I was reading the book Intuitive Eating last night. This should be required reading for all of us on this blog. I only read one chapter last night - but SO much of it struck home. A lot of it was about how and why dieting doesn't really work - and how many of us who are chronic dieters, diet even when we don't mean to. I kept finding passages that I wanted to quote on this blog - until I realized that I would basically be typing the whole book over.
Supposedly what this book helps to do is re-set our thinking, pay more attention to the signals our bodies give and respond to the needs and wants of our bodies - rather than what we THINK we should need or want.
The chapter last night addressed a lot of what we fear will happen if we give up "dieting." 1. I will be out of control and eat everything in sight. 2. I will gain back every pound I ever lost. 3. I will never make healthy choices. etc. It also talked about our knee jerk responses. Like in MY case - I was reading this thinking "I will do the Ultra-metabolism diet right after New Years and then switch to intuitive eating at that point." I turned the page and there was a section about "last chance dieting." Chronic dieters always want to try one more diet before they give it up for intuitive eating.
I think intuitive eating is harder for me because there is no one telling me what to do. I want a schedule and rules to follow - but this book says that is precisely what needs to be fixed. I have to do what MY body needs and not what someone else (who has never met me) says that my body SHOULD be doing.
Anyway - I am eager to see how this all plays out. I have been much better about not eating something just because it is there. On Christmas (before I ate all the candy that night) I wasn't feeling like I wanted to eat candy. I was fine with the one Hershey's kiss that I had.
So my weight was 228.6 today. Oh - another thing I am not supposed to be doing - weighing myself everyday. I know that I didn't lose 1.4 pounds overnight. I lost water (at best). My calories were slightly lower yesterday - but not 750 calories lower (I don't think anyway...). I weigh myself mostly for the statistics of it. I like charts.
2 comments:
I read (most of) "The Hacker's Diet" online and this is most of what he was saying -- though he emphasized that you have to burn more than you eat if you want to lose weight (which is true -- though eating too little, as we know, means you can end up burning less, too, so it's a fine line). But he said some people are born with an "eat watch" that works fine all their lives, and it tells them when it's time to eat and when it's time to stop eating. The rest of us need to reprogram our eat watch to do that because it got broken somewhere along the line, and once we get it fixed it's much easier to stop gaining and even to tweak it to do what we need to do.
See - that is what MOST diets say... Eat Less - follow an eaters clock. But Intuitive eating says to eat naturally, because what we naturally want will generally be what we will need. I spend all of my dieting time trying to figure out how much I burn compared to how much I consume - so I eat less and less and my body stores more and more - and (outside of the initial week or so) I don't lose. And what I do lose in the initial week I gain back regardless of HOW many calories I consume. I am not a wildly inactive person. I see people MUCH thinner than I am eat more - bad foods too! - and NEVER exercise - and yet they are thin and/or lose weight easily. I am one of the few people I DO know that actually DOES exercise in a formal way. So - that should show you as well as anything else - that I am different then they are.
The body fools us because the signal to stop eating doesn't actually trigger right away. So if you are eating, eating, eating, by the time your stop signal happens you have already eaten about 10 minutes too long - whcih is why we go from enjoying our food to the "Ugh I ate too much" right away. What Rebecca told me recently is that when food stops tasting as good is when to stop eating it. But - I can't actually tell when that happens. Except with ice cream - which is as soon as my tastebuds go numb.
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