcorn, lemon, pungent/strong, and then decayed.

This is talking about aromas more generally and isn’t reserved just for things that you would eat. If we narrow it down to that, the kinds of aromas that would come up connected with eating would be – and again, this is taken from the Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens – smelly (this would be something like a Roquefort or another smelly strong cheese), fragrant (bread baking), strong (onions or garlic), rich (freshly brewed coffee), soothing (chicken soup), sweet (cinnamon rolls being heated).

Some of these descriptors, things like soothing or rich, don’t match up with the list from the paper I just made reference to, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s less about getting the name right from a taxonomy perspective and more about understanding it for yourself and how you’re drawn towards different aromas at different points and how this can affect your taste and meal satisfaction.

Appearance is the next category connected to satisfaction. It’s really what the meal looks like. Again, some of these are going to come from the Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens and some of them I’ve come up with myself.

With appearance, there is colour. You can have something where it’s all the same colour; chicken breast, white rice, cauliflower are all white. Or there could be a variety of colours. You’ve got spinach, spinach pasta, carrots, steak. There’s all the different colours there.

You can have the different size. You could have a huge steak, you could have a small bowl of soup. The height of the meal – you could have a tower of profiteroles or you could have a very thin flat crepe.

The arrangement on the plate or on the table – you could have only one bit of food per plate, you could have everything on the plate that is spread out and not touching, you could have everything mixed together, like with a stew. You could have just one plate in front of you or you could have many plates on the table, like with tapas or sushi. The shape of the food – you could have something that is round like a meatball, or something square like a piece of toast.

And then the overall appearance. For example, the difference between some fine dining plate of food versus a burger or some tacos that you bought from a food truck or a street vendor.

00:25:55

Components of satisfaction: Bodyfeel + staying power

The next category is connected to satisfaction and is known as bodyfeel. This is less about fullness per se and is how a meal feels in your body once you’re finished eating or while you’re eating it.

Some examples: a bowl of soup or a bowl of laksa or a pho might make you feel warm and comfortable, or it might be so warming that you’re having to strip off layers of clothes while eating it. A large salad may be fresh and crunchy while eating it, but it makes your stomach feel distended when you’re finished, even if you aren’t actually full.

A heavy fat or fried meal – something like fish and chips or nachos – might be delicious while eating it, but it makes you feel queasy afterwards. A salty meal like a big bowl of popcorn may taste lovely but afterwards feels too salty and it leaves you still hungry. A bowl of ice cream could lead to multiple ice cream headaches while you’re eating it. A curry might be so spicy that it burns your mouth while eating it and it leaves you feeling upset in the stomach afterwards.

I’m definitely not saying that you can’t eat any of the above foods or that if you do eat them, this is exactly what is going to happen to you. You may get on perfectly fine with all of them. And even if you don’t, it doesn’t mean that you can’t eat them. It’s simply an awareness of how certain foods affect your body while you’re eating it or after you’re eating it and how that then affects your satisfaction with that food.

The next category is staying power. This is somewhat connected to fullness but looks at, when eating a meal, how long does it keep you full for? Some meals may keep you full for a long time, where you have something and 4 hours later you still aren’t hungry. Other meals, you finish and 30 minutes later you’re hungry again.

Sometimes it’s going to be really obvious or somewhat obvious and easier to predict. A lunch that consists mostly of salad leaves and other raw vegetables is likely to leave you hungry shortly afterwards. A lunch of say lasagne or a baked potato or a jacket potato is likely to keep you fuller for a longer time. In both cases, this can seem somewhat obvious.

For other times, it’s not so straightforward. A good example of this is porridge or oatmeal. For some segment of the population it is a highly satiating meal with lots of staying power, where if they have it for breakfast, it can be many hours until they’re hungry again. Maybe it’s not until lunchtime that they’re hungry again. But for other people (myself included in this category), porridge has very little staying power. Within say an hour, I’m cold and I’m peeing frequently and I’m hungry. It just doesn’t work for me. So if I do have porridge or oatmeal for breakfast, I’ll have other foods with it because on its own, it just won’t be enough.

There are also other times when guessing staying power isn’t so straightforward. One of the prime examples is during eating disorder recovery. There can be times when the body is requiring and requesting much larger amounts of food than normal. You can eat a meal that would ordinarily leave you full for hours, only to discover 30 minutes later you’re hungry again. This is completely normal, and it happens.

Or for women, for a handful of days leading up to their period, their hunger levels can be increased, so the staying power of food is reduced in comparison to how it usually is.

I should also note that the goal isn’t always to feel full for the longest amount of time possible. Staying power is just one aspect of satisfaction, and you may thoroughly enjoy something and get great satisfaction, even if the staying power of the food is rather miniscule. If you are hungry again in 30 minutes, you shouldn’t then be ignoring that and saying, “Well, I’ve just eaten something already so I can’t have anything now until lunchtime, or I have to wait for another 3 hours.” It is okay to eat something, completely enjoy it, and then eat again in a short amount of time. Or eat something alongside it because on its own it is not going to be enough.

00:30:30

Components of satisfaction: Eating environment, state, + nostalgia

The next category is two categories, but they’re highly connected, so I’m going to cover them in the same breath. It’s the eating environment and the state that you’re in. At its core, it’s looking at how the place that you are doing the eating and the state that you are in physically, mentally, and emotionally then affect your meal satisfaction.

Let me run through a couple of different aspects, but again, this is a non-exhaustive list.

What is the state of the room that you’re in when you’re having a meal? Are you in a messy kitchen with toys all over the floor and the table? Is the table laid nicely and with a candle? Are you eating in front of the TV or in front of a laptop? Is there a nice view out of the restaurant or the kitchen window in which you’re eating? Who else is in the room with you? Is it just you? Is it a family meal with kids getting up and down and making lots of requests? Is it you and your partner? Are you in a bustling restaurant? Are you outside with lots of other people standing around a food stall?

What is the mood of the rest of the people in the room? Is there tension because of an argument you just had with your partner? Is a child having a meltdown? Are you in a room full of friends or family and people are laughing and it’s this jovial mood?

And then we have the state that you are in. This can be impacted on by the eating environment, but it can also be impacted on by the state that you were in prior to entering into that eating environment. For example, you are eating in a room that is strewn with toys and your child is constantly making requests, so it feels like you are constantly getting up and down. This environment and the demands start to make you agitated and irritable. Despite having a meal in front of you that matches up with what you want to eat, the environment and your state mean that you aren’t appreciating it or it isn’t satisfying in the way that it could be.

For someone else in the exact same scenario, they maybe aren’t bothered by the toys and they aren’t phased by the many requests, and they’re still able to have meal satisfaction because it isn’t having an impact on their state. It’s not the case that one set of circumstances dictates one set of responses; it just depends on what happens with you, and what happens on some days will be different to what happens on other days.

Some meals you may love eating alone; others, you love the company and conversation of other people. Some meals you love being in a busy restaurant and enjoy the noise and the hubbub going on around you, and then other times you want a quiet meal in a quiet room with just you and your partner. Sometimes eating a pizza straight from the box off your knees while watching a film is the exact satisfying experience you’re after, and other times you do this and you feel unsatisfied.

It’s more about how the environment at that particular time and the state that you’re in at that particular time coalesce and impact on eating satisfaction.

For the next category, I’m lacking a good label for it, but I’ve noted it down as nostalgia, celebrations, and holidays. Some of this can have an overlap with the last one because obviously, during a celebration or a holiday, the eating environment and the people in the eating environment and everything that goes into it impacts upon how you enjoy that satisfaction or how you get satisfaction.

But it’s more about when we think about something like nostalgia – when we eat something that reminds us of our childhood, like having pumpkin soup and remembering how your mum used to make this in the wintertime, or following a recipe that was handed down to you from your grandmother and it bringing back memories of Christmas or Thanksgiving or that time you went on holiday.

It really is incredible how our senses of taste and smell can be so acutely connected to memories. Obviously, I framed this here in the positive by using the word ‘nostalgia’ and the examples that I’ve given, but the opposite can also be true. Certain meals can be less enjoyable because of the memories those meals or those flavours or those smells bring up.

What this category is really about is how satisfaction is impacted upon by memories, and also the ceremony of celebrations or holidays.

00:36:24

Components of satisfaction: Hunger, fullness, + fluid intake

The next category is hunger and fullness and how these can impact on satisfaction. For example, what I’ve noticed for many clients is that if they begin a meal and they are very hungry, this can make satisfaction more difficult. Being hungry is fine, but when this goes too far, it makes satisfaction feel less reachable.

Fullness is also connected with satisfaction. Again, trying to find the middle ground here. You could eat the perfect meal that tastes, looks, and smells lovely and do so in the exact right environment, but if the meal is half the size of what you need and you finish and you’re still hungry, and then you don’t eat anything else, satisfaction is going to be low.

Equally, if you finish a meal and you are overly full, this can diminish satisfaction. But how this has an impact on satisfaction isn’t always so straightforward. The uncomfortableness of fullness is one part physical discomfort and then there’s this extra part, which is the mental and emotional discomfort with the wishing you’d done something different and the potential guilt or shame that comes with the realisation that you ate too much.

The physical discomfort is a given, and with time this will disappear, but the mental and emotional discomfort is optional and is much more of a learned response and about the frame or the perspective you are putting on an experience. Physical discomfort doesn’t automatically come with negative emotions attached, so you can finish a meal and be overly full but have this not affect you mentally or emotionally, and you can still rate the satisfaction as high.

Finishing a meal overly full is also much more likely when commencing a meal feeling overly hungry. If satisfaction is low, whether that’s because of not feeling full enough or feeling overly full, notice where your hunger was before starting a meal to see if that has had an impact.

I recently did an article all about hunger. I don’t think it is always obvious to people what hunger feels like, as there’s many different symptoms that can arise that aren’t just a growling stomach. I also think that because hunger for so many people has been ignored for so long, hunger symptoms can no longer feel like hunger symptoms. I got lots of positive comments from clients and feedback from others about the article, so if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. I’ll link to it in the show notes.

The final category connected to satisfaction is fluid intake. This can be how fluids can either hinder or assist satisfaction. For example, some clients drink a high volume of water. Maybe before a meal, they have a couple of huge glasses of water, or while eating they’re drinking lots of fluids. This could prematurely make them full but lead to less satisfaction. Maybe this is intentional, with them trying to trick the body into feeling full so that they’ll eat less, but if it does lead to that fullness, satisfaction is still missing or is reduced.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are drinks that could enhance a meal. Maybe having a glass of red wine with a Sunday roast leads to more satisfaction than the meal on its own, or having a glass of milk with a cookie is better than just a cookie on its own. Or maybe you’re on holiday, and having a fresh coconut water out of a hollowed out coconut adds to the enjoyment of the meal.

Undoubtedly there’s other options, but you get the idea; fluids can impact on satisfaction levels.

So that is all the different categories that can impact on satisfaction. These are the components that go into more of that epicurean eating satisfaction versus the visceral eating satisfaction. Let me just run through the list again.

There’s taste, there’s texture, there’s type, there’s temperature, aroma, appearance, bodyfeel, staying power, eating environment and the state you’re in, nostalgia/celebration and events, and then hunger and fullness and fluid intake.

In the Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens, there are worksheets for many of these that can help with going through them. If you are an adult, don’t be put off by the fact that the book has ‘teen’ or ‘teenager’ in the title. It can be appropriate for adults and teens alike.

While I dealt with each component separately, the experience of satisfaction really is about the sum of all these parts. While some components might be great and others not so great, that will affect the experience. But as I said earlier, this is a process. If you’re relearning how to do this, treat it as a process. You don’t have to deal with everything all at once.

Something I should also add is that satisfaction isn’t the only determiner of what you should eat. This is especially true in eating disorder recovery. A meal could be unsatisfying because you are pushing yourself to eat something new or scary or to eat at a time where you wouldn’t normally eat. Overall, this is not a satisfying experience, but for recovery to happen, it needs to occur.

Or you may eat foods that lead to you feeling bloated and uncomfortable. These foods aren’t inherently bad; you simply haven’t eaten them for a long time, so your ability to digest them is temporarily compromised. This can feel unsatisfying, but it will improve with time as long as you continue to eat those foods.

I’m actually going to touch on many different ideas like this in a moment when I look at the fears connected with satisfaction, or it can be undervalued or avoided. But after spending so much time talking about the importance of satisfaction, I want to make sure that its importance is kept in the right context. In many cases, satisfaction isn’t the only guide for what to be eating.

00:41:58

Fullness vs satisfaction

I want to spend a moment to distinguish between fullness and satisfaction because often people don’t make the distinction, and there really is a difference.

The feeling of fullness is connected to the expansion of the stomach from eating a meal and the full feeling that this creates. While this feeling is a component of satisfaction, it’s only one component. For example, you could take a huge plate of plain boiled broccoli. There’s nothing else on it; it’s just plain broccoli. You could eat this piece after piece and reach a point of fullness, and then you could continue to eat and reach a point of over-fullness. This feeling is simply connected to the volume and the space that the broccoli is taking up in your stomach.

But despite this fullness, it is highly, highly unlikely that this meal is going to lead to any high level of satisfaction. Satisfaction is then about the other components that I’ve gone through already. It’s about reaching a point of fullness by eating foods that have the right taste and texture and temperature and in the right environment, etc. It’s finishing a meal that’s been enjoyable to eat rather than just making you full.

This is important because for many clients, they are finishing a meal feeling full, but the rubric that they’ve used to make food choices was “What is the food that is most filling but least calorific?” or “What are the healthiest foods that will fill me up?” When this happens, it’s likely you’ll regularly be eating past the point of fullness or eating at times when you supposedly aren’t hungry or finding yourself constantly thinking about food despite the fact that you eat to fullness.

When this occurs, satisfaction really is one of the first things I think of, as this is typically the thing that’s missing.

I want to spend some time now looking at some of the reasons someone may think they want to avoid satisfaction. Sometimes this is out of different fears connected to what happens when satisfying food is consumed, and sometimes it’s because of naïveté or confusion about what foods are actually satisfying to them. From focusing on this for a long time with clients, there’s many reasons that have come up, so I want to go through the most common ones.

The overarching themes for the majority of these specific fears is twofold: one, a fear of weight gain, and two, a fear about health. For a lot of people, maybe even most people, what is originally stated as a fear about health, when these beliefs are prodded and explored, are really about a fear of weight gain.

If there wasn’t a fear about weight gain, then the majority of these fears would either evaporate altogether or would be reduced in comparison to how they are now. So these two fears, but mostly the fear of weight gain, really are the backdrop to all the other fears that I’m going to talk about and are really just layered on top.

00:45:06

Addressing fear of losing control

The first reason for avoiding satisfying food is the fear of losing control if satisfying food is consumed – that by eating this kind of food, the floodgates will open and they won’t be able to stop eating. This is a really common thing that I hear, and often, but not always, this fear is because it is satisfying food that is consumed when someone has a binge or when someone has a binge that ends in a purge. So there has been this negative association with this satisfying food because it is so connected with these episodes where it feels shameful and it feels like there’s a loss of control and these want to be avoided.

If you’re eating in this way, it’s normally also connected with restriction. I mean this in terms of actual physical restriction, but also in terms of restriction of satisfaction. When foods are allowed, it’s likely you’re going to want to eat more of them when you start. They’re going to provide this heightened sense of reward and enjoyment. Or if these aren’t the right descriptors for your experience, then at least for your body, it’s going to register the palatability, it’s going to register the extra energy, and it will want to push you towards consuming more of them.

If the experience is this when you first have these foods, this is completely normal, and it makes sense. But I would say that this is not a permanent state. The lack of satisfaction is the equivalent of being underwater and holding your breath for a long time. When you resurface and allow satisfaction, there is the equivalent of taking in some deeper and bigger breaths. The longer you’ve been under, the bigger these may be and the longer it may take. But just like after resurfacing from being underwater, your breathing returns back to normal at some point.

I don’t like the word ‘normal’ here because it implies that the period before was abnormal when actually it’s also normal for someone who’s just resurfaced from being under the water to take bigger breaths of air. But what I mean is that satisfaction with time can be coming more at the epicurean end of the spectrum rather than being more visceral, as it is at the beginning.

For some people, the restriction and the lack of satisfaction has gone on for so long that in the beginning, it can feel like they can never reach a point of satisfaction – that it’s an impossible itch to scratch, and no matter what they eat or how full they get, they will never reach a point of satisfaction.

Again, in the beginning this can be normal and to be expected. I’ve done a number of podcasts on the Minnesota starvation experiment (which, if you haven’t listened to them, I highly suggest checking them out; I’ll put them in the show notes). This was exactly what the men experienced when the restriction ended and they were allowed to eat an unrestricted amount. They could finish a day eating many thousands of calories and be overly full but still feel unsatisfied. But this was temporary, and with time this changed.

So if the fear is that this will never change, that satisfaction is something for you that is going to be always unachievable, this is not what I’ve seen with clients. In the beginning it can feel like this is the case, but it does change with time.

I do also want to add – and what I’m going to add here happens quite regularly – that often by allowing satisfaction, it helps instantly. When someone has more satisfying foods, the urges to binge and purge lessen. Or previously they were eating every meal to a point of overfullness, and now they are naturally stopping earlier and at a more comfortable place – not through willpower and restriction, but because they feel satisfied.

It’s important for me to mention this because everyone’s experience is different. While some people may have a period of increased eating and increased desire for food because of increased satisfaction, for others it really starts to resolve very quickly, and their eating in a sense gets ‘better’ quite quickly.

00:49:30

Addressing fear of cravings + ‘unhealthy’ food

The next fear with this somewhat overlaps, but I want to deal with it separately because there are other aspects to it. It’s the fear of cravings. It’s this belief that if you are having a craving, this is misinformation and these cravings are not to be trusted. This obviously applies only to cravings that someone considers unhealthy. If they’re craving a salad or if they’re craving a water, then that craving is okay.

It’s interesting because I’ve had similar conversations with clients about Intuitive Eating in the same vein. Clients feel like they’re doing Intuitive Eating right and are getting great feedback from their body when they feel like eating foods that they deem appropriate. But when they’re feeling like something they deem is bad or is unhealthy that they’re now craving, then obviously this isn’t Intuitive Eating. It’s emotional eating or it’s a binge urge or it’s some other negative. For them, Intuitive Eating is only Intuitive Eating when it’s pointing them towards the foods that they deem to be correct.

This fear of cravings is also made worse because of how we talk about cravings in our culture. There’s this focus that we live in this junk food environment and we all have to be constantly vigilant and that cravings aren’t to be trusted, or that we can sort of trust our cravings, but we just have to do the work to figure out what they’re really saying to us.

So if you’re craving chocolate, it means that your body’s really craving magnesium, so have a small handful of cashews or some flaxseeds in your smoothie. Or if you’re craving white rice, you’re really craving quinoa. Or if you’re craving salty foods, it really means you need chloride and silicon, so have some fatty fish. Or you’re craving bread, and this means you need mushrooms and lentils.

Really, depending on who you follow, the craving then gets swapped out for something different. Vegans will tell you what a craving for chicken or ribs is really about, or the paleo people will tell you what a craving for fruit or bread is really about, or the low fat people will tell you what a craving for cheese or eggs is really about. It becomes this ridiculous version of The Imitation Game, where you’re doing your best to be Alan Turing figuring out the Enigma code, all the while with the message you’re receiving being a non-coded message: that when you’re hungry for chocolate, it’s because you want chocolate. Or when your body is wanting bread, it’s because you genuinely want bread.

There’s just been this demonisation of cravings and this distrust of our body, and it’s widespread orthorexic type writings about food and health that really has infiltrated so many people and infiltrated the health space.

With this one, when cravings are listened to and satisfaction is allowed, there can be a period of intake increasing and it feeling a little uncomfortable. But with time, this will correct. Or, as I mentioned with the first one, sometimes it doesn’t take any time. Simply allowing more satisfaction means that things improve instantly. This might not totally take away the anxiety because there’s still the fear of maybe it’ll be different with a different craving, but with time this does correct itself.

The next fear again overlaps with the last one, and it’s the idea that satisfying food is unhealthy – that “If I let satisfaction guide my eating, all I’m going to do is eat pizza and ice cream and cheeseburgers and chocolate bars” and whatever someone is craving that they deem to be unhealthy food.

This really comes back to where this podcast started when I was talking about visceral satisfaction versus epicurean satisfaction. When someone is restricting and food is mostly devoid of satisfaction, when satisfaction does occur, it really is that visceral end of the spectrum. When this occurs, the band of what foods are satisfying can be much more narrow.

But as time goes on, what satisfies and the components that go into making up satisfaction change. You can be satisfied from eating a bowl of cereal or a bowl of fruit with yoghurt or a whole pizza or some vegetable sticks with some hummus or some tzatziki, or eating a roast dinner. Satisfaction can come from a wide variety of foods, and what hits the spot will change from day to day. It’s not that it’s only about highly palatable food.

It really is true that the more you eat something, the less enjoyable and interesting it becomes. If chocolate is your most desired food, eat it in decent quantities at every meal of the day, and in a short amount of time, that interest will wane. Maybe it will take a couple of days, maybe it will take a couple of weeks, but if you give yourself an endless supply, the novelty does wear off because it is no longer a forbidden fruit.

This is true of food cravings in general. I’ve just had a period of really enjoying chorizo. Probably for the last couple of months, starting a couple of months ago, I bought some at the shops and rediscovered how much I loved it. Then every week when I would do a shop, I would buy it and I was eating it on its own and I was adding it to all these dishes. I was absolutely loving it.

Now, for the last couple of shops, I haven’t got any. The honeymoon period is over, and it’s just become less interesting to me again. At some point in the future, my chorizo love will peak again, but once I eat it and allow it and then it’s taken care of and I move on, something else becomes more interesting.

I also think it’s important to explore here what someone means by ‘satisfying foods are unhealthy’. Food isn’t so black and white. A food may appear unhealthy in one context and be incredibly healthy in another, and vice versa. It’s often those who are most afraid of foods that they are deeming unhealthy because say they are higher in calories that actually need higher calorie foods and would most benefit from them. What they are saying is unhealthy would actually be the healthiest thing for them to eat right now.

Exploring ideas around context here is important because there are so many factors that go into making something healthy or unhealthy, and it’s not so black and white. This then connects into other principles as part of Intuitive Eating – Rejecting the Diet Mentality or Challenging the Food Police.

00:56:22

Addressing the idea that pleasure should be avoided

The next category is connected to food but can also be more of a general idea. It’s that pleasure of all kinds is something to be wary of. If food is pleasurable and enjoyable, this is something to be sceptical of or avoid or be wary of. But as I said, it’s not just about food. Anything that is enjoyable, they’re suspicious of. They discover that they like playing an instrument or doing art or writing, but they then feel they shouldn’t be doing it, that they don’t deserve to be able to do it.

I know in Brene Brown’s work, she talks about joy being the most vulnerable emotion. For many, when joy does creep in, it’s hard to tolerate, so they rehearse tragedy. She talks about ‘foreboding joy’, when joy is mixed with a feeling that something bad is going to happen, where you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop because joy can’t happen on its own; it has to be matched with something terrible.

Sometimes this can be linked to a strict religious upbringing and the messages someone has received about pleasure as part of this. For some, joy and pleasure is only allowed if some other penance has been paid first, like a balance sheet. “I can only get to rest or eat a certain food if I’ve done X amount of exercise or it’s been X amount of time since the last time I ate.” But I’d say even in these cases, it’s rarely unbridled pleasure where all foods are open to be consumed. It’s normally still in a restricted band of allowable foods.

Other times there can be this feeling that they are undeserving of joy or pleasure – that because of who they are, they aren’t worth joy or something pleasant. This has come up mostly with clients who’ve experienced childhood trauma. Trauma at a young age tends to create this feeling of disgust and low self-esteem and unworthiness, so there is this feeling of being undeserving of pleasure.

With these clients, it’s rare that this is the only piece. There’s also then the fear of weight gain, there’s also the fear of binges or a history of binging and purging. There’s all these other parts that are then laid into this mix. All of the earlier comments hold true for those, and for this one specifically, it would be doing therapy that is looking at the trauma. There are many modalities for this.

I’m a fan of the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. The first half of the book is about all the ways that trauma affects the various body systems and the symptoms that arise because of it, and the second half of the book looks at the different evidence-based modalities that then can help with trauma – EMDR, internal family systems, neurofeedback, and so on. For clients with this history and with this experience, I often recommend that they read the book and then see which modality feels right, and then get in trauma treatment to deal with this.

00:59:35

Other reasons people avoid satisfaction

The remaining ideas in this section are less about fears and rather objections or other reasons why satisfaction isn’t followed.

The first one here somewhat ties into the fear about satisfying food being unhealthy, but kind of sidesteps the idea about satisfaction where the belief is that food is just about nutrition. “If we can go through the research by the top nutritionists and the people who study longevity, whatever they say is best for humans is what I’m going to eat.” It’s this very reductionist line of thinking where food is solely about nutrients and phytonutrients and health-promoting compounds, and if we can just maximise this, this is what eating is really about.

There are two groups of clients who have this mentality who then will find their way to me and we’ll end up working together. One way is that more and more foods start to disappear. If you search for negative health aspects of any food, you can start to find them. When the focus is on health and over time, more and more foods are disappearing from the diet, you may feel temporarily better, but as you are restricting, things invariably get worse. You’re then searching for, “What is the next thing?”, so you remove something else, and then you remove something else.

This is very much the spiral of the orthorexic, where there are less and less available and allowable foods. This is something I talked about with Emily Fonnesbeck, so if you haven’t listened to that podcast, then do. I’ll link to it in the show notes.

The other way that this myopic focus on nutrition ends up with clients finding me is that by doing this, they find that they are regularly eating past the point of fullness. They’re having binges or binge-purges, and they can’t work out why it’s happening. They can’t work out why they can’t just eat a meal and finish when they are full. So while nutrition and health information can inform our food choices, it is just one component. If the deck is stacked where it’s only in favour of nutrition information, then it’s going to create a problem one way or another. Satisfaction isn’t a nice to have or an optional extra; it really is fundamental.

The next of these ideas is “I want to get over my food issues and for food to just be this normal thing in my life, and normal people aren’t forever focusing on satisfaction and giving it so much headspace.” So rather than chasing satisfaction, they simply want to focus less on food, not more. This one actually comes up quite a lot. It feels antithetical to give food so much more importance when what they want is for it to have less importance.

My thoughts on this, there’s a couple of things that come up. One is I think that there is a misunderstanding here about normal people and satisfaction. I get huge satisfaction from eating food. Some meals more than others, but eating is a very satisfying experience. So when I say that food is just food, it doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy it. In fact, what allows food to drift into the background is the enjoyment piece. It’s being able to enjoy the meal and then move on. Being unsatisfied with a meal is what keeps it front of mind.

If you’re still in the restriction and non-satisfaction mode, this can feel counterintuitive because maybe you’re having thoughts that are regularly about satisfying food, and then if this is allowed, you’re going to think about it even more. So “If I just try to ignore it, then those thoughts will go away.” But in reality, this isn’t the case. If satisfaction is avoided, it’s unlikely that food is really going to drift into the background.

The second part with this – and this comes back to my analogy about relearning how to walk that I mentioned earlier – while the end goal is to have food be just food again and drift into the background, this doesn’t automatically happen by trying to not give it any attention. In the beginning, you will have to give food more attention and focus than normal eaters.

But this is all part of the rehab. You can’t just fast forward through this because what allows food to drift into the background, in a sense, is mastery of understanding satisfaction – that you can do it automatically and unconsciously, or largely unconsciously. But mastery takes practice, and the way to get there is being conscious and doing something with intent until it then becomes second nature.

The next objection here isn’t so much about the importance of satisfaction, but rather someone believes that they’ve already achieved it. They say that they like eating all the things that they eat, that they are naturally a healthy eater, but when we look at what they’re eating, it’s incredibly repetitious. It’s basically the same meal at the same time every day, and it’s a lot of things that are very ‘healthy’.

Here, it’s really about safety being mistaken for satisfaction. That’s not to say that there is no satisfaction. There might be. There is something satisfying about being in control or feeling like you’re in control and not deviating.

But what I find interesting about control here is who actually does have the control. Are you in control because you’re able to eat the same thing every day? Or are you actually being controlled by food because you have this lack of ability to do something different – that if you were to deviate from what you do normally, this would lead to panic and anxiety? If this is the case, it’s less about control and more about a semblance of control when you follow this preordained script.

I said earlier that satisfaction isn’t the only metric by which to make food choices, and this is one of those areas. If someone feels they are satisfied, but they are eating in a very strict way, then let’s pursue variety and eating different foods and challenge fears. Spend an extended period of time bringing in all of these foods so that there is genuine variety and all foods have become neutral again, and there aren’t any good foods and bad foods; it’s all on par.

Then at this point, if you still feel like the way that you were originally eating is the most satisfying way, by all means return to it because you’ve genuinely asked yourself the question and you’ve genuinely explored all the options. But if this isn’t being entertained and tried, then I think it’s much more likely that safety is being mistaken for satisfaction.

I should add that I can also see the dilemma with this and the difficulty that many clients like this face, because so much of nutrition and the health field is really disordered eating and eating disorders masquerading as nutrition science, nutritionists and dietitians posting about the healthy way that they eat – this being this collection of superfoods and trendy health products. The client sees this and they think, “Why do I need to change my eating? My eating matches up to this dietitian and nutritionist, and they’re meant to be an expert. If they’re keeping it up, then they must be enjoying it. If they’re enjoying it, then I think I’m enjoying it too.”

All their friends praise them for being ‘the healthy one’ or ‘the fit one’, and they say, “I just wish I could eat as well as you.” So there’s this reinforcement of disordered behaviour as if it’s a good thing. I then get why it can be hard to turn their back on this and to try something different. But if you’re eating in a restricted way and struggle to do anything different, I do question how much true satisfaction is going on.

Those are the main fears, objections, or resistance to satisfaction. I hope with each of them I’ve given a bit of a starting suggestion or a starting place for how to approach it differently.

01:08:13

How Chris works with clients on satisfaction

What I want to do to close out the podcast is to run through some of the ways that I use satisfaction or focus on satisfaction when working with clients. This is going to really just scratch the surface. Like with everything, it will depend on the client in front of me and us figuring out a plan together to move forward.

As I’ve mentioned numerous times already, going hand in hand with satisfaction is addressing restriction. Restriction has such a huge impact on our ability to experience satisfaction and the kind of satisfaction we get, whether it’s that visceral kind or the more epicurean kind. When working on satisfaction, the restriction piece is always part of the conversation and part of the focus. Are they eating enough? Are they eating often enough? Is there long gaps between meals or a long gap between waking and eating? This piece alone, when corrected, can lead to increased satisfaction and a greater calmness when eating.

If there is more of a visceral response with food, rather than simply focusing directly on this reaction and how to make someone more present in the eating moment, the focus is about what aspects are leading up to that point. What is the bigger picture? Because the solution isn’t about more willpower. This is most likely what’s already been attempted. It’s understanding about what’s driving this, and this is usually a combination of restriction and the avoidance of satisfaction.

Another piece that goes hand in hand with satisfaction is being present and actually tasting and savouring the food, which is something I kind of touched on before. For some clients, this means slowing down and eating more slowly. The tendency is to finish a meal and barely remember chewing and tasting. Slowing down can help with being in the moment.

But for other clients, meals already take an inordinately long time. A meal is intentionally stretched out to last for hours. This could be because they’re cutting everything up into tiny pieces and eating one tiny piece at a time, or it could be that they’re reading or listening to something while eating, but they’re conscious of making the meal last as long as possible.

While on the surface this can feel like savouring and appreciating, it’s typically linked more to restriction. The meal isn’t going to fill them up, so they’re trying to make the most of it. Or when the meal ends, they aren’t allowed to eat for a set time or not allowed to eat till 5:00 or whatever it may be, so if they can eke out this meal for a longer time, it’s marking off time, and it means there’s going to be this shorter gap.

In this case, it’s about being present in a different way, and also increasing total food throughout the day and at each meal so that there is less of a need to eke out the meals.

Another component that I work on with clients when bringing satisfaction is setting yourself up for success as much as possible. This is usually when they’re going to be having a new satisfying food or meal. How can they make it most likely that it’s going to go well? If someone is going to eat something satisfying, often the natural reaction is to restrict in advance. You know you’re going out for dinner, so you have a smaller lunch and no afternoon snack. Or you’re going to challenge yourself with a donut or a chocolate bar in the afternoon, so you have a smaller breakfast and a smaller lunch. In your mind, you are doing some calorie math that you’re going to be eating something higher in calories later on, so beforehand you need to reduce intake to make room for that extra amount.

But as I mentioned earlier, if you start a meal or a snack more hungry, the more you’re going to want to eat and the more difficult is it to feel satisfied, or the more indecisive you’re going to be in that moment. So you’re at a restaurant and you’re unable to make a choice.

So when clients are going to challenge themselves and have something satisfying or have a meal out, I suggest doing it when they’re at a point where they’re not ravenous and they’re not restricting in anticipation of that food.

There can also be other factors that make success more likely. Just as I said, starting a meal really hungry isn’t great. Neither is starting a meal being stressed or anxious. If this is the case, is there anything they can do to change this? Could there be some breathing or some meditating or chatting with a friend or getting some fresh air or listening to a certain piece of music? Is there anything that can be done in advance to put you in a better state before starting the meal?

Maybe you find it easier to eat something new when you’re not alone, so doing it with someone else and you’ve got that company there. Maybe there is a meal or a time of day that is easier. Say lunch is always a challenge, but you’re more relaxed in the evening time. You can then start by having something in the evening to make it easier.

The eventual goal is that it doesn’t matter what the situation is; someone can feel confident and comfortable eating satisfying food at any point. But we can’t fast forward to that place, so typically it’s best to start where it’s easiest and success is most likely. Obviously, if someone wants to rip the proverbial Band-Aid off and start with the most challenging stuff first, then they can go for it. But this isn’t the only way, and it’s not necessary.

Another thing I’ll often do with clients is have them give their meals and snacks satisfaction scores out of 10, a 1 being the absence of satisfaction and a 10 being feeling totally satisfied. This can help for a number of reasons. It can be a good indicator of where someone is at and what could be driving other issues.

For example, if they’re noticing that their scores are mostly 2s and 3s, this can start to explain why they are eating past the point of fullness or could explain why they finish a meal and are still thinking about food, or could explain why in the evening they tend to eat so much more than at any other point in the day, or why they end up having a binge and a purge after days of low satisfaction meals. Obviously, satisfaction is just one part here and the restriction piece can also be in play, but lack of satisfaction can be in part because they’re not finishing a meal feeling full.

The satisfaction score can also help with understanding what makes a meal more satisfying. I went through all the different components that connect with satisfaction, and it’s great when people can recognise and articulate this in advance, but often this isn’t the case. Someone really doesn’t know what leads to more satisfaction. When I say, “What would be a more satisfying food?”, there’s this blank look and they don’t really know. We can then start to look at the food logs and the scores that they’ve given the different meals and start to reverse engineer it.

Going through and noticing the meals that have those higher scores, we can notice that this one had more fat in it in comparison to other meals, or this one had a bigger portion of protein, or this one feels like it’s more of a meal rather than a collection of food items, or there’s less vegetables or there’s more starchy carbohydrates or “I finished a meal with something sweet” or whatever it may be.

We then have this educated guess based on the feedback and the scores, and the person can then put this into practice. They then intentionally have more meals that include these things and see what they notice in terms of their satisfaction score. If it goes up, then great. This becomes a continual process, and with time, they learn more about this and what is satisfying, and it becomes much more intuitive. But as a starting place, the numbers and the analysing of the meal and why they got to a certain score can start to direct what to try out.

Another suggestion in the beginning is to give yourself multiple options. For example, if you’re going in to work and you have no idea what will be satisfying for a snack, you can take a selection. Take some cheese and biscuits, some fruit, a chocolate bar, yoghurt, some nuts, some beef jerky, and then when it comes time to eat, see what you fancy. You can do the same when you are at home.

A past client called this option ‘fridge tapas’, and this is something that I’ll occasionally do when there isn’t something specifically prepared for lunch. It’s the option of just getting lots of things out and on the table – a loaf of bread with various condiments – peanut butter, jam, honey, marmalade. There could be some hummus, some chorizo, a can of tuna, some olives, lots of different cheeses, avocados, cut-up vegetables. Bring the fruit bowl over, put out some cereal. Maybe there’s some leftover rice or potatoes in the fridge that can be heated up.

Then with all of this in front of them, it’s the equivalent of having some tapas or being at a buffet where you pick and choose things. You won’t necessarily eat some of everything and you won’t necessarily eat everything that’s in front of you, but it’s just having this visual and having all of these things there that you see what you fancy in the moment.

For someone with a history of binging and purging, this kind of lunch idea could sound terrifying, and it might not be where they want to start. But for many clients it can be really helpful when they are exploring satisfaction and there’s this array of options and tastes and things to notice and experience.

The next suggestion is to make sure that satisfying food is being purchased when you’re going to the shops – which sounds obvious but sometimes needs reminding. For many clients, shopping is done on autopilot. They get what they’re used to getting and that’s it. But if they’re going to be having more satisfying food, this needs to be thought about and bought in advance.

This can take different forms. You could specifically look up a couple of new recipes and then get the ingredients for them. It could be deciding that you’re going to have a certain satisfying food for a snack each day, so when you go to the shops you get enough of these to last you for a week. Typically it does pay to figure this out in advance and head to the shops with a plan in mind. You can obviously go to the shops and see what takes your fancy, but in the beginning this can feel overwhelming or it can lead to huge amounts of indecision. If this is likely, then plan in advance.

01:19:20

Importance of trusting your body

The final piece of advice and something I work on with clients connected to all this is trust, and getting to a place of trusting your body and the feedback it gives. This was actually how I closed out my article on hunger. If you can trust that your body is giving you the right hunger signals and that it’s giving you the right signals about cravings and what’s satisfying, it really does help this process.

But if that is not the case and you don’t have trust in terms of your hunger signals and you don’t have trust in satisfaction, it’s very difficult for the rest of this to work because you’re constantly second-guessing yourself. Or worse, there is the assumption that your body is trying to trick you.

I don’t have a quick solution for this one. It’s normally addressed through exploring and unpacking where the lack of trust comes from. I have various writing exercises that explore this idea, and they can be used as a jumping-off point for having discussions. It can also be addressed through trying things out and through experience and seeing how things change by challenging and going through the process, so it’s not just around dealing with beliefs and theories; it’s about experience.

This isn’t something that will instantly change overnight. It’s not that you’re suddenly going to hit 100% trust overnight, or that someone has to be 100% trusting to get started. You just need to be open to the idea and curious to explore it, even if there is some level of apprehension.

That is it for this episode on satisfaction. Hopefully you have a better understanding of the topic and a better sense of why it’s important as part of recovery or getting over dieting or getting to a better place with food. It really is an integral part of when I’m working with clients, and I’ve seen that the more people are able to allow satisfaction and trust their body in this feedback that it is giving them, the more their relationship with food can be normalised and less fraught.

I will be back with another episode next week. Until then, take care of yourself and I will catch you soon.

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