someone on here told me about intuetive eating the other day, been doing this the last few days but have a slight problem, what do you do if your hungry no matter what you eat?! Please, please healp, so far today I've had 3 ryvita with tomato & onion, a small bowl of rice with broccoli, peas, sweetcorn & ham & scrambled egg with ham on toast (the last two were within 15mins of each other!!), I've really been paying attention to what I'm eating and pausing between each mouthfull to see if I'm full but I'm not, infact I'm absolutley ravenous, leaving for work in less than an hour & wont be home until 7.30pm so if I'm this hungry now I'm worried I'll be ready to eat my own arm by then lol
(intuetive eating says that you should eat when your hungry & stop when your full, but what if you have a big appetite like it seems I have?)
x x x
Hey Doodles, sorry, I didn't give you the full lowdown on IE, there's a lot to it which is why I suggested that you have to read the books.
My guess is that you are not feeling full because you will never feel full/ satisfied if you don't eat what you really want to eat. I doubt that any of the things that you have eaten are what you really want to eat because in your mind you are trying to be 'good'. IE is not a diet and if you think of it as such you will always be subject to the 'on the wagon/off the wagon' diet/binge cycle. Instead, it's a way of trying to be 'normal' around food without it being the enemy. The good part about this is when you do it, you lose weight!
The principles of IE according to one of my favourite books, 'Beyond Chocolate' by Sophie and Audrey Boss are as follows:
- Tune In (ie check with yourself to see how you are feeling, are you hungry? What for?)
- Eat when you're hungry (Not too hungry or you'll overeat)
- Eat whatever you want (Honestly! Over time, this will get more balanced/ 'healthy')
- Put it on a plate, sit down and focus (otherwise you'll miss out on the eating experience)
- Stop when you're satisfied (Sometimes that's different to being full)
- Enjoy (the food)
- Own your body (try to accept yourself, if you keep being nasty to yourself, you won't change)
- Move! (Find ways of moving that you enjoy and aren't just to do with losing weight)
- Support yourself (Ask for help, well done you already do that on here!)
- Be your own guru (ie rather than Weight Watchers, Atkins, Slimming World etc telling what you should eat)
If you question yourself - 'I can't possibly feel full; I've had X and Y to eat!' You are doubting your body's ability to self-regulate and living according to someone else's rules. Why can't you still be hungry? Who says? All of us on here have become experts at listening to our body and interpreting its different cues in terms of ttc, it will take time to do the same thing with hunger. I've taken over a year to realise that before I used to eat when really I was hungry for different things - a hug, a nap, company, reassurance, a glass of water, the chance to rebel against whatever diet I was on at the time. Now I'm much better at distinguishing between stomach hunger and other types of hunger - it's then up to me what I do about it.
I used to eat pans and pans of vegetable soup, bowls and bowls of pasta with tomato sauce and never feel satisfied just because a diet said they were 'free'. Now I can have two spoonfuls of cake and feel satisfied because that's what I really wanted in the first place. Sometimes I will actually crave vegetables or fruit because I know I'm 'allowed' to eat whatever I want.
All of this takes practice and time, it's not easy but, in my opinion, it's much easier than the diet/binge cycle and the way that that process makes you hate yourself and feel out of control.
Take care xxxxx
(ps I always wanted to know this about Intuitive Eaters when I started: I'm 5'8'' and a size 12, I don't weigh myself because scales are another torture tool of the diet industry but I'd guess I'm 10 and a half stone. I was 12 stone 3lbs when I put my diet weight back on for the tenth time and realised that diets don't work! My lowest diet weight was 9 stone 4, everyone said I looked too thin xxx)
