Home Cooks: Does intuitive eating work for you?

Lolinloggen

Personally I don't think it is has to do with homecoming = intuitive eating at all. There is an element to it but mostly it is the so called hassle factor You take out the convenience and readiness. It is as will all things If it doe not cost anything (time, money, energy) people tend to indulge more (consumerism). Hard work to achieve anything is always investment of time energy and or money.
Cooking at home requires, planning, prepping, time and energy and thus people tend to be more restrictive with it. If things are not in the home, one cannot eat it and if that is intuitive well so be it I call it planned restriction.

I know for me intuitive eating does not work under stress as I'll eat anything prepared or not. Thankfully my indulgence tends to be raw vegetables so the damage is light but if nuts are around, 10 minutes later they are not.

sytchequeen

I never (and mean NEVER) buy ready meals. It might be easier if I did because there is a fixed portion. I'm a home cook, I enjoy it, but if I don't watch it I get "portion creep". It's just soooo tasty!

garystrickland357

I do 99% of the cooking and we eat at home most of the time. I love to cook and cook mostly from scratch.

I still have to log food for portion control. It's too easy to "have another piece/scoop/spoonful" of whatever it is. I do find that cooking my own food helps with being satisfied and reducing snack cravings.
[edited by MFP mods]

mmapags

I am both a home cook and a retired professional chef. I have always prepared most of the home meals and eat out irregularly. I gained more than 40 lbs over my maintenance weight eating intuitively.

When I learned to log and measure accurately, I have lost those 40+ lbs. I am now at maintenance and don't log regularly. I am eating intuitively while measuring changes on the scale. If I start going up, I will log until I have it back under control and at maintenance.

I don't think being a home cook gives any advantage for eating intuitively.

Panini911

I make most of my meals and eat "healthy" and was a very obese child, teen and young adult. I lost the weight via tracking and moderating portions. when i stopped tracking, keeping the same foods for the most part, i put on 100lbs again.

got back intro tracking and portion control. again mostly same foods. lost the 100lbs.

stopped tracking kept eating mostly the same home cooked-prepared "healthy" foods and put on another 35.

Portions are my issue. I may not need ot track daily for life but i need to monitor my weight to catch small gains and regularly measure and weight and track a few days of food to ensure I am still on track in order to maintain this healthier weight.

apullum

I meal plan meticulously every week. I also pre-log meals for the entire week. Most of my homemade meals are relatively low calorie because I have been here for about four years now and I have a set of recipes that I usually make, or because I put things into the recipe builder and modify as necessary before I cook them. It doesn't have anything to do with eating "intuitively," which is how I (and probably most of us) got obese in the first place. It's just a routine I've developed.

rainbow198

I cook all of our meals at home except when we go out for pizza on Friday nights.

The combination of planning my meals out ahead of time, tracking my meals in my food journal and also listening to my hunger cues by starting to eat when I get hungry, stopping when I'm close to getting full has helped me to keep off a lot of weight easily for several years.

amy19355

Intuitive eating does NOT work for me. Meal prep DOES.

I'm considering a formal engagement and marriage ceremony to my digital food scale.

Like the OP, I make most of my food from scratch. I do utilize some canned products, and seek out the low/no sodium versions so that I can control the amount of sodium. Canned tomatoes (no salt added) are a staple that I use when making beans and also in some chicken dishes. Coconut milk, low sodium soups, are the only other canned goods I have in my cupboards.

I keep plenty of frozen fruits and vegetables on hand, for when fresh is out of season.

Salt is something I add in the least amount during preparation, and wait until eating to add it (maybe). I like seaweed flakes as a way to add interesting saltiness to rice.

My measuring cups and spoons live on the countertop now, right next to my food scale, which sits next to my Instant Pot. I'm a meal prep nerd and those are my most used tools! (I could go on for hours about how much, and why I love my Instant Pot.)

I thought I might be able to eyeball correct weights after two months of diligent measuring.
But....noooooooooooooooo, oh NO, NO, and NO , I cannot do that accurately. At least not yet, but, honestly it is fast and easy, and seems to be becoming second nature to measure everything as I prepare or plate my food, and use the tools in MFP to count the calories and macros.

I like making my own food and knowing exactly what is going into my body. Labels on packaged prepared foods are an education in additives that don't sound much like food.

good fitness to us all!
amyfb

pjwrt

I'm similar to the OP in that I cook all my mostly veggie meals. You'd think that was a good thing, right. Wrong. I'm a good cook. My meals can be eaten in one sitting.

Case in point: last night's Cheesy Black Bean Enchiladas. I made a batch of four with a calorie count of 500 each. I ate two and still made my daily goal, minus exercise (I'm 162 lbs, 5'10'', body fat of 8).

The thing is, I had to literally force myself to back away from the remaining tasties. Winter is approaching quick up here and everyone gains weight every.single.year. I want to break that habit badly, so maybe if I bought all my meals at McDs, I'd have less a temptation?

neugebauer52

I guess we are just old fashioned and cook our meals from scratch at least 6 times a week. Personally I also want to know what I am eating, i.e. we try to buy directly from farms and / or we know the suppliers and where produce comes from. We also like to eat meals which originate from different parts of the world, to get those ingredients for home cooking is usually not that difficult - but restaurants usually do not have such a wider selection where we live.

LyndaBSS

I eat a pescatarian diet which is plant based with seafood, eggs and some dairy.

Within two weeks of starting mfp, I was much more mindful of what and how I was eating. I don't use prepackaged foods because I don't like the taste and, like you, I like to know how my foods are made. I make 99% of my meals at home.

I eat when I'm hungry and not by the clock. That was a huge step for me. I eat 3 meals and rarely snack.

I'm very happy with what I've accomplished in the 2 1/2 months I've been here. 😀

Gamliela

I haven't been even slightly successful at intuitive eating for the last 25 years.

All homecooked meals, rarely eat away from home. We cook together, so if someone wants food that the other doesn't it works out ok. For example; I don't eat pasta and bread, so I eat more vegetables. We have a flexible schedule, dinner is around 1:00 or 2:00 and supper between 6:30 and 7:30. Breakfast is 'whatever, whenever'.

zebasschick

many of my family cooked at home. they were mostly overweight, and everything was cooked from absolute scratch. no one ate till they felt overstuffed except on thanksgiving. snacks were actually a rare thing, and they didn't do lots of desserts.

Lynzdee18

mbaker566 wrote: »

eating intuitively doesn't work for me. doing that is how i ended up back here

Me too.
I did so well. Lost 65 pounds in 2015-2016. I hadn’t been a size 6 in my adult life ever. I logged religiously for over 1000 days but it was so tedious that I quit. And slowly but surely over 2018 and the beginning of this year, I mindlessly gained back 40 of those pounds. Argh

Mid May of this year I got back to MFP and I’m down 32 of that gain. I’m going to hang around here for a few weeks I think, trying maintenance. In retrospect I think I was so focused on losing that I swept down past my ideal weight(still searching for that place!) but I’m trying to be mindful of what goes into my stomach.

I’ve realized breads and other carbs like that lead me to temptation. I need to eat mega calorie-less vegetables to fill me up.

My intuition is wonky. 🥴

lalalacroix

I've always cooked most meals from scratch. I got fat this way and lost weight this way.

However I did stop weighing and logging my foods almost two months ago. I'm on the last 10 pounds of my loss and am still on track with losing. I think I finally learned what appropriate meals are for me and how to snack without overdoing it.

zeldafree877

I mostly cook all my meals at home. I'm not into eating fast foods, period.Especially when i have time off from work, i'll cook 2 meals to last into the next day or so, left overs are good after marinating a day or so, depending what it is. Then I'll start all over. Now that I've started counting calories, i basically need help with some of the foods i buy, i cook for my husband also, so it's gonna be a little struggle for change.So i suggested that he can eat what he wants, because he cooks to, that way he can change his recipes also..I was very big on bread, i cut back a lot, so that's a big help for me.

DiscusTank5

I can not rely on my intuition for eating reasonably sized portions, whether I eat at home or eat out. Tracking is what helps me stick to my calorie goals.

whmscll

I cook and eat at home 7 days a week except for special occasions. Still need to weigh and log everything to make sure I’m not eating larger portions than I should be.

Zodikosis

who necro'd this thread lol

GrizzledSquirrel

Anecdotally, you’d think there was some correlation. However, I cook 90% of my meals from scratch. The rest are eaten in restaurants when I socialise (i.e not cos I don’t want to cook) and I’m overweight.

So, my point is that you can get overweight on “whole foods” just as you can on palm oil.

The reference your Mum makes to “her day” will also include other factors such as more manual jobs (less mechanized, even housework), less reliance on cars and probably a more frugal attitude to food in general (food was precious and you just had less on your plate).

Hilogirl2018

I've lost almost 30 lbs since March eating restaurant meals 4 times a week, on average. I find it much easier in the weight loss phase to eat this way rather than all the delicious home-cooked foods I can easily indulge in. I'm actually learning how to transition to more homemade meals now that I'm closer to maintenance because I've mastered eating outside the home.

It's interesting that we're all so different in our approaches: whereas someone else mentioned they'd skip the hassle of baking cinnamon buns, I'm the type who'd love to make the buns myself and then feel I 'deserved' to eat more than one (but would never buy more than one from a bakery).