“A true work-in-progress.” —Me
“[Currently] the book is trying to be three things: a practical guide for color 1 people, a critique of dietary mentalization, and a personal essay about your own body. [This could be] a really good niche resource or something genuinely important.” —Claude
“A book for those who are tired of optimizing, tired of being told they’re doing it wrong, and suspicious of anything that promises ease.” —ChatGPT
“Yay you’re writing a book!!!” —Kiryll
“Mommy get off the computer” —Liam
First of all: IN PROGRESS. I am writing this on the internet because keeping secret files would mean they get made but never finished. This project is important to me; it lives on its own domain so that I am constantly anxious to make it more real. The last time I updated the contents of this site was March 7, 2026. If you’re here WAY after that date and are wondering what’s up, why is section X there but sounds like I wandered off to get coffee and never came back right in the middle of an anecdote? Yeah, that happens. Feel free to send me an email. Nudges help me keep going.
Now, onto the actual contents of this single page site:
Your Determination/Digestion is the way your brain is best nourished so your vehicle can function the way it’s designed to. In other words, you are what you eat.
This is not a diet!! 1 It is not a rulebook of what to do to make your body look the way you think you want it to. That said, and I think this should be obvious, but: I do not intend to tell anyone what and how they should eat — quite the opposite.
If at times (for example, when reading one isolated paragraph whilst ignorant of everything that came before) it seems like this is exactly why I am doing, please remember that:
As always with these things, please take only what you need, and ignore the rest. This is not medical advice, I am not a (mental) health professional, nor am I a licensed Human Design practitioner through any official Human Design institution. All inaccuracies, wishful and biased thinking, narrativization, and bad research are mine!! No AI was harmed in the development of this work.
I am writing this for myself much more than anyone else. Whatever I have seen, experienced, or “found out” by now, I am not certain about, no matter how definitively the words might make their way through the oft-distorted filter of my mind initially. Going through this process, however, clarifies what I already know (but often don’t know yet that I already know), and metabolizes it so it can settle in my body and mutate subconscious patterns. One of the mind fucks of Human Design is “correctness”, which can never be gauged by any metric we typically use to evaluate the fruits of our efforts (yet we cannot stop our minds from trying anyway) but only ever by whether we are operating through the signature of our Type. I am a Generator and I am satisfied, yes, but — I am not done here, wherever this project is currently, whether it’s been packaged like a finished work, or whether it’s still in the earliest stages of Difficulty at the Beginning.
Caveat: I do believe, however, that operating within specific limitations for a limited time can support your differentiation. This must be approached with the well-calibrated expectations and for the right reasons, though, otherwise it’s a vast highway to the Land Of -ias, that is, eating disorders ↩︎
If you want to print this out to read it without getting distracted by all the other things you could be doing on your shiny mobile device, you can just go ahead and do that. BUT you can also buy (yay spending money! yes consumption!) a PDF version of this book made specifically for printing, by which means you are also conveniently showing me you appreciate what I am doing here and encouraging me to continue. You’ll be notified about all future versions and be able to download them at no extra cost. At some point, those new versions will be much prettier, because they will have been properly designed and typeset by me personally “Export as PDF”. This will happen when I feel this document is exhaustive enough to warrant such treatment. If you prefer an e-reader version, that will be available too when the time is right, also included with the updates! Buy the PDF for €5 here :)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
In the Human Design community, Appetite is famously “the hardest” Determination that the planets could possibly have bestowed upon anyone. When I was new-ish to the Facebook discussion groups on this and other topics, the Appetite people would complain that they have it worst, they can’t eat anything normal, and I was absolutely one of them. “I’d love to trade with you haha” they/we’d say to people with Direct Light who were struggling with their determination FOR NO REASON AT ALL, seeing as they could everything they wanted, no??
Concluding “I have this Digestion, thus I must do my best to abide by its rules” is missing the point of this entirely.
A more freeing way of thinking here would sound more along the lines of “I have this Digestion, thus the way I have secretly always wanted to eat is, in fact, correct for me and I do not need to police the way I am eating, at all.”1
You do not have to eat meals of one or two carrots, then a tomato, then a boiled egg (white first!), and one spoon of honey. (If this is the way you like to eat, though, obviously don’t let me stop you?!). You do not have to stop eating your favorite meals.
I have tried virtually every way of going about this over the past seven years. I’ve brute-forced OTAAT (one thing at a time), I’ve repeated meals daily for months on end, I’ve adhered to both strict vegan and carnivore diets, I’ve seen the difference that various types of movement and inertia make in my perception of my appetite, digestion, and the resulting energy my body gains from what it’s fed, or not. I have been writing about Human Design since 2021, and I’ve done my share of reading (and watching of YT videos) about current and not so current research in the field of nutrition. I’ve been a hardcore “follower” (though it is pretty ironic and reductive to call it that) of Human Design since 2018.
I’m neither a scientist nor a Human Design professional. Really, I am just some person with this Determination and an open Spleen, Head, and Ajna, and a split bridge in Gate 46 — meaning, I am obsessed with observing the way my body responds to every input it is fed. This could speak to how much granular experience I have with all this — it could also speak to how wrapped up I am in it that I cannot see the forest for the trees. That’s why I’m doing my best to frame this not as “HOW TO APPETITE” but more as “When I did x here, y happened”. But correlation is obviously not causation, so the conclusions I draw from what I have observed may be completely off here and there, at least for some percentage of Color 1 digestees — AND, as always, people function so wildly differently at times, come from such different circumstances, it can be truly flabbergasting. So, of course, ALWAYS keep in mind, what has “worked” 2 for me may not work for you at all. I will try to point this out wherever I can in the following. It’s probably to be expected that I will fail to do so here and there, though, so please bear with me, at least until a version of this piece is finished that I believe I can tentatively call done (for now).
It is exceedingly easy to grow up with disordered eating in this day and age, no matter one’s digestion or aura type or degree of openness, or body shape or size, gender, race, or sexual orientation. The messaging we receive from society and, to varying degrees, from caregivers growing up is stark and unavoidable. We are fish swimming in the water of the words “you must be this way, and to be this way, you must do this and not that,” often spoken by people we most literally look up to.
As we will discuss much more thoroughly later on, though, Color One individuals are, in my estimation, extremely prone to developing eating disorders early in life. I believe that this happens because we are malnourished more or less from the moment we exit the womb. Autonomy is the most important factor in an Appetite way of eating, and, as a newborn (unless we have extremely empathetic caregivers with lots of nervous system bandwidth for listening to our every cue, which is exceedingly rare) we have none of it. By the time we’ve hopefully been able to develop some as a toddler, we’ve basically already been conditioned out of knowing what we need and when. Barring circumstances that are basically impossible in this day and age, in which our parents or other caregivers make room for our needs in such a way that we re-learn our appetite and hunger cues in time for puberty — when we are finally truly independent adults with the freedom to choose our own food and when we take it in, we’re pretty much fucked. We make decisions around what and when to eat according either to what we learned from caregivers and society growing up, or by rejecting those very ways of being, which then becomes its own conundrum.
At some point way before this pseudo-autonomy is reached, however, we will register that something is massively wrong, and we will, most likely, project this wrongness onto our own bodies.
It is not our fault. It’s not anyone else’s fault, either, though it can feel good for a while to cast blame on parents or society or whatever. Nothing at all is to blame, and that realization can hurt more than anything else. But on the other side is autonomy. You are your body, and your body will fight for its right to be itself. It always has, you just haven’t been able to see it yet.
I cannot speak to the experience of people with an undefined sacral. Mine is defined. My definitions of satiety and satisfaction around food and taking in information are fundamentally different than yours.
I’m still in the early stages of finding out how deep this difference truly goes when it comes to Determination, so please bear with me. I’m not sure yet how much of my understanding of Appetite needs to be overhauled entirely or just tweaked to accommodate those with a different experience of eating, and this will certainly change many times over the course of writing this book.
Resistance at the beginning is normal, because conditioning. We are nearly always conditioned to resist, neglect, shame and disavow that which we truly are; Openness and society are just magic that way. If however with some time and reflection a Digestion type still feels unnatural AND your birth time isn’t ironclad, it’s worth checking out if your chart is actually correct. ↩︎
we still need to have a conversation about what “working” or “functioning” even means though ↩︎
If I could impress upon anyone a sort of first commandment on how to eat like yourself — not like the health influencers or your mom or some dude at work tell you you should — it is that whatever you take in must be your choice to take in. Whatever you eat, you are doing so because you want to eat it.
I’ll go into more detail around the logistics of this in the AUTONOMY section, but for now this is the most important thing: you have an Appetite, and if you’re here, there’s a good chance you’ve already established that you are Feeling The CallTM to live as yourself, and as such, I’m sorry (?), but you are now required by the laws of nature to find it, listen to it, and act upon it.1
Finding out what The Appetite is may be one of the most important things you can learn about yourself. When you can actively differentiate between what you have an Appetite for vs. what you “think could be good” or what you feel somehow obligated to do or take in, there is a kind of calm or excitement that settles into your whole being. 2 I can’t say life becomes easier with a straight face here, but it absolutely becomes simpler and, by extension, more alive.
“One thing” is whatever it means to your Appetite at any given moment. Do not waste your time and energy thinking about whether a fried egg with butter and salt is one, two, or three things. If you want a fried egg with butter and salt and this is what satisfies you (or feels successful, peaceful, or surprising) this is what one thing is.
Be kind to yourself. Conditioning around food goes unfathomably deep. Even telling yourself to “listen to your appetite” can feel like an impossible task, and another rule. You are doing fine, whatever is going on. Just take notice of what’s happening, and breathe.
Appetite always originates with a physical need. The system is depleted in some way and, like water moving toward equilibrium, flows to the lowest point.3
For most of my life as a semi-conscious being, I wrestled with a feeling somewhat like nausea, but not entirely the same. It was a very unpleasant sensation, like a toy stuffed with garbage, and it seemed to persist whether I was hungry or full.
The first time I noticed the feeling taking a leave of absence was when I was eighteen. I had quit school some ten months earlier and, I guess for the first time ever, my nervous system had calmed down just enough for me to register that I was going to go insane if I couldn’t get this feeling to leave just once.
Back then, I had no idea that anything I was eating, or the way I was taking it in, might have something to do with The Feeling. I had grown up in a family of health nuts. I ate next to no processed foods or sugar. To me, it was obvious that food itself was the problem and the amount of it I was taking in. Seeing as I had often tried very hard (and failed, just as hard) at “just eating less,” the only thing left to try was to.. stop eating.
My fast was planned, prepared for, and executed according to an online practitioner’s guidance. I emptied my bowels several days before ceasing solid food, ate only psyllium husk in apple juice for fiber to cleanse the gut for two days, then subsisted on sauerkraut juice and beet juice for the next five days. When both of these began to taste nauseatingly sweet, I switched to plain herbal tea and water.
I remember being both jubilant and sad about the realization that I “couldn’t even drink juice” — one part of my brain relished requiring nothing but water, feeling morally and generally superior to all the mortals around me, poisoning their bodies and minds, not a care in the world. A different part, the one I displayed on the outside, was worried, alarmed even. The full, nauseating, trash sensation was gone, but seeing how exactly I had gotten it to leave was perhaps more unsettling than The Feeling itself having been there since I could remember.
Fasting was wonderful and miserable. I longed for everything. I spent my time looking at pictures of food, dreaming up recipes, and cooking for my friends and family, watching them hungrily, probably making them extremely uneasy in the process. I told them I was fine making stuff for them, that it calmed me or some shit like that. That I liked watching them eat. I don’t know. It was bullshit.
I remember wanting steak — like, really, really badly. Like nothing else in the world. This was notable, though I brushed it aside quickly at the time, because up till then, I hadn’t been particularly keen on meat before, ever. I was a carb junkie all the way. Gimme pasta and bread and rice over anything else.
Anyway.
I fasted for thirty days. My family told me I looked “so good,” and how strong they thought I was for doing this. I inhaled their compliments for warmth. It was May and the air was warm. I was wearing a heavy wool sweater and windbreaker, yet I felt a chill in my bones that I hadn’t experienced even once throughout every Canadian winter growing up.
When the month I had planned to Not Eat was up, I broke my fast with a quarter of an apple. My mom had warned me repeatedly to take my time, savor the food, eat only one bite. I remember trying very hard, but finding I couldn’t. Otherwise, the time it took to acclimate to eating is a black hole in my memory. By the third day or so I was shoveling heavily marinated salads like no tomorrow — and, predictably, feeling The Feeling again. I yearned to go back to Emptiness.
If you’re new or just not that deep into Human Design, you may not know about one of the most interesting aspects of it. Genetic continuity is a real Thing. It’s probably so fascinating to me because it is both so subtle and on-the-nose about how Everything Is Fucking Connected. Basically, genetic continuity tells is that every line, color, and tone with the same number are, well, related. They share identifying traits.
But first let me tell you about one of the most frustrating experiences as a Color One, which you have probably witnessed happening if you have ever had small children, because of course this is a universally human experience, especially for underdeveloped brains, not necessarily specific to only Color One people (because what are Color One people if not underdeveloped digestion types lol).
So, I am going about my day, and someone says, hey, let’s get pizza later? I respond, sure! and spend the next couple of hours with my brain kind of in food foreplay mode. I’m not hungry yet, but as the day wanes, my stomach starts grumbling. At some point, I’m not just ok to eat, I Am Ready, Let’s Fucking Go, Now. We arrive at the pizza place. I know exactly what I want because I’ve been fantasizing about it all day — plain Margherita, with a soft pillowy crust and lots of cheese. We place our order and wait, excited, ravenous. The pizza arrives. It is exactly what I ordered, but not what I expected. The pizza place for some crappy (economic, ugh) reason skimped on the cheese and absolutely over-baked the crust. A lump forms in my throat. I hate this. I don’t want this soggy crusty brick of dough with sauce on it. I am also so hungry that my brain doesn’t work and I can’t regulate my facial expression into something polite enough to request the pizza I actually wanted? Also are they even, like, skilled enough to do what I actually came here for? What’s the use in asking for what I wanted? I should just eat this and be happy with what I got, but I feel so nauseous from the weight of unmet expectations and also hunger and blue-balled salivary glands. I’m angry at this restaurant and also myself for thinking I would get a perfectly pillowy crust.
Anyway. This sucks and I sulk for a little bit and the mood is definitely ruined.
There’s a passage in one Ra lecture or another in which he repeatedly hammers home, “one! thing! after! another!” He quite explicitly makes this sound like “one thing” is — always, absolutely — a piece of food that has not been transformed, prepared, or combined with anything else.
The thing one must understand about how Ra talks about... everything but himself and the information given to him directly by the Voice (which isn’t as much as we often think!), though, is that he is inferring. He doesn’t actually know what he is talking about. (He tells us this, often, that he never really knows what he’ll say before he does.) He is saying things as they arrive. And we take them as gospel — he is The Messenger, after all. And it’s understandable we’d take them that way, though he also repeatedly said, “don’t listen to me, see for yourself.”
Here’s what I have seen: the ideal of “one thing after another” is just that. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen or that when it does, it’s forced or wrong — no. Just that holding oneself to Eating One Thing After Another (Consecutive or Alternating!) as a rule can be almost as — if not more — cruel than whatever gospel your mind previously viewed as necessary and true.
One thing is whatever your brain currently views as one thing. For me, one thing has been: sauerkraut with bacon and onions and spices and salt and butter. It’s been ground beef cooked in broth and absolutely nothing else added. It’s been a chunk of butter or four apples or a burrito with only my favorite fillings. It’s been pre-made burger patties, cooked rare with a dark brown crust and nothing else. Currently, though, I like the same burger patties with cream cheese, cilantro, and sriracha.
As a Generator, everything I do is pretty much either in pursuit of satisfaction, or it is the result when I am not forcing myself to do or eat things that don’t smell right. I am mostly a self-directed, self-sustaining being. I respond to my environment, I do things, I use up my energy. I feel an Appetite or a hunger, I eat things, I am satisfied.
When I typed “satiating/satisfying” in a section above, I thought, well, and non-sacral types will feel their signatures when eating correctly, then, by extension, yes?
... I don’t know if it works that way. As far as I know, non-sacral signatures are experienced in relationship with others. On their own, a Projector does not experience success. On their own, a Manifestor has no impact, no peace. On their own, a Reflector isn’t surprised.
So, when it comes to taking things in, something that does not automatically involve The Other, I’m somewhat at a loss about what taking in sustenance truly does for the non-sacral being.
At this time, I literally don’t have the information. I’ll need to talk to some non-sacral humans who have seriously experimented with this way of eating.
I feel like this is a great place to point out clumsily that Appetite and Wanting are not the same, and Wanting can often be detrimental to your own and others’ wellbeing. We will get into the specifics and the differences between true Appetite and other forms of Need, eating for pleasure or not, etc. in time. ↩︎
Which is pretty interesting given that Touch, Calm or Nervous, are the Determinations opposite Appetite ↩︎
In case this immediately comes to mind: Yes, cravings are appetites. Whether they are productive or not is a matter of discernment, which requires awareness, which needs to be developed, which we’ll get into. ↩︎
[ not sure where this goes] ... This means that family dinners are, excuse the horrible pun, pretty much off the table — unless you are making them yourself, the way you want them. If you for some reason regularly frequent restaurants that only serve tasting menus, it’s probably a good idea to re-think that lifestyle choice for you, or make sure your expectations around what food they’re setting in front of you align with reality.
The evangelists will say, NO, the HORROR, a processed food? well, to learn about your appetite, your body must be nourished, and sometimes that means force-feeding it by the most humane means possible. for your body to work as it’s meant, it must be strong, and to be strong, it must be fed, and to be fed adequately, it really must know what it needs, but after years of living in... society, it most likely does not know that, and until it does, sometimes one must use the tools of the enemy for one’s own gain. that means drinking a protein shake here and there when you have no specific appetite for anything else. the danger here is displacement. do not do this if you are addicted to sweet foods. get that in check first - ditch everything sweet for a week (even sweeteners), then try a piece of fruit, and see how you feel. if you are observing that you would at some point basically just live off protein shakes, no, bad sign, back off. if for a couple of days you are intensely focused and simply don’t have the TIME and energy for anything else, have at it, but have the decency to put some frozen berries in your liquid meal, eh? though of course this is a grey zone for many appetite people too. mixing dairy and plants can feel this or that way to me, too. sometimes i want it that way, sometimes i don’t.
Certain foods or food groups grow your appetite for them at the expense of others.
Once, my son and I kept snails as pets/houseplants. When you learn about keeping these creatures alive in an indoor environment, one of the big things most experienced snail owners will impress upon you is to NOT FEED THEM CUCUMBER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Lettuce can be fed occasionally, but is almost as bad as cucumber.
Why??? Snails snack on all kinds of veggies and plant matter, no? Well, with cucumbers it is like cocaine to snails, the internet knows. Snails find cucumber so yummy that eating anything else no longer computes. But this is a trap for the poor snail, because, idk if you knew, but they cannot put on fat, and cucumbers contain almost nothing that nourishes them. So eating cucumber makes them 1. addicted to cucumber and 2. thus not want to eat anything else, so, logically 3. get no nourishment and, in the end, tragically, 4. die from malnourishment.
It is not quite so extreme with humans :) The most obvious difference is that we can put on fat as storage for bad times, which basically happens when our bodies are a) not burning any meaningful calories above what they need to stay alive, aka when we are not really doing much other than sitting or laying around (but there are exceptions) and b) when we are consistently, over a period of several months, taking in a quality of food that is so sparse in nutrients that our bodies have no other choice but to deduce that we are in famine mode and must save all the energy we can extract from the little nourishment we are getting.
This is, to me, the slippery slope to rule them all. It is so easy to confuse obsessive compulsions around YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT with the notion of ”just listening to my body.” It is so easy to make limitations intended as guardrails into literal cages, and once that has happened, it is insanely difficult to allow the bars to break.
Esther is a 3/6 Generator on the Cross of Laws. She lives with her son, her partner, and her father in a small town in Germany. You can view her design here.