Ep 88- The Root Cause of Food Addiction: Intermittent Reinforcement

October 16, 2025

Today I explain how one of the most powerful concepts in behavioral psychology, intermittent reinforcement, drives food addiction, binge eating, and cravings for processed foods.

You will learn…

• What intermittent reinforcement is and why it makes habits harder to quit

• How BF Skinner’s pigeon experiments explain obsessive food cravings

• The hidden role of flavor deception in processed foods and sugar

• Why binge eating feels rewarding in the moment but robs you of true pleasure

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, confident eaters, happy Thursday. I'm gonna explain a concept that is key essential to understanding any addiction, including food addiction. So I'm first gonna start by explaining this concept of intermittent reinforcement with a story to help you understand this deeper and really get in an aha, and then we'll apply it to food and binge eating even more specifically.

So I just got back from my morning walk and me and my dog, we saw a coyote, and this is not the first time we've seen a coyote on our walk. I live near some open space, and today we saw the coyote in a new location. So it really surprised me to say the least. It was only about 10 feet in front of us. So I spent the rest of the walk really hyper focusing on where this coyote might be, if it was going to attack us. Just really being on it, and when I see this coyote pretty frequently throughout the week, I am on high alert our entire walk.

Now, [00:01:00] intermittent reinforcement is when the reward shows up intermittently, when sometimes we get the reward and sometimes we don't. And it's confusing for our brain. Sometimes a positive situation happens and sometimes a negative situation happens. This causes our brain to hyperfocus on the situation to figure out, am I getting a survival benefit here, or is a survival threat happening?

So it becomes this really interesting, puzzling situation that your brain wants to figure out. So if we think about the situation with the coyote, you might think, well

there's no intermittent reinforcement at play here, but there is. Walking in a beautiful space is a survival benefit. It is something that is adding to my happiness. It is something where I'm moving my body causing more blood flow, having immunity benefits from that being out in nature. That is something that is good for my survival, and running Thai Coyote is a survival threat. It is something that threatens my ability to [00:02:00] live a happy, healthy life.

So my focus narrows in on this area where I start to not think about anything else. I forgot my to-do list for the day. I forgot what I'm doing next. All I could think about is this coyote going to appear or is it not going to appear to try to figure out which one will it be in this moment?

So the narrowing of attention in on a confusing situation is a beneficial thing for our brain to do. I want you to keep that in mind. Now, to back up a little bit, intermittent reinforcement is a concept from behavioral psychology, and it came from back in the 1940s with a psychologist named BF Skinner who did experiments with pigeons. He wanted to see what would happen. When pigeons were fed food in different frequencies, so he put them in a box with a lever, and at first, every time the pigeon pecked the lever, a food pellet came out. That is what's called continuous reinforcement. You do the action, you get a reward. It's very predictable. It's not very [00:03:00] interesting for our brain. It's good to know, but not very interesting.

But then Skinner decide to change the rules, where sometimes when the pigeon packed lever appellate came out, and sometimes it didn't became totally random, and guess what happened? The pigeons didn't slow down. They didn't decide this is pointless. They actually started pecking more, and not even just a little bit more.

Skinner observed some pigeons, pecking two to three times per second for hours on end, even when no food was coming out. One pigeon famously pecked 10,000 times before giving up another picked for six years. Yes, six years. That is half of a pigeon's lifespan. This is intermittent reinforcement at play.

When rewards come inconsistently, it actually makes the behavior stronger, more obsessive, and harder to quit. Now, why would a pigeon or any of us keep going when the reward isn't guaranteed? Because intermittent reinforcement creates uncertainty. The pigeon thinks maybe the next peck [00:04:00] will do it. Maybe you just have to try a little harder.

And food is essential for the pigeon survival. So it's not gonna give up if it's having something that it might need there. So this level of uncertainty drives three things. It drives increased engagement, meaning the pigeon participated with more effort than ever before. It caused resistance to extinction of the habit, meaning even when the reward is gone, the pigeons didn't stop.

It made it harder to change their habit, and it leads to obsession. Their attention narrows to the lever as if nothing else matters.

So going back to my coyote situation, let's say that I go a week without seeing the coyote, which has happened. I've gone a couple weeks without seeing it. I stop hyper focusing on where the coyote might be, and I can think about something else that might be important for my survival because my brain has seen that it's not a threat anymore, that there's no net positive benefit for me staying obsessed and searching this out because the threat has gone away.

So it frees up my brain space for something else. On the flip side, if it had been a week straight of every day when I go on this walking path, I see a coyote, I would probably walk somewhere different because my brain would learn that this is a clear survival threat, so it has clarity on the situation.

And when I would walk somewhere different, it wouldn't be hard. I wouldn't need weeks of journaling or emotional processing to do it because my brain is very clear and aware that this is a survival threat. It's not causing me any benefits. I don't wanna go up and snuggle with the coyote because I know it's a clear survival threat. the moment our brain has clarity on which is a positive situation, which is a negative situation, the moment our decision making becomes easy.

So addiction happens because we can't figure out if the thing is giving us more pleasure or more pain. Think about a toxic relationship, One day they're buying you gifts and telling you how much they love you, and another day they're yelling in your face, taking away that same [00:06:00] love.

Or maybe you've had the start of a relationship where sometimes you get a text from them and then sometimes they ghost you for days. Love is a vital resource for our survival, and so our brain is trying to figure out how can we get this love? This is confusing. What rules or new ideas might we be able to try to figure out? Is this gonna give me the reward or is this a survival threat of not giving me the love? The way people get out of abusive relationships is they start to see that the negative is more prominent than any positive benefits they get from them.

Gambling happens because we get a reward, and sometimes we get the threat of losing money. And when people become addicted, it's because they're anticipating a net survival benefit of gaining money. And the people who don't get addicted, like me, I went to Vegas a couple years ago and I gambled like $40 and I was like, ah, that's good. That's because I could see the truth and I knew about how casinos are a huge industry and that they are there to rob me of my money and statistically you will always lose. [00:07:00] So that information gave me enough clarity to see how this behavior, if I continued going on with it, would probably just cause me more losses than gains.

Any addictive substances promise one thing, but delivers another. Think about alcohol promises, fun, relaxation, energy, deep sleep. But what it really does is rob us of all of those things.

We say things we don't wanna say when we're drinking, do things we don't wanna do. It's taking away our integrity. We sleep horribly. We wake up exhausted the next day. It's hard to have fun the next day because we're hung over, so it robs us of fun, relaxation, energy, and deep sleep, even though in the moment that's what it promises.

So let's bring it back to food and binge eating. With binge eating, you might be already starting to see how the binge promises pleasure, but it fundamentally ruined our ability to experience pleasure after that. And more specifically, the new research I have been doing around processed flavored foods and sugar.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, [00:08:00] go listen to episode 85 and 86 because when we're eating flavored foods that have manipulated molecules, they're lying to our tongue about what's coming in. The same flavor cue is sometimes paired with a real nutrient source and sometimes with a counterfeit.

So for example, let's say you taste a strawberry. Sometimes when you eat a strawberry, you get real strawberry nutrients arriving in your gut, and other times you just taste strawberry flavor, such as in a protein bar or a shake. Yet no strawberry nutrients arrive. Our tongue perceives that these highly processed foods have a high nutrition amount based on the way that they taste, because our taste buds don't really know the difference between a real strawberry flavor and a fake strawberry flavor. Otherwise, we wouldn't eat it. So even though our taste buds think nutrition is coming in, none or very little nutrition arrives in the gut, creating intermittent reinforcement in a situation where we now need to [00:09:00] hyperfocus on where are our nutrients coming from.

Your brain has learned. Sometimes when I eat the food, I get nutrients and sometimes I don't. So I better keep going to figure out where my nutrients are coming from. I better keep eating in case I might get that pleasure of having nutrients arrive in my gut. A vital thing for our survival. And so when this intermittent reinforcement is at play with food? Increased engagement, you eat more quickly. And you eat larger amounts of it with more urgency, just like the pigeons did. You have a resistance to stopping the habit. Even when you want to quit, it feels impossible. You have a heightened obsession with food and eating, researching it all the time, looking at cookbooks, obsessing over recipes. Food is taking up way more mental space than it should. This is not a malfunction. I really want you to understand that this is a normal response to intermittent reinforcement. It is the brain survival logic. If something is important for our survival like [00:10:00] nutrients are, if we don't get enough nutrients and vitamins and minerals every day, we will die.

The safest move is to keep trying eating until we are sure what the rule is. If the rule is we eat a strawberry and every time we eat a strawberry, strawberry nutrients come in, it's clear on what that is. It's a positive survival benefit, so we don't have to hyperfocus it on it so much.

But if sometimes we taste strawberry flavor and no nutrition arrives, it has to keep eating in order to make sure it can see What is this food giving to me? Is it giving me a survival benefit or a survival threat?

When we start to see that binge eating and processed foods with these added flavorings are only a survival threat. It becomes easy to stop, and this is what I've been doing inside of my craving Reset Which, depending on when you were listening to this, it is almost over, but you can still join up until october 23rd when the craving reset ends.

But I have been retraining my own brain to see how [00:11:00] sugar and processed foods trick my taste buds into thinking nutrition is coming in, which drives us to think about it more, to have more cravings for it, to desire it more. But the second we start to shift our mindset in this very particular way, to see how these foods are lying to us, deceiving us. And creating intermittent reinforcement in our body, it becomes clear on what we need to do to stop. And this is what coaching does for people. We use psychology to help you understand the faulty beliefs that binge eating is Bringing you pleasure and help you understand the situation is only painful.

Binge eating never brings you true joy. I promise you. If you think it does, that is your brain lying to you. And once we can see that is what will free you from these habits.