WILDFIT, explained
Most diets ask you to resist the food
WILDFIT asks why you want it
WILDFIT is Eric Edmeades' approach to food psychology. It works on the pull a food has on you, so over about ninety days there's less and less left to resist.
I'm a certified WILDFIT coach. This page is my plain account of how it works, what it asks of you, and how it stacks up against the diets you've probably tried.
- Certified WILDFIT coach
- WILDERBODY, by Eric Edmeades
- No calorie counting
- Coached live in a small group
- About 90 days
- Two weeks of psychology first
- One food change at a time
- Nothing to count
Sound familiar?
You know what to eat
You just keep wanting the other thing
- You finish a proper dinner, and twenty minutes later you're standing at the cupboard.
- You hold out all week. On Friday night the deal you made with yourself on Monday falls apart.
- You've heard yourself say "I've been good, I've earned this" and you knew exactly how it would end.
- At four in the afternoon you're flat, and something sweet is the only thing that sounds good.
- You've lost the weight before. Each time it came back, the cravings came back with it.
- A birthday, a holiday or a long work lunch, and you're starting over on Monday again.
What it is
What WILDFIT actually is
and what it isn't
WILDFIT is the company Eric Edmeades founded to teach food psychology. He built it after fixing his own health through food, and after years studying how people ate before supermarkets existed, including time living alongside hunter-gatherers in Africa.
The program WILDFIT runs today is called WILDERBODY. It's the third version of what used to be the WILDFIT 90-Day Challenge, with the same principles and a better way of delivering them. It opens with the Food Freedom Challenge, two weeks of psychology in which almost nothing on your plate changes.
Eric's case against dieting is that diets are wrong twice. They're wrong for your mind, because resisting a food you still want runs on willpower and willpower runs out. And they're wrong for your body, because they ignore how humans evolved to eat. WILDFIT works on both.
The difference
What if you simply stopped wanting it?
Every diet you've tried works on behaviour. Eat this, skip that, eat inside these hours, hit these numbers. Your conscious mind can keep that up for a while, but the part of you that reaches for the biscuit tin hasn't changed, and sooner or later it wins. WILDFIT goes after that part. Once a food loses its pull, you have nothing to resist and you don't need a rule about it.
Diets change what you allow yourself to eat. WILDFIT changes what you want to eat.
The tools
Some tools you'll use every day
To live in Food Freedom
WILDFIT gives names to things you've felt for years. Once you can name something, you start catching it while it happens.
- Surrender
- Struggle
- Deprivation
- Ambivalence
- Disinterest
- Food Freedom
Eric Edmeades' scale for the pull a food has on you, from giving in without a fight up to Food Freedom, where the program aims.
Food Freedom
Being able to choose what you eat and what you don't, without needing willpower. It doesn't mean eating whatever you like. The food is still there. It has stopped pulling.
The Food Dialogue
The argument in your head before you eat. The Food Angel is thinking about tomorrow, the Food Devil about right now. You aren't trying to make the Angel win. You're trying to get the two of them to agree.
The Six Hungers
Nutritional Hunger, Thirst, Low Blood Sugar Hunger, Variety Hunger, Empty Stomach Hunger and Emotional Hunger. Only the first is hunger in the usual sense. A craving is usually a few of the others voting together.
The Food Timeline
Eating starts well before the first bite and ends hours after the last. Most of the good feeling arrives the moment you give yourself permission, before you've tasted anything.
Craving Escape Velocity
The scale a food moves along, from giving in without a fight to not wanting it at all. Willpower can't push a food up the scale. Foods climb it as the program does its work.
Reward Repatterning
Your brain learned to reach for food when you're stressed, bored or low. You stop rewarding those states with food, and start rewarding the ones you'd like more of.
- Nutritional Hunger
- Thirst
- Low Blood Sugar Hunger
- Variety Hunger
- Empty Stomach Hunger
- Emotional Hunger
Only one of them is about needing food.
The Six Hungers, from Eric Edmeades’ WILDFIT
How it works
Thirteen weeks, psychology first
WILDERBODY doesn't hand you a list of banned foods on day one. It starts with how you think about food. The changes on your plate come later, in stages, once the psychology has already done some of the work.
Two videos a week
Eric Edmeades teaches the program himself, in two new videos a week for thirteen weeks.
Psychology before food
The first two weeks are the Food Freedom Challenge. You learn the tools above and watch your own eating with them, while your plate barely changes.
Changes in stages
After that, the program asks for changes one stage at a time, each small enough to manage. By the time you reach one, the psychology has usually loosened its grip more than you expected.
A live call every week
Each week there's a live coaching call to work through what came up, and a workbook to track what's changing.
You decide what stays
By the end you know what each food does to you, and you choose what stays in your life.
The comparison
How WILDFIT compares
to what you've probably tried
Every approach below gets something right. What matters is what happens when you stop.
Keto
- Where it works
- Fast early results. Moving your metabolism off sugar can change your energy and weight within weeks.
- Why it stalls
- Keto is a restriction protocol. It tells your body which fuel to use, but it does nothing about why you reach for bread, sugar or comfort food in the first place. Most people keep it up for months, not years, and when they stop the cravings are exactly where they left them.
- WILDFIT's take
- WILDFIT's Spring overlaps with what keto does biologically. The difference is that it comes after weeks of psychology, lasts a season instead of forever, and ends with reintroduction. You know why the shift matters, which is why it tends to stick.
Intermittent fasting
- Where it works
- It simplifies things. Fewer meals means fewer decisions, and giving your digestion regular breaks has real metabolic benefits.
- Why it stalls
- Fasting controls when you eat, not what you eat or why. If your eight-hour window fills up with the same emotional and habitual eating, the underlying problem hasn't moved. It can also hide disordered eating behind a framework that sounds disciplined.
- WILDFIT's take
- WILDFIT works on your relationship with food rather than the schedule around it. Once the drivers shift, meal timing becomes a tool you choose to use instead of a rule you lean on.
Whole30
- Where it works
- A good elimination reset. Thirty days of clean eating teaches you what specific foods do to your body, and plenty of people find sensitivities they never knew about.
- Why it stalls
- Thirty days is long enough to notice a difference, and too short to change what you want. Nobody coaches you through reintroduction, so most people drift back to old patterns within weeks of finishing.
- WILDFIT's take
- WILDERBODY runs for about ninety days. The psychology starts two weeks before any food changes, and reintroduction is part of the program instead of something you're left to work out alone.
Calorie counting and macros
- Where it works
- It shows you what you're eating. If you've never paid attention, tracking can be a real eye-opener, and it gives structure where there was none.
- Why it stalls
- It turns food into maths. Over time the numbers can become an obsession, and they override your own hunger and fullness signals. When you stop tracking, you have no internal compass to go by.
- WILDFIT's take
- WILDFIT works with your hunger instead of overriding it. The Six Hungers teach you to tell real hunger apart from thirst, a blood sugar dip, boredom or a bad day, so you can trust your own signals again.
Intuitive eating
- Where it works
- A genuinely good philosophy. It cuts food shame, rejects diet culture and builds trust in your body. After years of restrictive dieting it can be very healing.
- Why it stalls
- If years of processed food, emotional eating and blood sugar swings have scrambled your hunger signals, "trust your body" can walk you straight back into the same patterns. The intuition is there, but the signals it reads are compromised.
- WILDFIT's take
- WILDFIT resets the signals first. Once cravings stop hijacking them, intuitive eating stops being a philosophy you try to follow and becomes the way you eat anyway.
None of these are wrong. They all work on the rules, and the rules only hold for as long as you hold them.
Your coach
I never knew life could feel like this
- Certified WILDFIT® Coach
- Mindvalley Holobody Coach
- Mindvalley 10X Fitness Coach
- Holohabits Practitioner
- Paradigm X Speaker Finalist
Years ago I went low-carb, and I didn't keep quiet about it. I told people, and showed them my new lunches. It worked for a while. Then I was eating all of it again, and explaining to each of those people why.
WILDFIT was the first thing that showed me why some habits are so hard to change. The pull toward a food is subconscious, built up over years, and it doesn't respond to limits or willpower. Once I worked on the pull instead of the behaviour, my choices changed without a fight.
I trained as a WILDFIT coach to understand why that worked. Now I run WILDERBODY inside my Health Blueprint Foundation, with live coaching around it, because the weeks that ask the most of you go better with someone in them with you.
Doing it with me
The WILDERBODY Experience
with support every step of the way
You can do WILDERBODY on your own, straight from WILDFIT, and plenty of people do. Doing it with me, you have a coach who knows your history from the intake call, reads what you write each week and answers with advice for your life. Around the program I do the mindset and identity work that keeps the changes in place once the ninety days are up. And I'm on the call in the hard weeks, when giving up starts to sound reasonable.
Small group · 14 weeks
Health Blueprint Foundation
WILDERBODY with a weekly live call with me, feedback between calls, and a cohort of up to six people going through it at the same time as you.
Explore the Foundation programPrivate · 14 weeks
Foundation program, 1:1
The same fourteen weeks with every session private. For when you need your own schedule, or complete confidentiality.
Book a Discovery Call
Is it for you?
WILDFIT might be for you
if you recognise yourself here
- You've tried at least one of the approaches above, and the results didn't last.
- You're tired of the cycle of restriction, willpower and starting again.
- You don't need more information. You already know what you should eat.
- You'd like to think about food a lot less than you do.
- You want to know why you eat the way you do, not only what to change.
This is not for you if…
- You want a quick fix or a short burst of weight loss.
- You're looking for a meal plan or a set of food rules.
- You're not open to looking at the psychology behind your eating.
Ready to stop fighting food?
The Health Blueprint Foundation is how I run WILDERBODY: fourteen weeks, a small group, and me on every call. Cohorts run every few months, and each one starts with a free call about where you are and whether this is the right next step.
Explore the Foundation program