Intuitive Eating 101 Series - Principle #6: Discover The Satisfaction Factor

Learn how to enjoy ALL foods without the guilt or worry.

**Disclaimer: Please note that the information in this or any other blog posts on this site may not be suitable or apply to you, depending on where you’re at in your mental health and/or eating disorder/diet recovery journey. This information is for educational purposes only and not meant to be a substitute for medical or psychiatric advice. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before making any changes. See full disclaimer here.

Welcome to part six of a ten part series, breaking down each principle of Intuitive Eating, a non-diet and weight-neutral approach to health. If you missed the introduction about what Intuitive Eating is and the deeper dive into the first principle, read this post first. You can also read the last part in the series here.

**Also, please note that this 10-part blog series was based on the 3rd Edition of Intuitive Eating, and there is now a 4th Edition out (June 2020), where some changes have been made. However the information in this series is still very much relevant to learning and applying the Intuitive Eating principles.   
​
This post is going to be all about Principle #6: Discover The Satisfaction Factor.

Do you ever order a salad at a restaurant but really want the pasta? Do you ever finish eating a food, even if it doesn't taste that great, like stale muffins in your office kitchen, without giving it a second thought? Do you ever “force” yourself to eat a dessert or something that looks appealing to you, even if you’re not hungry? If you can relate to any of these statements, you may be missing out on the most important part of intuitive eating - food satisfaction and pleasure.

Yes, you’re allowed to actually enjoy and receive pleasure from what you eat! This can be a foreign concept to dieters, people with eating disorders, or anyone who is rigid about the ideas of “food is medicine” or “food is fuel”. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that food can be treated as medicine and fuel, but I also believe there is a place for enjoyment and pleasure from food as well (something I had to learn over time as I recovered from eating disorder and dieting behaviours).

Think about it, if people could treat food purely as medicine or fuel, then we’d all be able to live off of “super-food” smoothies all day right? Or just eat broiled chicken breast, rice and broccoli all day, every day. But no one can do that. Why? Because eating is also about deriving pleasure from the physical sensations of the food as well as from the mental/emotional satisfaction of eating it.

But if you’ve been dieting or following a bunch of food rules for a while, the idea of deriving any pleasure from food can feel scary. You might believe that “good” or “healthy” foods are the blander, less tasty foods, while “bad” or “fattening” foods are the tasty ones. Therefore you associate pleasure from eating as “bad” because you could only get pleasure from “bad” foods. You may have thoughts like:

• “If I have one delicious bread bun, I won’t be able to stop!”
• “If I eat foods I enjoy I’ll get fat, because “bad” foods are the tasty ones” or
• “If I let myself eat this dessert, I’m doing something sinful and will have to make up for it”.

If this is you, ask yourself, how often has these restrictions worked? How often have you bought the “diet” ice cream but was left unsatisfied and still wanting the real thing? Or maybe you ate twice as much of the “diet “ ice cream to try to satisfy you but you were still left wanting more? Or what about eating rice cakes and celery sticks when you really just wanted a muffin or some pretzels, and you end up not only eating a bunch of rice cakes, but then you also eat the whole bag of pretzels?

What often happens if you deny getting pleasure from foods, you might eat until you feel full, but you’ll be left feeling unsatisfied and thinking even more about food. Or you may even eat past comfortably full trying to fill that satisfaction void, when if you had just eaten what you really wanted, you would have probably been satisfied with a moderate portion, and no lingering obsessive food thoughts.

Diet culture can instill fear about food cravings and guilt about eating “indulgent” (a.k.a. “bad” or “fattening”) foods, which leads to more disconnect between our mind and body and therefore distrust in our bodies and eating behaviours. Moreover, you may feel like you don’t trust yourself around foods that would be pleasurable because you haven’t been practicing the other principles of intuitive eating, such as honoring your hunger, giving yourself permission to eat all foods, or challenging your thoughts and beliefs about food. So being able to start deriving satisfaction from foods, will also often mean working on these principles as well. If you still believe that a donut is “bad” (and therefore you are “bad” for eating it) then how can you derive any sort of pleasure from eating it, right? Or if you’re ravenous and shovel a donut or two down your throat, you also most likely won’t derive pleasure from eating it, let alone even taste it!

Even though Discovering The Satisfaction Factor is often practiced with the other principles, it can sometimes be a nice place to start the intuitive eating process, depending on where you’re coming from and what your needs may be. Either way, these are the five steps that Tribole and Resch (2012) outline for anyone to start practicing this principle:

1. Ask Yourself What You Really Want To Eat: This is so simple, yet can be challenging if you’re used to denying yourself what you want because of certain food rules or meal plans you’ve been following. Dieting is often about what you can’t have, so figuring out what you actually want to eat can feel mind boggling. If you’re not sure where to start with this step, you could start to notice when you eat, what foods do you actually like? What foods don’t you like? What happens when you eat the foods you like? And what happens when you eat foods you didn’t really want but thought you “should”? Become your own detective and stay curious about whether you actually want what you’re eating or not.
2. Discover The Pleasure Of The Plate: This step invites you to experiment with all the different sensory experiences you can enjoy with food and can help refine step 1), figuring out what you actually like to eat. When you eat or are thinking of eating soon, you can ask yourself these questions: What taste do I feel like (sweet, salty, sour, bitter)? What texture of food do I feel like (crunchy, soft, chunky, chewy)? What smells good to you? What looks good to you (colours, or designs)? What temperature do you feel like (hot, cold, neutral)? Do you feel like something lighter or heartier, or in between? There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. The answers will be individual to you and can change meal to meal and day to day. For example, if it’s cold outside, you may feel like a hearty beef stew instead of a cold raw salad. Moreover, your satisfaction factor can even change during a meal. Maybe you thought you really wanted the popcorn, but then halfway through the bag it gets stale and you’re just not really enjoying eating it anymore. That’s a situation where you can stop and throw it away because you’re not deriving anymore pleasure from eating it, for example. It may seem wasteful to think like this, but if you end up throwing away a bit of food and feel more satisfied about doing that, then eating something that doesn’t taste good and possibly overeat and feel uncomfortably full after, intuitive eating would say this is OK to do. The more you can tune-into what you actually want, most of the time, and tune into your hunger and fullness cues, the better you’ll get at gauging portion sizes and how much you need to eat to feel satisfied and content.
3. Make Your Eating Experience More Enjoyable: If you’re under stress, you will less likely digest your food well or derive any pleasure from eating it. So creating a relaxing and enjoyable environment when eating can help increase the satisfaction factor. Here are some suggestions on how to do that:
   1. Slow down and take some time to eat, at least 15 minutes if you can.
   2. Sit down at a table instead of standing up, driving, or moving around.
   3. Take a few deep breaths before eating to help you unwind.
   4. Chew your food enough so that it goes down easier.
   5. Notice the taste of the food when it’s in your mouth. And check in with yourself if you’re actually enjoying it or not.
   6. Eat when you’re moderately hungry, not ravenous or already full. You’ll get the most satisfaction then.
   7. Try to eat in a calm, relaxed state.
   8. Keep a variety of foods you actually like in your home or at work. This goes against the idea of “out of sight, out of mind”, but actually by keeping foods you know you like around, you’re creating safety and trust within yourself that you can have these foods whenever you’d like. Buy veggies you like as well as ice cream you like. If you like chicken but prefer thighs to breasts, then get the thighs. If you prefer butter to margarine, get butter. Often, just swapping out “diet” foods for the ones you’d prefer is a first step in getting more satisfaction with eating. **Note if you’re practicing Make Peace With Food, this step can be challenging to achieve, so take the baby steps you need to have these foods in your home first.
4. Don’t Settle: Maybe you thought you wanted that muffin at Starbucks and was excited to eat it and then after a few bites realized it was stale and not as good as you had anticipated. So you don’t have to settle for it. Don’t feel you have to finish it if you’re not getting the satisfaction you wanted from it.
5. Check In: Does It Still Taste Good?: When you’re eating a food you really like, check-in halfway and ask yourself, does this still taste good to me? Do I want more? Or am I satisfied? It’s a well known phenomenon that the more you eat a specific food, the less you’ll enjoy eating it. For example, the first few bites of cake are usually more enjoyable and tastier than the last few bites. This doesn’t mean you have to throw away the cake, it’s just an exercise in becoming more aware of how much and when do you actually enjoy your food, and then giving you the choice to act on that information however you want.

When practicing Discover The Satisfaction Factor, sometimes people believe that they have to savor every bite of food that they eat and always eat in a mindful, un-distracted way. This is not the case. There are no “always” or “never” in Intuitive Eating. It might not always be practical to eat foods you enjoy all the time. Maybe you’re at a work function and have to just eat whatever is served. But even in those cases, you can still practice this principle by choosing the food that looks the most appealing to you, even if it’s not exactly what you wanted in that moment. 

Also, people have to plan and grocery shop. I get it’s not realistic that you’re just going to go out and buy the ingredients of whatever food you’re wanting in that moment. Sometimes we eat leftovers or grab a protein bar on the go. Not everything we eat will bring total satisfaction. That’s life.

The suggestions in this post are tools to:
1) give you permission to start eating foods you actually like, and
2) to help you discover what foods you like and enjoy and how to start incorporating them more into your life.

The more you will learn what these foods are, the easier it will be to plan what you want at the store or to order the meal that will leave you satisfied and not feeling deprived.   
 
Next - Read about the seventh principle of Intuitive Eating: Cope With Your Emotions Without Using Food.

References
Tribole, E. & Resch, E. (2012) Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press

Are you struggling with eating and body image concerns?
​Learn more about my psychotherapy & counselling services, and how I can help you here.
​
If someone else you know could benefit from this article, please share it!​