I’ve been exchanging a couple of emails with Jen of Conversion Diary about intentional eating. She mentioned to me that she wanted to explore the difference between gluttony and addiction, and I thought I’d think about it too — it sounds like a worthy distinction to make.
But as I prepared to think and write about gluttony and addiction, I realized that first you need to distinguish all the different reasons people eat. They fall into three classes, I think. Let’s start by listing the reasons people eat or fast.
What drives us to search for food and to eat?
(1) Hunger — that stomach-growling empty feeling, the “I could eat anything” feeling. We feel it in our stomach, but apparently it’s not triggered merely by emptiness; insulin is involved, and the fuel available for cells. Hunger is said to disappear, or at least to become tolerable, after a couple of days of fasting, or after a couple of days on a low-carb regimen.
(2) Cravings — the obsessive desire for a particular food or class of food, independently of whether one is experiencing hunger. I experience cravings as fatigue, mental fuzziness, anxiety, or distraction coupled with an intense certainty, borne of experience, that if only I eat something I will feel instantly better.
(3) Social eating signals — Various social and cultural signals that one might not even notice: for example, at a party where everyone else is eating, one might absentmindedly eat as part of being social.
(4) “Should” — The cognitive belief that one ought to eat, independently of hunger or cravings: for example, eating now because there might not be enough food later, or eating a serving of vegetables because you believe they promote health, or eating dessert so you don’t hurt someone’s feelings.
What stops us from looking for food and eating?
(1) Satiety — not the absence of hunger, but a positive signal of fullness or “enough”-ness that creates almost a revulsion towards the idea of putting more food (or more of one particular food) in one’s mouth.
(2) Not-eating signals — Social and cultural signals to stop eating, signals we might not notice we’re responding to: we stop eating because the party has moved on to the after-dinner coffee and conversation.
(3) “Shouldn’t” — The cognitive belief that one ought not to eat: for example, one might stop eating in order to leave enough food for other people, or to avoid giving the impression that one is a glutton, or because you think eating too much will make you gain weight.
Now let’s sort them into categories: the biochemical, the social, and the cognitive.
Hunger and satiety and cravings are three different drives, and I am convinced all three are biochemical. It is possible to resist all three of them, but it’s difficult. Scratch that, it’s not strong enough. Resisting hunger, satiety, or cravings creates suffering; we can’t know how badly other people suffer, and I think it’s charitable to assume that many people literally cannot tolerate the suffering of resisting those drives.
The drive to obey social and cultural signals for or against eating are, I assume, programmed into human beings and other social animals. Exactly how those signals are conveyed is going to vary from group to group, and I am sure there are some attachment theorists or anthropologists who could write about it much better than I can, but I think I can sum it up as an unconscious drive to do what’s expected of us — including to eat in the way that we’re expected to eat — and thereby remain in the good graces of the group.
“Shoulds” and “Shouldn’ts” are cognitive, and I assume they are the exclusive domain of human persons: this is where we exercise our intellect and our will to affect our behavior.
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