Hi Rebecca,

I just read through 19 comments. I like your article AND commenters made some good points.

A suggestion? Redo the article but change the attention-grabbing title. After you read a bit through, you find out that for some, IF is disordered eating, and for others, it's fine.

So disordered eating - which is a great and I think perhaps the single most important point about healthy intake - is a disordered RELATIONSHIP with hunger.

If you have developed a finely tuned mindfulness with regard to body signals - such that you have begun to learn to discern the difference between instinctive cravings, emotional satisfaction and mental narratives about hunger - then you'll be able to lose weight and maintain the weight loss on any reasonable diet, from Mediterranean to Keto (even independent of carb sensitivity, though it will be most likely that - BY THAT TIME - an important caveat - you'll develop an intuitive sense of how carbs affect your body without having to count calories or carbs).

When I did doctoral research on pain (as a clinical psychologist), we found a very similar kind of distinction had dramatic effects in terms of pain reduction. Turns out most of what we call "pain" is a complex set of instinctive reactions, emotional drama and mental/cognitive narratives.

Intuitive eating is often caricatured as eating whatever you feel like. That's like treating pain by doing whatever you want! No, it's a substantial, dedicated process of tuning in to these fine tuned distinctions regarding different systems of the brain (from the ancient survival based mechanisms of the nervous system to the highly complex workings of the cortex and in particular, the prefrontal cortex).

You don't have to know any details about the brain, or nervous system, or even the digestive or other systems (though for some it's helpful). But with dedicated mindfulness over time, the body signals get much much clearer and one just "knows" what and how much to eat - far better than any nutritionist could prescribe (though, I don't want to criticize those folks either and no doubt they can be helpful along the path to developing mindful intuitive sensitivity to the body's true needs).

Thanks again for this thought provoking article.