Intuitive Eating – Continuing the Journey

I bet you thought I had let the whole intuitive eating thing trail off, didn’t you? Nope. I haven’t. But in the last couple of months my husband and I have had another project going that took up the time I would normally spend writing.

Now I’m back to tell you how things have been going.

We all know that anything worth learning involves a journey. It would be nice to be able to wake up one morning, click our heals, and Presto! That change we decided to make is fully implemented in our lives. But we know that’s not the way we humans were put together.

Such has been my experience with learning how to live an intuitive eating lifestyle.

In the last couple of months I’ve realized this will be a life-long endeavor. I have lived many years learning bad habits with food, so I cannot expect to get this overnight.

Overall my eating has been good. I now dislike how I feel when I’ve eaten a couple of bites past comfortably full. And I’m able to wait until I feel truly hungry before eating. However, I need to work on my activity level a bit more.

It’s a process. And as such, there will be times when I don’t do things perfectly. In those moments there are some thoughts that help me keep going:

First, never develop the attitude I’ve got this. Old habits creep in so easily. If I’m not paying attention I end up doing some of the very things I thought I’d never do again. Keeping my mind in gear is one of the basic tenets of intuitive or mindful eating. I must never lose sight of that.

Second, just because I see some old habits creeping back it doesn’t mean I’ve failed and I should just forget the whole thing. That’s old thinking. This is a journey. And all journeys have some starts and stops and side trips. The important thing is to keep heading in the right direction. All-or-nothing thinking is my worst enemy.

And last, weight loss is not the main indicator of how I’m doing. A lighter body will come, and I’m seeing some change, but it is a side benefit. My primary focus here is to develop a healthy relationship with food. How I eat and exercise become the means to health, not a ticket to a perfect body.

I hope this series of posts has been as helpful to you as it has been to me. If you struggle with dieting and your relationship with food, I hope you’ll give this way of living a try. As for me, I am continuing on this journey. And I know the change in me will not happen overnight, but I am willing to see where this path will lead. For me it is the only way that makes sense.

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If you missed my previous posts about the subject, here they are in order:

A Look into Intuitive Eating for Recovering Dieters

A Useful Tool for Intuitive Eaters

Intuitive Eating—Is It Time to Eat?

Intuitive Eating—Trusting When to Stop

Intuitive Eating—Trusting When to Stop

Perhaps the scariest part for me in learning how to intuitively eat was the idea of stopping.  How could it be possible for me, the practiced over-eater, to put the fork down when I should?

When I first started to eat this way, I didn’t understand it. It contradicted everything I thought I knew about eating, but I was willing to give it a try.

To begin, I simply obeyed the rules. I followed the guidelines I outlined in two previous blog posts:

A Look Into Intuitive Eating for Recovering Dieters

A Useful Tool for Intuitive Eaters

I didn’t know enough about it to know what was in store, but after only two weeks I could see the impact on my body and my attitude toward food.

First, I realized that when I stopped eating after reaching the comfortably full stage, I experienced a tremendous level of satisfaction and energy. I had never felt that way before.

Second, because of how I felt after a meal I wanted to repeat that experience. It became easier to back away at the appropriate time.

Learning how to stop at the right time may seem a little frightening at first, but there are some things you can do to help.

• Keep your brain engaged.
  Absent minded eating is one of the biggest culprits in overeating. Do you watch TV while you eat? Do you eat at the computer?   It is important to pay attention to the cues of fullness while eating so that you can notice when you’ve had enough.
• Slow down and savor your food.
  Eat more slowly and enjoy the flavors. Remember that you get to eat your favorite foods. Enjoy them.
• Trust your body.
  Our bodies know better than we when it’s time to stop. Listen to it. Trust it.
• Learn to take less food.
  This is an important principle, especially when you are eating at home. After a while you will learn it takes less food to fill you up. Learn to visualize what that looks like and try to place that amount on your plate. It helps to trade a large dinner plate for a sandwich plate.
• Allow yourself to leave food.
  A bit of relearning is in order here. It is much better to leave food on your plate than to eat food your body doesn’t need. If you are eating at a restaurant, ask for a take home box and enjoy the food the next day.
• Realize you will make mistakes.
  Allow yourself to make mistakes. Expect them. Then when they happen learn from them. Don’t use them as an excuse to give up.
  

When you first start learning to eat this way, you might be torn about finishing the hamburger and fries or plate of enchiladas set before you. But after you begin to listen to your body and act accordingly, the energized sensation you get after a meal is something you want to experience again and again.

I can’t say I am 100% successful with this part of intuitive eating. It’s a process. But after doing this for a while, I now despise how I feel when I eat beyond the comfortably full stage. I’ve learned only my body can tell me how much to eat, and I am choosing to trust it.

Intuitive Eating—Is It Time to Eat?

Is it time to eat yet?  When I was a kid, I asked my mother that question a thousand times. Things were simple then. It was time to eat only when she said so.

After reaching adulthood, the answer to that question became much more complicated.

I learned to eat for many reasons. Sometimes I was hungry, yes. But many times I ate because I was bored or lonely. Perhaps everyone else was eating or the food was just there. Sometimes it was because I wanted comfort. I think sometimes I ate because I wanted to hide.

None of that kind of behavior with food did anything good for me. In fact, it started me on the dieting dead end that characterized most of my life.

There are several names for intuitive eating. I’ve seen it called mindful eating or attuned eating. A friend earlier this week called it intentional eating. The crux is this—it involves inserting brain before inserting fork.

After I started to apply the idea of eating anything I wanted and learned to listen to when my body was asking for food, something miraculous happened. I largely stopped wanting food for all those other reasons.

Eating by the Clock

The first hurtle for me with intuitive eating was learning to leave the clock out of the equation when deciding when to eat. After I started waiting until I was hungry, coupled with stopping when I was comfortably full, I fell into a rhythm of eating every 3-4 hours. That’s normal from what I’ve read and heard from others.

Yet that set me up to start looking at the clock when I began to feel the least bit empty. I realized I was beginning to rely on the clock to know when to eat rather than my body. Old habit.

I made that observation and changed.

Emotional Eating

After beginning to find my foothold with intuitive eating, I realized I still needed to deal with an issue—emotional eating. On those stressful days at work sitting in front of a computer, I wanted to eat.

I was not sure what to do about this one. It was so ingrained in my psyche, I’ve thought I might need counseling to conquer it.  But a story Linda Bacon told in her book, Health at Every Size has given me a tool to help me work through this.

She tells of a kids birthday party she attended where she was serving cake. One of the little boys had just finished one piece of cake and came up to get another. “That was so good,” he said. “I want another piece.”

“Are you sure you want another piece?” Linda asked.

“Can’t I have one?”

Linda cut another piece to let him know that he could, “You certainly can. I’m just trying to help you figure out if that’s what you want. What is it that you really want?”

The boy thought for a few moments. “I guess what I’d really like is to go outside and play.”

She says the boy left the cake, and went outside where he spent the rest of the afternoon playing.

The very first day I felt the urge to run to food when I was having a stressful day at work, I tried the birthday cake question—is that what I really want?  That one simple question allowed me to feel I wasn’t hungry at all. Once I could establish that fact, the thing I was about to go get out of my panty didn’t even sound good anymore. Amazing.

So far, the birthday question is my best friend to get through times when I want to eat for emotional reasons.

Learning how to eat intuitively and mindfully is very much a journey for me. I am a student  not a master.  But for the first time in my life, food is no longer the foe it once was. Instead of being a constant source of struggle, it is starting to occupy a comfortable place in my life. The place that was always intended.

The Day God Embraced Me Through My Friends

Today I opened my email and found a blog post from Mary DeMuth, a writer I follow. In the post she asked her readers a question: “When has God used a friend to deeply encourage you?”

I sat back in my chair, and thought only for a few moments. I knew exactly when that happened for me.

In June of 2008, my father experienced a severe head injury. He had been in the attic, and we believe he blacked out and fell. My husband, Brad, and I were working from home that day, and we both heard the tremendous crash in the garage. We met each other in the hallway with a look in our eyes that said, nothing good just happened.

When I opened the garage door I found my father on the concrete floor, unconscious. I stayed with him while Brad called 911 and backed the car out so EMS personnel could get in. They arrived, evaluated my dad, and took him away in a helicopter.

In the shock and silence that enveloped me after they left, I stared down at the spot where my father had lain just a few moments before. Only a puddle of blood remained.

Two hours later I held my dad’s hand while his heart stopped beating.

Just that morning we had decided to have slow cooked pork roast for dinner, and my dad had been to the grocery store to buy it so I could get it started. What a different day it had turned out to be.

The doctors at the John Peter Smith Trauma Center in Fort Worth explained everything. Based on the injury and what we heard, he likely didn’t even know he was falling. And they were certain he didn’t experience pain afterward.

The words of the doctors comforted me in the days to come. That and the fact that my dad had gone Home.

Weeks later I was crumbling inside. I thought I knew what to expect. I had been down this death road before with my mother. But I learned we don’t get practice runs for the next time we lose a loved one. Each loss differs in its own way.

Brad and I had just moved to a new church and no one knew me. I tried to express how I was feeling in the ladies Bible study I had just started to attend, but my guess is no one there had ever lost someone close. When no one tried to reach out to me, I didn’t hold it against them. I used to react the same way until I found out what deep loss feels like.

The crumbling inside continued.

One day while I drove to work, I felt as if a massive emotional or mental break bore down on me. I didn’t know what was happening, only that I feared what would happen if I let it run its course. I cried out to God. “I need someone, Lord. Someone that understands. Please. Otherwise, I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

At noon, my cell phone rang. At 530pm my phone rang again. Both times close friends called. Both called because they had been thinking of me all that day. And both had been there before. My friend Charlotte had lost her husband unexpectedly, and Ellen had lost her father and two brothers. Charlotte and Ellen knew.

That day my friends talked with me and listened. And while we were not physically in the same room, I felt their love from afar. More important, I felt the deep love of the One Who had sent them.

It was the day I hit bottom, but it was also the day I fell into God’s embrace in the arms of two friends who had walked that road before. And on that day I began to heal.

A Useful Tool for Intuitive Eaters

When I sat down to write the second blog post about intuitive eating, it was supposed to be about eating only when you’re hungry. But as I wrote, I realized there needed to be one post before that. The whole idea requires a little more set-up.

When I first heard about paying attention to natural hunger and fullness signals to determine when and how much to eat, it sounded like a very logical idea. It was a why-didn’t-I-think-of-that before kind of moment. But then the question formed in my mind, “How do I do that?”

The reality is many of us have lost the ability to tell when we’re hungry or full. We’ve allowed such a multitude of reasons to govern our eating that we’ve lost touch with those sensations.

I cringed to realize I needed to relearn what true hunger and fullness feels like.

Several of the dieticians who have written books on intuitive eating provide a tool to their clients to help reacquaint them with this most basic of skills. It’s called the Hunger/Fullness Scale.

Very simply, the Hunger/Fullness Scale is a set of statements that describe your level of being hungry or being full. The statements are numbered 1 through 10, 1 being how you feel when you are at your hungriest, and 10 how you feel at your fullest.

Several of the authors I’ve read defined each condition on the scale and made recommendations as to the range you should stay within to be successful. One author presented the scale a little differently, and it is her advice I follow.

In her book Health At Every Size, Linda Bacon wrote, “Only you can determine when and how much to eat.” She recommended keeping a journal for a few weeks to determine what hunger and fullness feel like. She shared her own Hunger/Fullness scale based on what those sensations feel like to her. Then she provided a blank scale and suggested readers create their own.

It made me realize this is one area where I had stumbled before with a hunger/fullness way of eating—trying to apply how someone else feels those sensations to my own eating. It didn’t work very well.

Below is the Hunger/Fullness Scale I wrote based on how I experience hunger and fullness.

Denise’s Hunger/Fullness Scale:

1. I’m so hungry that I’m light-headed or shaky.
2. I have an overwhelming urge to eat. If I start eating at this stage, I find it difficult to stop.
3. My stomach is growling.
4. My stomach feels empty, or I feel a burning sensation.
5. I am neutral. I’m not hungry, but I’m not full either.
6. I am aware that I am closer to becoming full, but I’m not there yet.
7. I am comfortably full. I am satisfied.
8. I ate a few bites over comfortably full. My stomach feels mildly bloated.
9. I ate way too much. I want to unbutton my jeans and go to sleep.
10. I am so completely full that I hurt. I might feel sick.

In my intuitive eating world, I try to stay within a 3 or 4 and a 7 on the scale. Anything outside that and I’ve either allowed myself to get so hungry that I won’t be able to stop, or so full that I’ve eaten entirely too much.

Most people who have been on diets in their life, like me, begin an eating regimen to lose weight. And I would venture to say the majority of people who start using intuitive eating as their plan have that as a goal. It does work. I spoke with a woman a few years ago who had lost 100 pounds in a six month period using the hunger scale.

However, losing weight is no longer my goal—health is. Weight loss will most likely come, in fact it already has. But I’ve done so much yo-yo dieting I have to realize my body might not want to let go of it all. I have accepted that. As long as I’m healthy, I will take whatever size comes with finally making peace with food.

I’d like to hear from you now. After reading two blog posts about intuitive eating, what do you think? Is this something you might like to try?

A Look into Intuitive Eating for Recovering Dieters

Hi. My name is Denise. And I’m a recovering dieter.

I have to laugh after reading the above statement because I hear in my head the imaginary group response, “Hi Denise.” But in all seriousness, there is nothing funny about living a life segmented by periods of strict discipline on the latest diet followed by out of control eating.

My experience with diets started in third grade when my mother took me to the doctor, and he prescribed a mild appetite suppressant. Since then I’ve been on multiple appetite suppressants, including Dexatrim, Metabolife, and Redux. I’ve tried Weight Watchers, the fasting diet, the grapefruit diet, skipping meals, the rice diet, food exchanges, Optifast, Medifast, a low fat diet, Adkins, and South Beach. Several of these had good short term success. The key here is short term success.

The reality is diets don’t work. They are not long term solutions. They don’t fix the real problem. In fact, the very act of dieting is the cause of our inability to attain the ever elusive ideal weight.

In the book Health At Every Size, Dr. Linda Bacon says “…dieters tend to be heavier than those who haven’t attempted weight loss. Your body has reset your [ideal weight] setpoint to a higher level. Lucky you–you now have an extra layer of protection so you won’t wither away next time you go on a diet (which the body perceives no differently than a famine).”

That explains a lot.

I first heard the term “intuitive eating” when I was taking a Christian Journalism class a few years ago. One of my fellow classmates worked as a dietitian at Baylor Hospital in Dallas, and I picked her brain a little. She explained it meant using our body’s natural cues of hunger and fullness to determine when and how much to eat.

The more I read about this way of eating, the more I felt it was the only way for me. Thankfully the medical establishment is beginning to agree, but there is an ocean to cross before it’s widely accepted. The diet industry interests are quite powerful.

From my reading, I have broken down the intuitive eating way of life into four points. Notice: This my own interpretation; I am not a medical professional nor a dietitian.

1. Eat anything you want, but only when you’re hungry.
2. Stop eating when you’re comfortably full, not stuffed.
3. Get out and move because it feels good and it’s fun, not because it’s a workout.
4. Allow yourself to make mistakes as you learn. No guilt. No shame. Learn from your mistakes and move on.

Intrigued? I was when I first heard about this way of eating. I’ll be blogging more about each of the above four points in the coming weeks, but in the meantime let me give you some books to read if you want to learn more.

Health at Every Size by Dr. Linda Bacon, PhD.
I just finished reading this book and I have to say it’s the best one I’ve read so far with regard to understanding how our bodies work and how much power the diet industry wields.

Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD and Elyse Resch, MS, RD, FADA.
My dietitian friend in the Christian Journalism class recommended this to me. It helped me understand the hunger/fullness method of eating for the first time.

Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat by Michelle May M.D.
I have not read this book yet, but from reading Michelle’s tweets I think it will be a great book.

Thin Within, by Judy Halliday, R.N. and Arthur Halliday, M.D.
This book offers a Christian approach to this way of eating. Thin Within is a good alternative to Weigh Down if anyone has ever been involved with that. I was briefly and wrote an article about it, “What’s Up With Weight Down.” Word to the wise–stay away from Weigh Down.

While a little long, I hope the information in this post has given you some food for thought (pun intended).

In the next blog post on intuitive eating, I’ll explore eating only when you’re truly hungry.

You Have Goals for 2012–What Now?

Yesterday my pastor had planned to talk to us about our goals for the New Year. God ended up having other ideas for his sermon, but in his segue into what he actually did talk about, my pastor said this—many of us make goals but few make plans for achieving those goals. Then he quoted a saying I had heard before, “He who fails to plan, plans to fail.”

That got me thinking. Over the Christmas holidays I’ve done a lot of pondering about my life, and out of that has come several goals for myself in 2012. Have I planned sufficiently so that I succeed in achieving those goals?

In the spirit of making sure I have a scheme in place, let me share with you three of my goals and how I plan to achieve them.

My first goal is to blog consistently. Why? Because it’s just good practice as a writer. The how is a little more tricky, especially as I start back to work tomorrow. I realize I won’t be able to keep up the pace I have maintained during the holidays, so I need a realistic strategy to make sure I can accomplish this goal. So, my plan is to blog 1-2 times per week. In addition, I need to expect there will be busy weeks when I am not able to blog. All or nothing mindsets are not allowed here.

My second goal is to get to work on my novel. For that I’m going to need support and I will need time. For support I have joined the Greater Fort Worth Writers group, and I plan to attend the DFW Writers Convention in May. For time, I plan to use the extra hours on days that I work from home, plus grab a few hours on the weekends. The most important thing is to consistently work on it.

My third goal this year is to implement intuitive eating. If you are not familiar with the term, it is the idea of listening to your body for cues on hunger and fullness instead of dieting as a way to achieve health and to arrive at your ideal weight (which may not be the weight you find on a doctor’s chart). For this goal, I will need support and accountability. These two are a little harder to come by because there are not as many groups focused on this way of eating in the DFW area yet. So, I plan to blog about my experience, I am going to search out online communities, and if I’m honest with myself, I may need to seek out some counseling. I see a lot of work ahead of me with this goal.

There you have it. Those are my plans for achieving my goals this year. Now, commitment to these plans is a whole other discussion. Sounds like another blog post.

What about you? Have you made plans for achieving your goals? I invite you to share them here or make notes just for yourself. The act of writing them down not only helps you to identify your plan of attack, it helps you answer the question—What now?