You Were Starving Yourself When You Should Have Been Eating More
The science just proved what we already knew: restriction was never the answer.
Something happened to me last week that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
I was working on something new. Something I’ve been building quietly for a while now. And I hit a moment where I just sat back and thought, this is going to change things for a lot of people.
I’m not ready to tell you what it is yet. But I wanted you to hear it from me first: something’s coming in the next couple of weeks. And if you’ve been following along with what we do here, I think you’re going to be fired up about it.
More on that soon. Stay close.
But today, I want to talk about something that landed on my desk this week that made me genuinely angry. Not at you. At the system that’s been lying to you.
“Eat less” was always the wrong instruction.
A 2026 reanalysis of a major NIH clinical trial just dropped, and the findings are so damning to the diet industry that I’m surprised it’s not bigger news.
Here’s the headline: people who ate whole, unprocessed foods consumed 57% more food by weight than people eating ultra-processed food. More food. Heavier plates. Bigger portions.
And they took in roughly 330 fewer calories per day.
Read that again. They ate more and consumed less.
If you’ve spent the last ten years white-knuckling your way through tiny portioned meals, measuring rice in a cup, and feeling like a failure because you were still hungry after dinner, this is the study that explains why.
You weren’t eating too much. You were eating the wrong things. And worse, you were being told that feeling hungry was the price of discipline.
It wasn’t discipline. It was deprivation dressed up as a plan.
Your body isn’t stupid. It was being tricked.
Here’s what the researchers found, and I want to break this down because it matters.
When you eat real food, fruits, vegetables, unprocessed meats, whole grains, your body does something remarkable. It actually regulates itself. The researchers called it “micronutrient deleveraging,” which is a fancy way of saying your body balances calorie intake against nutrient intake automatically.
Think of it like a thermostat. (Sound familiar?)
When your food is packed with real nutrients, your body gets the signal: we’re good, we got what we needed. The hunger quiets down. The cravings settle. You stop eating because you’re genuinely satisfied, not because you ran out of willpower at 8 PM.
But when you eat ultra-processed food, which makes up 57% of total daily calories for the average adult in the US and UK, your body never gets that signal. The calories go in, but the nutrients don’t. So your brain keeps the hunger dial turned up, keeps sending the signal to eat more, because it’s still waiting for the nutrition that never arrives.
That’s the invisible hand. That’s what’s been pushing you toward the pantry at night. Not weakness. Not a broken character. Your brain, doing exactly what it’s designed to do, searching for nutrients it never received.
The volume changes everything.
Here’s the part that should make you furious at every diet plan that ever put you on a 1,200-calorie meal plan.
The unprocessed food group ate 57% more food by weight. Their plates were fuller. They chewed more. They felt physically full. And they also got 36% more micronutrients than the ultra-processed group.
More food. More nutrients. Fewer calories. Less hunger.
Meanwhile, the diet industry had you counting almonds and feeling guilty about a banana.
This is what I mean when I say the system is broken. The advice was never about your health. It was about control. About making you believe that smaller plates and more suffering equaled progress. And when it didn’t work, they told you the problem was you.
It was never you.
So what does this actually mean for us?
I’m not here to hand you a meal plan. That’s hardware talk, and we deal in software here. But I do want you to sit with what this research is really saying, because it lines up perfectly with what we teach.
When you stop fighting your body and start giving it what it actually needs, the war starts to end. The food noise gets quieter. You eat until you’re satisfied—genuinely satisfied, and you move on with your day.
That’s not a diet. That’s the quiet mind.
The researchers confirmed what we’ve been saying all along: the problem was never that you ate too much. The problem was that ultra-processed food hijacked your brain’s ability to know when enough was enough. Your hunger signals weren’t broken. They were being overridden.
We are scientists, not judges. And the data just landed in our favor.
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The identity piece nobody’s talking about.
Here’s where this gets deeper than nutrition science.
Most people will read this study and think, great, I’ll eat more whole foods. And that’s fine. But it misses the real shift.
Because you’ve probably tried eating “healthier” before. You’ve done the produce haul. You’ve meal prepped on Sunday. And by Wednesday, you were back in the drive-through feeling like a fraud.
The food wasn’t the problem. The identity was.
If your internal thermostat is still set to “person who struggles with food,” then all the whole foods in the world won’t override that setting. You’ll start strong, the old identity will pull you back, and the slingshot will snap.
But if you start seeing yourself as someone whose body knows what it needs—someone who trusts the process instead of fighting it, then choosing real food stops being an act of discipline. It becomes an act of alignment.
You don’t eat whole foods because you’re “being good.” You eat them because that’s who you are now.
That’s the shift. And no study can give you that. Only you can.
This week, I want you to notice one thing: the next time you eat something real, a piece of fruit, a home-cooked meal, actual food that came from the ground or walked on it, pay attention to how your body responds. Not your brain. Your body. Notice the quiet that follows. The absence of the negotiation.
That silence? That’s what we’re building toward. And it’s closer than you think.
Talk soon,
Rick
If this landed for you, share it with someone who needs to hear that they were never the problem. And if you’re not subscribed yet, this is the letter that’s helping people over 40 escape the diet trap for good.