Life consists in eating other creatures. You don’t think about that very much when you make a nice-looking meal. But what you’re doing is eating something that was recently alive. And when you look at the beauty of nature, and you see the birds picking around – they’re eating things. You see the cows grazing, they’re eating things. – Joseph Campbell

The mind can ramble off in strange ways and want things that the body does not want. – Joseph Campbell

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Your body is a pile of food. Everything in your body from your heart to your hands was built mainly from food you’ve absorbed. And since we spend most of our lives looking after our own bodies, what we eat and drink matters.

Some people are very disciplined with what they eat. The health conscious follow rigid plans so that they can reach goals like ‘low blood pressure’ or ‘beach body’. Some people even skip entire food groups, go to fasting clinics or count every single calorie that goes in and out of their system. 

The diets that we design and decide on are influenced by many different things. Peer groups, financial situations, interests, social norms and culture can all push us one way or another.

But instead of listening to yet another fitness podcast, might it be possible to figure out what our body wants to eat? Might an objective diet exist?

For many years, I counted calories and tried to eat based on what I heard was healthy. After giving that up, for reasons described here, I decided to see if it was possible to start eating more with my stomach rather than my head. Aside from common sense, I would try not to follow any particular diet or set of rules. Through the din of advertisements, influencers, social pressure and bad habits, I would try my hardest to hear the sound of my own stomach.

Maybe it’s impossible to separate our conditioning from how we make choices around food. Even if I think I’m intuitively picking one type of food over another, that intuition is influenced by something out of my control, like some deeply repressed fantasy or all the things I have learned in my life about nutrition.

Regardless if that is the case, I was more interested in what arrived on my plate every day. Does eating a bit more intuitively change what eating looks and feels like? Are these changes positive or negative? I care less about who’s in control and more about results.

Here’s how relying a bit more on intuition changed my eating:

Breakfast

• In the morning, I found myself cooking more savoury breakfasts than I used to, like smoked salmon with cream chese on toast. Breakfast doesn’t need to be 100g of sugar. Sugar is ‘just a carb’, but sit down and drink a litre of cordial and tell me how you feel. We don’t need much of it.
• Hot eggs, toast, oatmeal. Especially in winter, hot food in the morning is incredibly satisfying.

Lunch

• Before I paid attention to my appetite, I’d usually default to something like a big subway sandwich or burrito and a large coke. 
• Although I was still pretty hungry at lunch, I rarely wanted to eat masses of meat or carbs. I never really get sick of salads loaded up with heaps of oily stuff (feta, olive oil, olives, avocado) or smaller soups. So more greens and fats than something like a pastrami sandwich.
• Strangely, I found myself craving and loving tinned fish like sardines and mackeral. I spread it on toast. Feta and beetroot were other random foods I couldn’t get enough of. Who knows why. But I don’t belive we naturally crave junk food.
• If I was ordering take-away, I found that I defaulted to sushi, again defaulting to fish over other types of meat.

Dinner

• I started to eat smaller dinners, a bit earlier in the evening. It didn’t feel right stuffing myself right before bed. I think this is probably where people put on extra kilos.
• The more I look at alcohol, the more it seems that this is something we’re mainly better off without.
• The simpler my cooking got, the more I found myself adding salt to things. This is probably because I was getting a lot less sodium from junk food.

If you take some of the craving and bad habits out of your diet, things start looking healthier and frankly, a bit boring. We go a bit crazy when we aren’t stimulated with the latest lab invented flavors or if we can’t eat a different style of cuisine every night. But I was surprised how little my body cared about that sort of stuff. It simply wants food to keep it running. Even if it can physically handle plates of nachos and liters of beer (sweating and shaking), why would you?

Mind-led eating tends to be more habitual, compulsive and erratic. Body-led eating is perhaps closer to what we actually need to eat rather than what we crave.

Mind	Body
Want	Need
Binge, starve	Eat
Prepackaged for convenience	Take time to prepare
This food is “bad”	I’ll eat something else.
Hitting exact nutrient goals	Craving a particular food
Bias to added sugar, stimulants	Bias to micronutrients
Eats to feel better	Eats for energy
More technology (Powerade ION4)	Less technology (Water)
Protests meat	Says thanks for meat
Price	Quality
I need something new	I need something nutritious
Hunger > Taste	Taste > Hunger
Rarely satisfied	Rarely ‘starving’

Fever-Tree, a brand of tonic water coined the phrase “If ¾ of your drink is the mixer, mix with the best.” The same applies to us and our diets. If your body is mainly food, look after it with the best food you can afford.

Further reading

• Food rules – Michael Pollan
  • A short book that distills a lot of common sense
• Grain Brain – David Perlmutter
  • More scientific and specific advice about nutrition that is generally pretty good
• How to eat – Thich Nhat Hanh
  • The mindful angle. It’s hard to eat junk food mindfully
• Nutrition tier lists – Dick Talon
  • Nutritional breakdowns of most types of food
• ‘Eating’ on Buddha Bike
  • Several other posts about food and diet

Disclaimer: I would never urge anyone to stop eating anything, or feel bad about their food choices. I don’t care! This is just a reflection on an experiment with my own eating habits that I found interesting. I could be wrong about everything. Your mileage may vary.