"Intuitive eating." Another tired, recycled concept that dates back at least to the 1970s. It had no scientific research to support it then, and none now.

Eating all you want on Thanksgiving is perfectly fine, after all you can be stressed you from traveling. It's a lot better than doing drugs or other substances.

People face difficulties everyday whether it be about there weight or about whats going on in their lives. I just want to say that you should feel free to explore whatever it is you need to and be happy with how you look and the decisions you make. Enjoy Thanksgiving, it only happens once a year, enjoy the food as well as the people you spend and share it with.

Julian Glander! What was that morsel of regurgitating food? Your illustrations have certainly killed my appetite! I have never seen a creepier turkey! And why are so many of the foods mouthbreathers? A most unappetizing set of graphics for ruminating on overindulgence. Well done!

When I read the article, I predicted that the Comments section would be what have come to expect from the Times' readers when it comes to food and eating: Judgmental, reeking of scorn, and odious. @Mor sums it all up. They a perfect example when they start with "Americans are obscenely overweight." The statement (and the person's subsequent comments) shows us clearly the disgust with which this person views their fellow beings. There is also the statement from @Mor that "The Minnesota Starvation Experiment has nothing to do with the American culture of overeating. It studied the results of actual starvation." Had Mor read the linked article (and other widely-available information about the experiments) they would have realized that the regimen the men involved followed was eerily similar to the sort of regimen that dieters follow today. In fact, the number of calories that were allowed to them during the period called "semi-starvation" was 1800 calories, plus extreme exercise. Dieters today would regard that as a princely number. Please, all, read the linked article. Let's be clear about this opinion piece: It advocates connecting a body's feelings (both physical and emotional) so that one's body's true needs can be met. If we frustrate the connection, we are likely to engage in eating behavior that is not healthy. The Times' judgmental commenters need to take a few minutes to think about how their own prejudice informs their beliefs about others.

I have lost 15 pounds since August. It is a matter fasting from 6:00 PM to 8:00 AM and eating less. I have not eaten fast food since 1988 as it very unsatisfying and not filling. Thanksgiving is not an issue for me either. As a control freak, we cook the meal for guests and family and have for 30 years. When you spend 2 days preparing and cooking, eating it is not as appealing as you would think. And so I may eat a spoonful of the items we prepare from scratch, and all that is of interest is the turkey.

Couldn't disagree more with the author (who is trying to sell her book on this topic). Getting at why you are using a drug, in this case food, to blunt your emotions may help you consume food for pleasure rather than pain (overeating past fullness).

Some people drink too much to cope with their emotions. Others eat too much. It's just that simple. For Thanksgiving, eat and drink to your heart's content.

Sigh. Another article pushing intuitive eating. I've tried it all, including Christy's course. The problem with emotional eating is that you're choosing to be powerless, not powerful. We’ve been trained that weight loss = torture. It's not that I didn't know what to do. It's that I couldn't do it consistently. MyBodyTutor.com was the only thing that was able to keep me interested and progressing until I reached my goal of losing 75 pounds. I'm not worried about Thanksgiving or any holiday or indulgence for that matter! The goal, as I've learned, is to be fit and happy, not fit and miserable. I feel like I can easily keep the weight off too. I'm a different person with a different mindset and habits along with a new relationship with food. That's been a game changer because everything I've tried in the past got harder as time went on. It’s because I was relying solely on willpower. With MyBodyTutor, it's getting easier as time goes on. I can't recommend it enough to anyone who wants to lose weight and keep it off in a way that doesn’t feel like torture. If you aren't where you want to be, get some help. You don’t have to settle for “acceptance” and tell yourself you’re happy when you’re not. At my age, I never thought I would be able to lose this much weight and without agony. I don't remember the last time I felt so good. I’m so proud of the way I look and feel. I finally feel like my outside matches my inside and I’m thrilled I didn’t just “accept” where I was.

As a nutritionist and cooking instructor, there is so much that I agree with when it comes to intuitive eating. However, I have noticed the amount of "anti-diet" books coming out on the market are just another name for, you guessed it, DIET.

Here we go again. The article made sense to me, especially when I consider the eating habits of my Italian immigrant grandparents. They ate good, well-prepared simple food, based on seasonal availability. Nothing was off-limits and we were taught to listen to our body. Compare that to today's diet obsessed culture, too thin, too frail, too obese and very few average people in the US. One of the biggest turn-offs is the non-celiac gluten haters. Second is the people who act like they are experts on a topic without being able to read research, listening instead to some money-making diet guru or the latest diet scheme. Listening to my body works just fine, thank-you and I intend on having a generous serving of stuffing, cranberry sauce and pie on Thanksgiving. Since I am the hostess this Thursday, I get to set the rules: no cell phones at the table, no talk about diets, no right wing politics and lots of gratitude.

For the readers commenting about how the author is ignoring evidence, know that there is actually a ton of data behind this approach to eating ("intuitive eating"). The biggest being the well-known fact that diets fail 95% of the time, with many dieters gaining the weight back, plus some, within a few years. Americans have tried all manners of dieting - and it hasn't worked. There is also a ton of data showing that being in a larger body does not, in fact, correlate with being less healthy. Please pick up a copy of "Intuitive Eating" by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch and "Body Respect" by Linda Bacon for a deep dive into the research. Happy Holidays!

Yet another commercial for intuitive eating. Next year we will have moved on to something else....

My unscientific theory is that emotional eating (using food to reduce anxiety) increased at the same time depression meds because widespread. The kinds of people who went to therapists got anti-depressants, while the kinds of people who never went to therapists and rarely to doctors turned to processed foods. American culture has gotten crueler, more stressful, and lonelier for large numbers of people. Unless and until those conditions change, the endless books about diet and weight loss aren't going to do much to bring down obesity rates.

One day of indulgence won't make a difference. It's indulgence in sugary and processed foods every day that leads to health problems.

The article was informative but the super ugly jumping gifs really got in the way of my reading. I had to skip portions of the article because they were so distracting.

You lost me at."Rather than “Go knit in a corner instead of eating,” I’d suggest, “How about you call a friend after you finish that pumpkin pie?”... Put your PED (personal electronic device) down , and for crying out loud, go for a walk,perhaps with others. Be social in real time/real life.

Terrible article. Better advice would have been about how to get beyond emotional eating. I have lost 35 pounds using the NOOM app since June. What am I going to do on Thanksgiving? Use the calmness about food that has come with examining why I eat and when. I am NOT going to eat to alleviate my stress or anxiety or political despair. I am going to eat what I want, in reasonable portion sizes. I'm going to enjoy every bite. One day isn't going to make or break a diet. And, yes, if something goes haywire and I overeat, I am not going to punish myself about it. But I don't think it's going to happen.

Food isn't addictive? Look around you. People use food for the same reasons, and in the same way, as they use drugs and alcohol...to escape and avoid.

I'll never forget the time a neighbor complained to me about her husband's unhealthy relationship to food, all thanks to his mother. "She used food as comfort," she said. "I see," I replied. "But why do you make that sound like a bad thing?"

What’s really destructive is drowning one’s emotions in alcohol.

Enjoyed the article. Much to think about.

My late mother was what used to be called a "health-food nut"; she subsisted on small plates of carefully cooked vegetables. She would routinely ruin our extended family's Thanksgiving dinner with lectures about the evils of sugar and sneer at an elderly female relative's lovingly made apple or pumpkin pie. She was a gaunt, angry woman and her obsession with nutritional food didn't extend her life. She probably had orthorexia, an obsession with healthy food that is actually an eating disorder. She's long dead, but she would have fit in fine with today's virtue-signaling "health" food culture.

My God. The NYT is championing "emotional eating"?! Given the runaway obesity epidemic in America and the catastrophic, ruinous costs to our public health system of treating obesity related diseases (diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, metabolic liver disease, cancer, etc., etc., etc.), counseling Americans to "eat your holiday feelings" is tantamount to handing a flame thrower to a 12 year old pyromaniac. What are you thinking? Is this "opinion piece" being funded by the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery? Stop it. Stop. It.

This article is so filled with misinformation that you don’t know where to start. Let’s start with an indubitable fact: Americans are obscenely overweight. You don’t need statistics, even though they are easily available. Just travel abroad and then come back. You’ll be shocked into dieting for a month when you are greeted with the sight of beached whales in the airport, puffing and huffing their way through a giant bag of chips. Are these people comfort-eating because of their childhood trauma? Then how come you don’t see such sights in countries where you have real traumas - war, social unrest, famine? The Minnesota Starvation Experiment has nothing to do with the American culture of overeating. It studied the results of actual starvation. How many Americans consume half of the calories they need compared to those who consume twice as many? The experiment was conducted at the time when people actually starved to death in war-devastated Europe and Asia and when artificial famine was used as a method of social control. Shame on the author for exploiting mass suffering to justify laziness, self-indulgence, and poor choices.

Dear NYT: It would be fascinating to read Marion Nestle's response to this piece. I expect she'd say that whether or not big food paid for this work, they couldn't be more happy with it. Hearing the nuances of the argument would be interesting, though.

I've always been an emotional eater. … But, now I'm more interested in directing the same emotions to new ends. [From the mountain road scene in "The Deer Hunter"] Axel (Chuck Aspegren): “Hey, Nick … let me ask you a question. Nick, how come I never see you eatin’?” Nick (Christopher Walken): “I like to starve myself. It keeps the fear up.”

The last thing we need is advice from a registered dietician, steeped in the dogma of bad science and lack of knowledge of current research. I recommend looking into the new work being done by Georgia Ede if you want to research the connection between mood and food.

I think the message in this article is wrong. You absolutely should restrict your eating. Of sugar, deep fried snacks, alcohol, and red meat. I did and I reached a point where I no longer see these things as pleasurable. If we can condition ourselves to crave healthy things. Then that is what we will want. It doesn’t have to be a diet in the western understanding of the word. That is as a departure from the norm to achieve some temporary goal. A diet should be a way of life. One that you adopt because you find it pleasurable and healthful at the same time. When reaching for an apple becomes more pleasurable then the chips, and I know at least I’ve managed to reach that point, then you’re not restricting yourself anymore. You’ve become free from the chains of a junk food culture that is pushed on us in every way from the moment we’re born. And why? So the fast food executives can buy fancy cars and watches.

Disagree! The processed food industry is making a fortune by concocting the most addicting combinations possible of fat, sugar and salt with the assistance of chemicals labelled as "artificial flavors." It's easy to get addicted to them and eat waaaaay too much, and it's very difficult (about a three week weaning period, in my experience) to get used to eating actual food: fruit, vegetables, dairy, whole grains, meat. I'm not kidding about addiction. The cravings and impulsive splurgings are real, and so is diabetes and inflammation resulting from sugar, white flour, fried food, and/or processed foods. Also, processed food is a lot cheaper than real food (in my area, apples are $2.99 a pound). Not many people are going to become obese from eating too much fruit. It's what you eat, not how much you eat.

Thank you for this Thanksgiving feast or rather piece. Forever dieter that I am I can have my turkey and eat it too! Now I can explain away my gaining pounds to loss of cognitive control - without guilt! And I really love pumpkin pies!

First, food is an absolutely necessary input of energy to a human being, as well as to other animals, of whose feelings and emotions we can only guess. Second, the likes or dislikes of certain foods go undoubtedly back to the times of the cave-man, but they are as a whole acquired characteristics, not genetically inherited. Third, if eating certain foods gives pleasure, so be it. With all due respect to medical physiologists and serious dietitians, there is a big difference between the food intakes of a refined gourmet and glutton. A 19th-century Victorian breakfast of the wealthy was shear gluttony. I suggested a couple of times to Mr. Frank Bruni to analyse the possible connection between the foods preferred by certain politicians and their political platforms. For example, is Trump's politics related to his devouring of cheeseburgers held in the hands?

Thanks for this, Ms. Harrison. As a psychotherapist specializing in disordered eating (and as a woman on my own food journey in this diet-obsessed culture), I can attest that it is the disconnection from our felt experience of food that drives over-eating--not any addictive quality in food itself. What many commenters here seem to overlook is how external regulation (dieting, calorie counting, demonizing certain foods) leads to atrophy of our body's inner compass. When we in this field talk about eating "whatever you want," we are not talking about bingeing chocolate doughnuts seven days a week. We are talking about consciously choosing something that is appealing and appetizing, tasting each bite fully, and paying attention to what your body is telling you every step of the way. When most human beings approach food like this, the body will tell us when we have had enough. It becomes aversive to overeat because it actually doesn't feel good. The hard part is re-developing the intuition we we born with, because it's taken such a beating through socialization to thinness. It takes time to re-build the intuitive eating "muscle," but it can be done. And it doesn't have to look perfect (after all, our bodies are living, dynamic organisms--not blocks of wood). If I occasionally overeat because my mouth wants a second helping delicious turkey and stuffing, I don't sweat it. I trust my body to get back to balance. And it always does.

The human brain/body and it’s evolution is so much deeper than we will ever understand. We obviously need to eat to survive, but over indulgence is a real issue. The interplay of genetics, hormones, and culture is exponentially more complex than we may ever really understand. In the meantime, I imagine moderation is the course that many should strive for. The deeply rooted psychological stuff is a whole other kettle of fish.

I don't know. I agree and I disagree. On one hand, restrictive diets are terrible for your mind and body. After being a non-dieter for most of my life, I've spent the last ten years trying intermittant fasting, cutting out carbs, paleo, the Mediterranean Diet, and even Mark Bittman's "Vegan Before 6:00." All of them left me feeling terrible after a few weeks, and the relapses were both inevitable and guilt-inducing. On the other hand, I started gaining weight for a reason—and it was probably because I was eating whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and not "depriving" myself of things like sugar. Articles like this make it feel pointless to improve oneself... it implies that we all have a biological set-point that we ultimately cannot overcome and cannot argue with, and you're stuck being the way you are (and lucky for you if your set-point is "slim.") This article offers no solutions for the millions of Americans struggling with overweight and obesity. It trades the false hope offered by dieting for no hope at all. Where does that leave us?

I attended a Quaker high school in the 1950's. One of our teachers had participated in the "starvation" experiment mentioned in the article. He told us that the only topic the participants talked about was food. Mostly they were fed turnips to mimic what was happening to civilians in Europe during the war. They talked about the steak dinners with all the trimmings they planned on eating after the experiment ended. They were disappointed and angry when the refeeding stage started and they got.... more turnips!

The real Thanksgiving equals a meal with Native Americans and colonists. And here we are hundreds of years later saying food has nothing to do with Thanksgiving? Please! My husband has worked on a Native American reservation for decades. Anyone that knows anything about Native American culture knows sharing food is a large part of the culture. Just go with it, for one day, please. No more analysis. Happy Thanksgiving for what it really is.

I've lost about 30 pounds over the last few years, much of it in the last 16 months, and am down to my mid-college weight again. I eat chips, cookies, cake, pasta, cheese, candy, nachos, etc...at least a few times a week. I keep track of my calories in an app, so I do disagree that you can just eat whatever you want in terms of quantity, but even on days I don't track calories (like weekends or vacation), I'm aware of about how many I'm consuming. I've tried fasting, I've tried only eating certain foods, I've tried meal replacement shakes...none of it stuck, because it wasn't sustainable. Eat what you want to eat, in moderation. Drink booze, but about half what you'd actually like to drink. Try to balance out a big-calorie day with some exercise whenever you can. But mostly, keep track of portions, not content. The rest will fall into place if you listen to your body.

So are we just supposed to pretend that the obesity rate isn’t skyrocketing, and that this doesn’t have a significant impact on the health of the nation? These days I’m diagnosing endometrial cancers in women in their early 30s (or even younger) who all have BMIs of 35-50+. Decades ago young women getting these cancers was exceedingly rare, practically unheard of. This just happens to be my particular specialty but ask any doctor how obesity has affected their practice and they will have plenty to tell you. It’s sad that people feel ashamed or depressed because of food and eating, and all people deserve respect, and obesity is a societal issue more than an individual one. But this piece suggests that just focusing on eating the right number of calories so you don’t gain weight is psychologically harmful and ignores the very real physical and psychological risks of obesity. Ridiculous.

There are people for whom worrying about food and diet is not something you can turn on and off at will. The occasional binge or giving in to emotions is simply not an option. Never, ever. You might have added a qualifying sentence that for people with such restrictions, "intuitive eating" is something of the past.