PhronesisEating in its calibrated form is governed by interoceptive hunger signals: the person eats when genuinely hungry, pauses when satiated, and otherwise relates to food as nourishment rather than activity. Compulsive snacking — the pattern of reaching for food not from hunger but from the need to occupy the hands, manage low-grade boredom, or generate oral stimulation as a substitute for genuine engagement — is reconceptualised here within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W_ CS in the landscape of eating behaviour.
The ground state S^0 is Calibrated Hunger-Governed Eating: the capacity to eat in response to genuine hunger signals, cease upon satiation, and tolerate undistracted time without recruiting the mouth as an occupying device. Compulsive snacking is formally distinguished from emotional eating (Displacement Framework Paper \#692), which is the use of food to regulate specific, identifiable emotional states.
The present pattern is structurally different: it is not primarily about emotion but about occupation—the need to give the hands and mouth something to do, to fill low-stimulation time, to convert restlessness into a motorically grounded activity. The person who compulsively snacks is not eating because they are sad or anxious in the specific sense; they are eating because doing nothing with the body feels intolerable, and eating is the most available, socially invisible, sensorily satisfying form of occupation.
Three sustaining mechanisms are identified and formally characterised: (1) hand-to-mouth automaticity — the conditioned habit loop in which low stimulation, proximity to food, and low task-engagement reliably trigger the reach-and-eat sequence without deliberate hunger assessment; (2) oral-stimulation-as-presence — the use of chewing and swallowing as a form of sensory anchoring, creating the felt sense of being engaged when genuine engagement is absent; and (3) hunger-signal disruption through constant grazing — the progressive degradation of interoceptive hunger clarity caused by maintaining constant caloric input, which flattens the hunger–satiation cycle and removes the clean signal on which calibrated eating depends.
A formal dynamical model tracking the hunger signal H(t), snacking rate S(t), and interoceptive sensitivity I(t) demonstrates how chronic non-hunger snacking degrades the very physiological signal that would otherwise govern eating behaviour. Nine propositions, three definitions, and two remarks formalise the architecture of the wrong attractor and the return paths to S^0.