Why Aren’t We Self-Correcting?

Commentary

The end of Lent is coming, and I will be eating again. As I write this, I have gone more than forty days without food. Last night, I stopped by the grocery store to pick up a few items, and I felt like an alien walking the aisles. I serve food every day in a restaurant. I cook constantly. And yet I have now gone far more than a month without surrendering to the desire to eat.

From that place of clarity that only deep fasting seems to bring, I found myself asking a question I cannot shake. Why are we not self-correcting?

There have been experiments that suggest we are not born without guidance. In a well known study, young children were given only whole, unprocessed foods and allowed to choose freely. Over time, they built diets that supported normal growth without instruction. Animal research shows something similar. When rats are given separate sources of protein, fat, and carbohydrates, they regulate their intake with surprising precision, often prioritizing protein and adjusting other nutrients depending on their metabolic state. In some cases of metabolic dysfunction, they even reduce carbohydrate intake in ways that help stabilize blood sugar. But this ability is fragile. It disappears when highly processed foods enter the picture. What looks like wisdom may still be there, but it is being overridden.

Fasting has shown me something I could not see while eating regularly. It quiets the constant pull of appetite just enough to observe it. Hunger, I realized, is not always hunger. It rises and falls like a wave. It is tied to emotion, to rhythm, to habit. Without answering it immediately, you begin to see how often the desire to eat is not driven by need but by something deeper or sometimes something much more trivial.

When that constant stimulation is removed, even temporarily, there is space to ask better questions. Not just what should I eat, but why do I want to eat right now.

My family joined me in smaller ways during this period. My husband fasted for two separate stretches of two weeks. My eleven year old son fasted for three days and then again for four. My husband came out of it with a sense of power, but also with language that surprised me. He kept returning to the idea of sin, gluttony, and desire. He said he realized how often he was not eating from hunger but from something else entirely, frustration, disconnection, and habit. He feels more committed now to not letting food and alcohol control him.

That question followed me into the grocery store. I looked around at what we are surrounded by and at how sick we have become as a society. If natural intelligence exists, if there is some built in wisdom guiding living beings toward health, then why is it not showing up here?

When I dug deeper, something became clear. That self regulation only appears when the choices are real food. When the options are whole, recognizable, unprocessed. When highly engineered, hyper palatable foods are introduced, that signal breaks down. This is true in animals, in children, and in adults.

It is not that we have no power to resist. Some people do. Many do not. But the environment matters more than we want to admit. And when the environment constantly stimulates appetite, fasting becomes one of the few ways to step outside of it long enough to see it clearly.

I have two close examples in my life right now. One friend’s husband had a heart attack just last week. The next time I saw him, he was drinking a forty four ounce soda from a gas station. Another friend is struggling in her marriage. She is a nutritionist. Her husband has been hospitalized four times in recent weeks with complications from diabetes. These are not abstract risks. These are immediate, life threatening realities. And still, behavior does not change.

So what would it take for our internal wisdom to be louder than what surrounds us?

At home, we try to walk a line with our children. We do not isolate them from the world. They go to birthday parties. They are around other families and other food. Six days out of the week we eat at home, and we focus on the best version of what is available. When we are out, we allow treats, but we try to choose the highest quality version we can find. The goal is not perfection. The goal is to preserve their ability to listen to their own bodies.

I want my children to keep whatever that natural intelligence is. I do not want it overridden.

It is easy for me to speak from where I am right now, coming off of two consecutive years of fasting through Lent, sustained on raw milk, bone broth, and tea. But I have not always stood in this place. I have carried extra weight. I gained with every pregnancy. I had four children between the ages of thirty seven and forty five. It took time to return to where I am now. I understand how easy it is to justify. I am pregnant. I am breastfeeding. I just had a baby. I deserve this.

Even eating whole foods, even living an active life, my body holds on to weight easily. I have to be intentional every time I eat. I have never had a habit of fast food or soda, and still I have struggled. So I do not speak from perfection. I speak from experience.

What I have come to see, especially through fasting, is that the comfort we feel when we eat often fills something else. My husband realized he eats when he feels frustrated. He eats when he wants connection and does not have it. Once you see that, it becomes harder to ignore.

Maybe the question is not why we are failing to self correct. Maybe the question is what signals we have drowned out.

If animals can regulate themselves in the absence of interference, then what have we built that is interfering with us?

And if we want that wisdom back, it may not come from more information or more discipline alone. It may come from creating space. Space to feel hunger without immediately answering it. Space to notice desire without obeying it. Space to remember that we are not meant to be driven entirely by impulse.

Because the truth is, the system we are living in is louder than our instincts.

And unless we quiet it, we may never hear ourselves clearly again.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.