Live For Food

Intuitive eating promises to hold the answers to dieting and weight maintenance.  In a nutshell you can learn to listen to the hunger signals your body gives you, and you will then eat when you are hungry, stop when you are full, eat exactly what your body tells you to eat, and enjoy everything you put in your mouth.

If you are on any diet where you have to calorie count or keep a food diary, or you just suffer periods of hunger where you are watching the clock until the next meal time, it probably sounds like an unobtainable dream. Yet some people manage to make this way of eating a reality.

I’ve dabbled in intuitive eating myself as it seemed the ideal path to take towards weight maintenance for life. Generally I need a food diary to keep myself on track if my weight starts to creep upwards but it can be a bit tedious to keep long term.

So in the quest for intuitive eating success I’ve read Paul McKenna’s book “I Can Make You Thin”, Geneen Roth’s “Women, Food and God”, and Sophie and Audrey Boss’s “Beyond Chocolate“. The best one in my opinion was Beyond Chocolate but I know many intuitive eating devotees swear by the many books Geneen Roth has written.  I found any other Geneen Roth’s difficult to get hold of via my local library however.

The general rule with intuitive eating is to analyse your hunger signals to determine when you need to eat using some kind of hunger scale.  Your body should tell you exactly what it feels like eating, and that is what you should eat, until you stop feeling hungry.  Rinse and repeat.  In the process one tries to detach from emotional eating and rely purely on physical hunger cues.

Personally I failed at intuitive eating each time I tried it – I suppose about four times.  Not a catastrophic failure but I can outline the problems I have with this system as follows:

• I hate feeling hungry and so would eat too early on the hunger scale.
• I hate leaving food on my plate. It seemed silly to leave a few mouthfuls of dinner only to get hungry an hour later and have to faff around heating it up.
• I was always full after a main meal. This meant technically I could never ever have dessert after dinner.
• My meal times are often preset by my working hours and those of my family. This became very awkward to fit round the eat when you are hungry rule.
• My intuition is not the best. It tells me I want muffins for breakfast and cookies for lunch. I really don’t think my intuition would ever get so fed up of cake that it would only tell me to eat it once a week.
• A general lack of rules makes me less accountable. I would cheat on intuitive eating, i.e. eating when not really hungry, and then happily forget about it. I suppose its the converse to why a food diary does work for me.
• I got cross that I didn’t get hungry often enough!

The upshot was that each time I tried intuitive eating my weight started creeping upwards again. I have concluded that in its original incarnation its not for me. The problem I think is with me and not the principles behind the system.  

I would definitely recommend giving it a go if you are about to embark on weight maintenance – it might be just what you are looking for.  Even if its not, reading around the subject certainly makes you focus on how detached we are from our physical hunger cues.  I felt it was a valuable experiment, despite the failure.

Has intuitive eating worked for you?  Would you recommend it as a weight maintenance strategy?