Dietary Self-Regulation: Beyond Eating Disorders

In this series, we’ve strayed quite a long way from the Playa del Carmen resort we started at, via milkshakes and open-loop versus closed-loop systems. In the penultimate part we circled right back to it: back to how raising numerical limits lets you rediscover what it’s like to self-regulate in a way that works and feels great. Here are the key takeaways from this series on "self-regulation", or your body knowing what it’s doing:

Source: Abas Gemini via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Self-regulation can’t happen without feedback. The system has to be closed-loop, not open-loop.
• Self-regulation can’t happen in the presence of a strong external regulator that overrides feedback (e.g., a rigid, exception-free rule) and makes the system open-loop.
• Open-loop regulation in eating disorders is not only ineffective by all meaningful metrics (health, happiness, etc.), it also misses out on even the benefit of not needing to measure, because measurement is going on all the time, just not of anything useful, and not leading to meaningful adjustments.
• An external open-loop regulator (a rigid rule), once habitual, can’t typically be removed just by declaring it no longer exists or applies.
• Instead, we need to devise a process that makes the external regulator unable to operate. For instance, if its job is to impose a numerical limit (e.g., on calorie consumption), we up the limit so high that it becomes meaningless. Alternatively, if you’re so rule-bound that quantifiably increasing your freedom of movement results in no new movement, you can force the change by converting an upper limit into a lower one.
• Once the limit is high or low enough that other regulators (recalibrated satiety, fatigue, or any of the other richly complex signals that constitute “(not) feeling like it”) can kick back in, the external one will be rendered superfluous—or rather, its historical superfluity will be exposed.

This is the core of the story this series tells about eating disorders. Then, there are some interesting wider speculations that these structural principles around dietary restraint and self-regulation could lead us to. They take us out into eating and exercise habits, weight control, and health and happiness beyond the clinical realm.

It’s easy to argue that the evolved systems for hunger/satiety and bodyweight regulation that used to serve humans well no longer do. The familiar argument is that because there’s now so much more readily available fat and sugar on offer and so little need for most people in post-industrial societies to do anything physical to survive, we need new ways of keeping ourselves regulated. The increasing prevalence of obesity (and metabolic syndrome more generally) is typically cited in support of this argument.

The argument that we need new regulation methods for energy intake/expenditure is the standard justification for introducing more and more open-loop regulators into the spheres of eating and exercise. More of these are imposed into our attentional spheres every year, via governmental and medical guidance on calorie intake and weekly minutes of exercise (such as the CDC’s recommended 150 moderate minutes per week or the NHS’s ridiculously arbitrary “5 a day”), supported by all the conspicuous numerical indicators intended to help people apply these rules: nutritional information and traffic lights on food packaging, calorie counts on menus, calories-burned estimates on treadmills and fitness trackers, etc. The demonstrable failure of all these initiatives to make any significant change of the type intended (see Piwek et al., 2016, Jo et al., 2019) seems to lead only to yet louder calls for more of the same.

On the logic proposed in this series, however, if external open-loop regulators are the problem, not the solution, one would expect that the more widely they’re promoted, the worse the situation will become. On a population level, their spread will increase the prevalence of poor bodyweight management thanks to actively encouraged over-reliance on open-loop regulators that (as the dietary restraint literature cited earlier in this series suggests) don’t work. Given that this appears to be what we’re seeing, despite few significant changes in food production or availability in post-industrial nations over the past decades, there seems to be some evidence in support of this counter-hypothesis.

If there’s any truth in it, this shifts the causal burden for increasing the prevalence of obesity from modern changes in diet/exercise incentives to the misguided responses to these changes at the level of standard public health initiatives, as well as individual recourse to diets and tracking technologies. In this story, the rise of the extraneous regulators—a great surge of them, ignited by the popularization of fat-reduced diets from around the 1980s onwards, and catalyzed by the tech explosion on which all forms of (self-)quantification easily piggyback—is what has made and will continue to make people fatter in the long run (Jakicic et al., 2016), not what is valiantly keeping a lid on the “obesity epidemic.”

If this alternative story has any merit, even as a hypothetical, then what we need to do is switch the public health focus away from all the numerical distractions that prevent people from self-regulating effectively (see this New York Times piece for a recent overview), and towards encouragements to optimize closed-loop self-regulation. This might involve training in fundamentals like interoceptive awareness, eating speed (Troscianko and Leon, 2020), power/skill-oriented movement, and many other easily unlearned instincts. Who knows, maybe treating ourselves, and being treated by our governments, a little more like competent adults might reveal that we were all along?

One final meta-point to wrap up: I love how intellectually generative the two weeks in the Mexican sun turned out to be for me. This series is just one of the things that came out of it, along with a post on reasons to dine out alone, plus lots of ideas for course design that I spent fun time scribbling about on my balcony or by the pool or ocean. These things happened precisely because there was no pressure on any of it (if I’d aimed to write two long blog posts and create outlines for a writing support program and a mind/body course, that would have been a great way to wreck the vacation), and because the everyday “shallow work” had been removed to make space for things that weren’t urgent but were meaningful.

Self-Control Essential Reads

On Hold or in Overdrive: Decoding Inaction and Impulsivity

Does Performing Rituals Build Character?

Deep work can happen when all the usual shallow demands are lifted and idleness is embraced, just as real eating and movement can happen when all the numbers are lifted. The good stuff takes energy, and the energy comes from fuel and from rest—of the kind you get only when you know your body well enough to give it what it needs.