Intuitive eating to lose weight?????

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  • Elphaba1313
    Elphaba1313 Posts: 203 Member
    My intuition regularly tells me to eat all the chocolate and all the chips and then to sit on the couch and binge watch Netflix. This is good if I want to stay fat and inactive. Not so good if I want to be healthy. So short answer, no, doesn't work for me. I have to log to stay in a calorie deficit.
  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 9,281 Member
    Not sure about weight loss - but certainly some people can do weight maitenance without counting or tracking or any other deliberate strategy.

    Probably the ones who were not overweight in the first place though - so probably doesnt apply to many of us
  • IBelieveInDogs
    IBelieveInDogs Posts: 6 Member
    I think people are focusing on the wrong word here, the word should be 'mindful' not intuitive. Mindful eating has worked for me.

    It is based on asking yourself if you are truly hungry, not just bored, as well as eating slowly, so that your brain can recognise that your stomach is full and stop while you are satiated and not stuffed. It also tells you to eat when you are hungry, so theres no restriction and you should never be starving, or over eat.
  • Noreenmarie1234
    Noreenmarie1234 Posts: 7,492 Member
    Didn't work for me to lose. My best intuitive eating leads me to maintenance. Why would listening to your bodies true hunger signals lead to weight loss? Mine lead to weight maintenance. I think it is a good practice to apply and use alongside calorie counting though because it helps you with maintenance in the long run. (at least for me it did)
  • Noreenmarie1234
    Noreenmarie1234 Posts: 7,492 Member
    shaumom wrote: »
    intuitive eating relies on the premise that the body will naturally tend towards an equilibrium, in terms of weight, AND that this equilibrium is 'healthy by how we define it currently.'

    This ignores reality. Because intuitively, the body acts in the ways that will keep you alive long enough to breed, and unfortunately, the body developed in a world where you had to gain weight to survive times when food wasn't so plentiful. So staying the same size all year round is NOT what the body is trying to help us achieve. Which is why intuitive eating isn't workable, for most - our intuition is not geared for what we're currently trying to achieve.

    From what I've read...
    1. The body tends to make people hungry to maintain a minimum level of weight...so if you are the perfect weight, not eating unless you're body seems hungry might work. If you are trying to lose weight, however, your body will make you hungry until you stop losing weight and get back to the weight you originally were, if it can. It's a good survival trait, but not so great when people have food readily available all year round.

    2. And many things can alter when your body gives hunger impulses. Gut bacteria, for example, have been shown to influence when the body gives hunger signals, in ways that can make you lose or gain weight if you listen to them, and whether your body is urging you to lose or gain weight depends on which bacteria your gut has.

    3. There is little survival benefit for the human body to try to restrict weight gain. Because typically, weight gained during part of the year was needed to survive lean times during the winter, you know? It's a GOOD survival trait to be able to gain weight quickly when needed - until you live in a civilization where you get food consistently, where you aren't HAVING any lean times to take that weight off. Then, not so helpful.

    4. Human beings also have a lot of instinctive behaviors that increase the likelihood that you will gain weight unless you are aware of them and going AGAINST your instincts, or at least heading them off at the pass. Like, for example, people will tend to eat the food in front of them, so the more food there is, the more we tend to eat. This can make it tricky to eat out without a little weight gain, if portion sizes are large. People are drawn to sugars and fats instinctively, because we're built that way - theories as to why are simply because these two things indicate more calories, and for a species trying to eat enough to survive, it's good to be drawn to calories sources so you don't starve to death.


    So basically - our instincts/intuition is built to keep us alive in times when we needed to be able to hold onto whatever calories we came across, so we could survive the times when there are few calories to be found. And that's not a set of instincts that are going to be as useful when we're not in that situation.

    Exactly why I don't understand why intuitive eating would lead to weight loss in theory.
  • Lillymoo01
    Lillymoo01 Posts: 2,865 Member
    Emotions would dictate my eating too much if I were to eat intuitively which is why I became obese. I have much better control and take emotion out of the equation when I eat as much as MFP tells me to, rather than how hungry I feel.
  • Safari_Gal
    Safari_Gal Posts: 888 Member
    IBelieveInDogs wrote: »
    I think people are focusing on the wrong word here, the word should be 'mindful' not intuitive. Mindful eating has worked for me.

    It is based on asking yourself if you are truly hungry, not just bored, as well as eating slowly, so that your brain can recognise that your stomach is full and stop while you are satiated and not stuffed. It also tells you to eat when you are hungry, so theres no restriction and you should never be starving, or over eat.

    Totally agree with you!

    Now if I could only do better with mindful eating. 🤔

    The Japanese have had a phrase for this : Hara Hatchi Bu - stop eating when you feel 80% full.


  • caindove11
    caindove11 Posts: 73 Member
    I think it can work for some people, unfortunately, I am not one of them, lol. My mindful eating caused me to gain a lot of weight. I only found success when I started measuring my food and counting my calorie intake.
  • PaigeAnderson1793
    PaigeAnderson1793 Posts: 21 Member
    I don't really agree with the YouTube people. I gained weight by eating that way, and I've been successful losing weight by logging calories. I don't enjoy calorie counting, but I have to do that in order to achieve my goals. If the intuitive eating works for them, great! However, for the vast majority it is not feasible.
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,865 Member
    Sparkle097 wrote: »
    Does this work?

    I watched people on YouTube and they were saying you can lose weight while eating mindfully??? I always heard like it’s all calories when it comes to losing weight. But now I’m like confused?! It makes sense to eat when you are hungry but sometimes you can u can under eat or over eat from doing this???

    Wat if u eat when you are hungry but you are under eating. For example eating like 1200 calories or below but you don’t know that because you are intuitive eating????

    Wat do u think?

    It's still about calories. I can easily lose weight just being more mindful of what I'm doing. That said, I have pretty extensive experience calorie counting so it's pretty easy for me to estimate without having to log anything. You would know if you're under eating because you would be losing at a faster rate then you otherwise would and hair would start falling out, etc....

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