Are You One of Those People Who Can Eat Whatever They Want?
Oh good. I’m one of those people. You know the type. The allegedly “naturally thin” woman who “can eat whatever she wants.” I’ve never been on a diet. The only time I gained weight was pregnancy — first baby, gone in six weeks. Second baby, gone in two. Which apparently makes me either genetically blessed or something else is going on.
The part people don’t say outloud is that they don’t actually like people who “can eat whatever they want.” But the fact is, it’s not even true. Yes, I can eat ice cream, cookies, pretzels. But so can you. The difference is not what, but how much. While I will eat a single cookie, many will consume the entire box.
Avocado, steak, salmon — all those innocent “healthy” foods? Calorically dense and usually in large quantities.
So when people say, “You can eat whatever you want,” what they really mean is, “You can eat unlimited quantities and stay thin.” Which is absurd. If I ate unlimited quantities, I would not be thin. Nobody would.
Everyone can eat almost anything they want. (Fine, maybe not caviar and truffles unless your hedge fund had a good quarter.) But the issue is with quantity, not permission.
The Airplane Epiphany
Business class. Same tray. Same portions.
My seatmate — handsome, charming, obese — gets exactly what I get: chicken, potatoes, vegetables, nuts, cookie. My guestimate? 75 bites for the meal and 10 more for the nuts.
I eat for about 40 minutes and I’m done at 30 bites. Not stuffed. Just… finished. The food’s cooling. It’s less appealing. My stomach is sending satiety signals, so I wave to the flight attendant to remove my tray.
My seatmate, however, finishes the entire meal in 15 minutes. Not chewing-and-chatting fifteen. Competitive-eating fifteen. Same with the cocktails.
We both order. I sip mine. Warm nuts, little sips, civilized pacing. His first drink? Gone before I even registered it existed. The second? I watched. He didn’t sip. He didn’t drink. He poured it straight down his throat.
Speed of drinking matched speed of eating. No pauses or fork-down moments.
And speed matters to your stomach: When you eat fast, your gut–brain “I’m full” signals (stretch + hormones like GLP-1, PYY, CCK) lag behind. The fast eater can overshoot before the brakes engage.
This Is Training
Yes, technically anyone could eat that fast. They prove it every year at the Coney Island hot dog contest. Some guy consumes a number of hot dogs that sounds like a typo, and commentators marvel at his “technique” — stomach stretching, reflex suppression, strategic breathing. But that’s the point. People have been training themselves to eat like my seatmate on the plane.
You can train a stomach to hold more. You can train yourself to override the “that’s enough” signal. And soon the brain thinks this is normal and the satiety threshold shifts upward.
People say, “Oh, the stomach shrinks back.” Maybe in size. But sensitivity? That’s another conversation.
The Real Difference
That’s why the phrase “she can eat whatever she wants” is so misleading.
I don’t eat whatever I want in unlimited quantities. I eat what I want until I’m done. That’s it. The real difference isn’t metabolism magic, nor am I more “virtuous.”
It’s related to pace, quantity and training. Specifically: Capacity training (tolerating more volume), Portion normalization (“this amount is a normal meal”), Signal timing (eat fast → signals arrive late) and the Reward/habit loops (finish everything, add cookie, repeat).
And Now the GLP-1 Era
Now, in the age of GLP-1 drugs and medically shrunken appetites, we’re suddenly pretending this is brand-new information — that capacity matters, that appetite signals can be overridden or chemically adjusted.
We’ve known this.
But when the Church of Dieting — aka WW — tells people “these 350 foods are free, eat as much as you want,” they are training for:
Giant-volume eating that’s socially and psychologically “approved”
The habit of needing a mountain of food to feel done
And, conveniently, more money spent buying huge quantities
Some people train for expansion. Some people train for sufficiency. But nobody — absolutely nobody — can eat everything they want in unlimited quantities and defy physics.
Even in business class.
This is why I created Wellville, a satirical look at how “wellness” obsession has led to letting the lunatics run the asylum.