Normal Eating. Agree or Disagree?

distinctlybeautiful

What is normal eating?

Written in 1983 by Ellyn Satter

Normal eating is going to the table hungry and eating until you are satisfied.

It is being able to choose food you enjoy and eat it and truly get enough of it – not just stop eating because you think you should.

Normal eating is being able to give some thought to your food selection so you get nutritious food, but not being so wary and restrictive that you miss out on enjoyable food.

Normal eating is giving yourself permission to eat sometimes because you are happy, sad or bored, or just because it feels good.

Normal eating is mostly three meals a day, or four or five, or it can be choosing to munch along the way.

It is leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful.

Normal eating is overeating at times, feeling stuffed and uncomfortable. And it can be undereating at times and wishing you had more.

Normal eating is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating. Normal eating takes up some of your time and attention, but keeps its place as only one important area of your life.

In short, normal eating is flexible. It varies in response to your hunger, your schedule, your proximity to food and your feelings.

(https://www.ellynsatterinstitute.org/how-to-eat/adult-eating-and-weight/)

TavistockToad

Maybe agree, but what happens when eating a plate of cookies just because they are yummy happens every day? You get fat most likely...

Magnum_Opus

I would have to agree. However factor in physique goals and you're somewhat forced to stray from this pure version of eating if you will. That said there's a goldilocks zone where both circles intersect. For me that's having knowledge of calories & macros but eyeballing your food and using hunger, satiety, fullness and gym performace as your markers. That is If you wish to adopt a more holistic approach to things as apposed to weighing, tracking etc.

kommodevaran

This is what I live by, now. I have had a terrible relationship with food, because I had absorbed so much food fear. My eating habits would swing from restricted and virtuous to no limits and feelings of defeat. I eat cookies by the plateful - I still do, but not every day anymore. Losing the fear and getting in more neutral, balanced information, opened up for awareness. Awareness is what stops me from routinely overindulging. Fear couldn't, fear won't. I don't think that MFP's philosophy is in conflict with Satter's. I think they can work hand in hand. MFP lets you keep track of your intake, doesn't judge. You can set any parameters as you wish. MFP just tells you when you reach them. MFP showed me how much food I need; I had to actively change my attitude to "what I want, is enough, but not too much", but it vas easy because I didn't feel like I was nannied, I felt like I was in charge, finally.

middlehaitch

I can agree because it is, and always has been, my general approach to eating, without thinking about it.

Cheers, h.

pineapple_jojo

Normal is as normal does. What is normal?

TravisJHunt

pineapple_jojo wrote: »

Normal is as normal does. What is normal?

I think that is kind of the point, normal is what we make of it. Its different for different people and at different times.

Packerjohn

Too many people don't know what eating until you're satisfied means, or we have redefined "satisfied" since the piece was written in 1983.

distinctlybeautiful

@TavistockToad I think the idea is that when you get to a place where you trust your body, when you get to a place where you eat without placing undue thought/worry on it, when you get to a place without actual or mental restrictions around food, you aren't going to want to eat plates of cookies every day forever. Maybe at first, especially if you have a history of restriction, and this is actually useful in letting yourself truly come to see you're not going to be restricted in the future, but once you get to that sweet spot, it's unlikely to continue that way. Sure, maybe it will for some people, and then it's up to them to determine what's going on. This is coming from someone who has a huge sweet tooth. I eat chocolate multiple times a day - every day. I used to binge. A lot. Now I've given myself full permission to eat without restrictions, and I don't want to eat all the sweets available to me every time they're available because I know they'll be there.

@Magnum_Opus True enough. Goals may shape a person's decisions about food. I think, however, the further away eating gets from the third point and the last two points on the list, the less normal and more controlled it becomes. Sound's like you've found a sweet spot though.

@kommodevaran I think Satter's real end goal is for people to trust their bodies such that they don't need a tracker or arbitrary numbers to dictate how much or what they should or shouldn't eat. If you've been cycling between feeling restrictive and virtuous to feeling out of control and defeated for a long time, it's going to take time to reach that point of trust. I think it's possible for most people to get there though.

@pineapple_jojo In this case, I believe normal means eating without undue preoccupation, eating what you want when you want, and moving through life without constantly thinking about food.

@Packerjohn I believe most people can learn.

ccruz985

Written in 1983, before we had such a large amount of sugar and sodium added to our foods, before so many things on our table were processed the way they are now. Food itself isn't the same as it was in 1983.

pineapple_jojo

@distinctlybeautiful I would love to not be preoccupied with food. I don’t think I’ll ever have a normal relationship with it, sadly!

Magnum_Opus

TravisJHunt wrote: »

pineapple_jojo wrote: »

Normal is as normal does. What is normal?

I think that is kind of the point, normal is what we make of it. Its different for different people and at different times.

Very true. As humans we crave permanence. Nothing is permanent. Everything is ever changing including our diets so it seems.

Magnum_Opus

pineapple_jojo wrote: »

@distinctlybeautiful I would love to not be preoccupied with food. I don’t think I’ll ever have a normal relationship with it, sadly!

Why do you feel you are preoccupied with food?

Also don't be so hard on yourself.

kommodevaran

pineapple_jojo wrote: »

@distinctlybeautiful I would love to not be preoccupied with food. I don’t think I’ll ever have a normal relationship with it, sadly!

How is that preoccupation? Do you feel it's weighing you down? I think one of the deeply rooted problems people have with food - and Satter addresses this too - is that they don't think enough about food. Obsessed but at the same time careless. That is "normal" - usual, but not healthy, and brought on by fear which leads to apathy. I've been there, I know how it feels, and it's not nice. But it can change, given then right impulses at the right moments. I'm preoccupied with food, and I love it. I feel like I have a great relationship with food now.

Need2Exerc1se

I would agree that this is what normal eating should be. But I'm not sure this way of eating is normal anymore.

HealthyBodySickMind

"Normal" is subjective and changes. "What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly."

That being said, the above description in the OP is perfectly "normal" for me.

lemurcat12

ccruz985 wrote: »

Written in 1983, before we had such a large amount of sugar and sodium added to our foods, before so many things on our table were processed the way they are now. Food itself isn't the same as it was in 1983.

I remember 1983 very well. That's not really true.

Things available in 1983 include fast food restaurants, regular restaurants, "processed foods" (whether you mean frozen meals, which we called TV dinners and which were on average probably less nutritious than the ones available today, frozen veg, frozen fries, pop tarts, koolaid, soda, mac & cheese, cottage cheese, yogurt (less common than now), pasta sauce in a jar, dried pasta, sliced and packaged bread, potato chips, ice cream, packaged cookies, etc.).

Some of these choices were high cal, low nutrition, and had lots of sugar and sodium.

Some were not, but merely made cooking a nutritious meal out of mostly whole foods easier for some (things that I mostly do not use now, but we did when I was a kid in '83: salad dressing, Hamburger Helper, canned vegetables and fruits (we lived in a cold climate and while we ate some frozen veg I think eating canned not frozen was more common then), canned soups, bread, canned tomatoes (we didn't have "pasta" just "lasagna" or "spaghetti"), ground beef, so on. Also, sigh, fish sticks, which I have a weird nostalgia for even though I lived in a place where we got fresh fish a lot and I appreciated that too.

There were fewer low sodium options for things like canned beans and soups than now, and like I said TV dinners were pretty bad compared to many of the options now.

The difference is that the packaged options and cooking helps available now are more interesting and diverse and come in a wider range, which may mean more people use them more often, but if they choose the healthier ones who cares if they are "processed." And if they don't want those, well, there were people who could and did live on canned (high sodium) soup, cookies, and mac & cheese back then too.

I do think there's been a cultural shift where food is more commonly available (and often more appealing -- if someone brings in a variety of interesting sweets from a local bakery or a lunch place that has good desserts I', more likely to be tempted or overeat than if they bring in a bag of Oreos or even a box of girl scout cookies, and that is more common now than then, when the latter would have been the more available option). I also think going out to eat or ordering in is more common, because the options are wider, but again that doesn't mean less healthy -- in 1983, the only options where I lived for take out was Chinese or pizza or fast food (maybe Thai, but I think that was later where I was), and same with delivery (pizza and Chinese). As of 1993 and certainly now (although this is partly living in a big city), the options for delivery or take out are endless, and include lots of much healthier options, but also are more tempting because there are more choices. Same with the prepackaged stuff at supermarkets or the deli options at many supermarkets, probably.

Again, it's not about the foods being different -- it is EASY to eat from whole foods now (easier, in fact, in that much more is available there too), and it was EASY to eat not very nutritious packaged foods then if that's what you wanted to do.

An even more significant cultural shift is that I think it's more acceptable to not cook at all now, probably because so many people don't learn how, live alone for ages (cooking for a family used to be a pressure to cook real meals, i.e., healthfully), maybe by now people grew up not learning what a normal meal is (although I think this varies a lot from subculture to subculture, as I don't see that being the case with my co-workers or neighbors), so on.

Anyway, I would agree that it's easier to overeat now if you don't think about it and lack internal breaks that kick in sufficiently regularly, but NOT because the food is meaningfully different in terms of being inherently less healthful or more caloric.

lemurcat12

kommodevaran wrote: »

pineapple_jojo wrote: »

@distinctlybeautiful I would love to not be preoccupied with food. I don’t think I’ll ever have a normal relationship with it, sadly!

How is that preoccupation? Do you feel it's weighing you down? I think one of the deeply rooted problems people have with food - and Satter addresses this too - is that they don't think enough about food. Obsessed but at the same time careless. That is "normal" - usual, but not healthy, and brought on by fear which leads to apathy. I've been there, I know how it feels, and it's not nice. But it can change, given then right impulses at the right moments. I'm preoccupied with food, and I love it. I feel like I have a great relationship with food now.

This rings true for me too.

Lounmoun

I think there are things to disagree and agree with in that passage about what normal is.
It was a lot of words to say normal eating is not needing to think about eating so much and just do what feels right for you.
I don't know that the normal described is a starting place for many people these days.

If I were writing about what normal eating is I might say something like:
Normal eating is not cutting a lot of foods out of your diet unless medically required. Normal is not being afraid to eat what those around you eat.
Normal eating can be 1 meal a day, 3 meals or more. Meal timing and size of meals are preference as long as you stick to the right number of calories. Do what works for you.
Normal is not having to eat a particular list of foods to be healthy. You don't have to have a perfect diet to manage your weight. Just need the right calories.
Normal is realizing that different people have different calorie needs and you should figure out your own. Your partner or kids can and should eat differently.
Normal is using tools. If you feel like you need to track what you eat it is a helpful tool. If you feel like you need to be more accurate a food scale is helpful. If you need to look up nutritional information and read labels then do so. If you need to plan or limit your menu most days go ahead. Pay attention and learn while using tools so you can be more flexible someday.
Normal eating is having perspective. A very high calorie meal every once in awhile is not going to do you in. It is not normal to gain or lose 20 lbs of fat in one week. Get to know about water weight fluctuations. They are normal. Look at loss or gain over time. It is not normal to be devastated if your weight goes up 1 lb.
Normal is not assigning a moral value to food. Food is food. It isn't normal to hate yourself or call yourself names because you ate a cheeseburger or some chocolate instead of broccoli. You did not kick a puppy or commit a major crime so don't act like it.
Normal is eating enough to fuel your body. You don't have to starve yourself or eat or drink weird things to lose weight. Set a reasonable goal and lose more slowly. Realize that your body works fine and does not need jumpstarted or detoxified.
These days it is normal to overeat. Eating to satisfaction can be somewhat unreliable so it is okay to stop before you feel full. You might learn to recognize full over time. If you don't that is not the end of the world. You can be okay knowing you have eaten enough even if you could eat more. Type of food may make a difference in how satisfied you feel rather than just amounts.
It is normal to feel sad, angry, bored, etc. Food often accompanies our emotional events. There is a level of medicating with food that is not normal or healthy. If you have a history of always using food when you are bored or upset it is a very good idea to develop and practice different coping tools. It is hard to go through life abusing food, alcohol or drugs and help is out there.

aeloine

distinctlybeautiful wrote: »

@Packerjohn I believe most people can learn [to feel satisfied].

Not sure how I feel about this.
MAYBE people can learn but how would they? I really struggle with the "full" signal, but I'm not sure if that's due to nature or nurture.

Part of it may come from being an immigrant, where cleaning one's plate wasn't optional. Did my parents teach me to overeat because in Russia eating everything on your plate wasn't overeating but rather frugal? Or does my body just not send the full signal? How can you tell the difference if you don't know what you're looking for?

I think original post IS "normal eating" but I don't think that it's attainable for everyone. I think that it's normal for people who were raised to pay attention to how they were feeling about food, for whom leaving something on the plate was an option, and who maybe haven't gone without.

But I'm not sure that you can "learn" at an older age. I'd be happy to hear otherwise.

kimny72

ccruz985 wrote: »

Written in 1983, before we had such a large amount of sugar and sodium added to our foods, before so many things on our table were processed the way they are now. Food itself isn't the same as it was in 1983.

I was 11 in 1983. We would routinely have hot dogs, Rice-a-roni, tater tots, canned sweet baked beans, Banquet frozen dinners, and fish sticks for dinner. I would have Oscar Meyer bologna and a slice of Kraft American cheese on a bun for lunch with a Hostess Cupcake for dessert. I loved to have Aunt Jemma frozen french toast with margarine for breakfast on the weekends. There was plenty of processed foods. And as an afterthought, I was a string bean until I was in my late 20's.

As far as the OP, I would say what is listed there is what "should" be normal, but I don't think it is normal right for a lot of people. For me in particular, that is normal for me when I'm doing well. When emotional/bored eating kicks in, it's a different story! If I gave myself permission to eat what I wanted when I was sad or bored, I would be overweight. But yes, it sounds to me like what I aspire too.

Edited to add: Just realized this post makes it sound like we ate like complete crap when I was a kid, lol! We ate whole foods too