Intuitive Eating - Hmm?

Tried it. Only seemed to want to intuitively eat Oreos.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with Oreos. If you aren't intuitively eating like a bag and a half of them a day.

lemurcat12 wrote: »

Liftng4Lis wrote: »

Reading about it, I can say that it wouldn't work for me, MFP does.

This.

My impression is that people into the concept typically seem to think that intuitive eating is more "natural" and absent something screwing us up human beings would naturally just eat what we need to maintain a healthy weight and thus that doing anything more than listening to hunger signals (or eating/not eating for reasons other than hunger) is unnecessary or wrong.

I not only don't think this works for me, but I'm skeptical of the concept. There has rarely been a time when humans (a) had more than enough food easily available, (b) could as easily acquire food without substantial preparation time like now (even for those of us who mostly cook at home it's super easy these days), and (c) did not have social constraints like social eating times and cultural ideas about the proper way to eat to constrain them. Thus, it seems to me that eating in accordance with external cues like meal times or a planned idea of an amount to eat or way of eating is MORE consistent with human history than any kind of "just follow your hunger" intuitive eating.

Plus, I know quite well that my hunger signals don't work that well and are distorted by all kinds of things, but can easily be trained to follow social cues like meal times and amounts. This was so before I was overweight, when I lost and maintained for 5 years, and when I was losing this time (and now that I'm close to goal). I wish that I could rely on hunger and not bother paying attention to the other things, but that's just not how it is, so be it.

Edit to add: I don't think the choices are intuitive eating vs. calorie counting. There are all sorts of ways to externally monitor how much you eat that don't require calorie counting. I enjoy calorie counting currently, but I think not eating between meals and watching portion sizes and simply eating balanced meals -- really what we did societally until quite recently -- is another way of doing that.

What you said in your third paragraph resonated with me about hunger signals and social cues. We raised our children unconventionally with regards to food to circumvent this. We ignored the conventional advice that "meal times" were some sort of sacrosanct thing. I couldn't wrap my head around that idea, because I knew so much of my own problem with being overweight revolved around not knowing when I was hungry.

I made food, but my kids were able to refuse it if they weren't hungry and I heated it up when they were hungry and asked for it. They'd sit with us and have something to drink if they weren't hungry. We never made them eat if they weren't hungry. Conversely, if dinner wasn't ready, but they were hungry, they were allowed to eat something healthy like cheese sticks or fruit.

I wanted my kids, the children of two obese parents, to become intuitive eaters. So far, it's worked. Neither of them have a weight problem.

Personally I need the structure of MFP. I have,however,paid a great deal of attention to my body and its cues and determined a reasonable calorie allowance for me and have learned to make small but sustainable lifestyle changes to keep me in that calorie range. In essence I have ditched all diet plans and have found what works for me. Good luck to you in whatever you choose to do.

Intuitive eating is actually a concept that helped me immensely to make me realize all the reasons I was eating for. Most of the time - I don't eat because of stomach hunger, I'm eating because of mental hunger. I think there's a certain type of personality that it really speaks to, and to dismiss it as ridiculous and saying that people who are overweight got there because of intuitive eating is actually really incorrect.

Like someone else in the thread already said - people who are severely overweight got there because of MINDLESS eating, not intuitive eating. Not everyone has the same issues with food, though. In my case, I genuinely find it incredibly difficult to understand overeating for anything other than emotional reasons. I have a long history of eating disorders and my weight got to the point it is because I used food as a coping mechanism. Trying to get back in touch with eating foods I naturally crave and want and my hunger cues was something I lost years ago.

Many very fat people will have love/hate relationships with certain types of food and very much demonize a lot of foods. I read a book by Evelyn Tribole called Intuitive Eating, and I can genuinely say that that book is one of two books that will probably be what saved my life. It gave me the tools to start looking at food and how I eat VERY differently. It gave me the tools to learn to recognize hunger and satiety cues, and to learn to appreciate ALL foods.

Do I calorie count? Yes. I will for the rest of my life, most likely. My long-term goal weight is a long time away, so I may re-evaluate when I get there and see if staying there will be very difficult without calorie counting, but for the moment, my medical health needs to be dealt with so I calorie count, but I also very much take cues from intuitive eating. The concepts in it are really wonderful for someone like me, and helped me go from someone who was terrified of anything that wasn't a "healthy" food to actually being able to eat formerly off-limit foods in moderation and within my calorie goals.

There are definitely people who use the guise of intuitive eating to supposedly eat whatever they want all the time as much as they want. This goes against the actual notion of what intuitive eating is. If someone eats an entire cake, it's not intuitive eating, I can assure you. I've noticed a lot of references to overweight women on the blogosphere who hype up intuitive eating as an excuse to stay overweight and unhealthy. I don't mean, 20 or even 50 lbs overweight. I mean, women who are likely 100+lbs morbidly obese and endorse intuitive eating. They are not practicing intuitive eating and are lying to themselves if they think they are.

I understand that it's something that might be hard for some people to understand, but please realize that there are some really wonderful concepts in intuitive eating that have helped a lot of people. Just because it's not quite how you jive doesn't mean that everyone who tries to practice it are all lying to themselves or gain nothing from it.

Intuitive eating is the only way I have been able to maintain successfully. I got fat because I ate to suppress my emotions. There is a difference between mindless eating and intuitive eating. I made the choice I did because counting calories wasn't worth the mental struggle I was facing. Logging for me triggered my OCD so I found IE to be a great alternative for me. Everybody is different and will ahve to find what method works for them.

Thinking that people naturally eat according to hunger and that our feelings of hunger are enormously meaningful in a physical sense, and determine whether we need to eat or not is a good way for someone who can't distinguish well between hunger based on needing to eat vs. hunger based on liking for a food or other prompt to get fat.

As I said above, I think a lot of the intuitive eating movement (or whatever) is tied up in ideas that dieting mentality is bad for people and causes many to develop issues about food that lead them to get fatter. (Laura Fraser's book Losing It discusses this some, in a way I actually agree with.) IMO, however, they take it too far by scapegoating society or the diet industry for why people on average don't seem to be good intuitive eaters. My view is that we (or a great many of us) just aren't natural intuitive eaters--nothing in our history would have required us to develop that skill, as it was much more advantageous for us to be able to eat when food was available and historically there have been numerous cultural limits on eating (kind of like sex, really). The situation we are in now in the US and some other places where food is abundant and easily available and there are few cultural limits on eating is the weirdness, every bit as much as the distorted connection of food with morality and such.

That said, I actually do think that many of the ideas behind intuitive eating are sensible or psychologically correct ones. But simply getting rid of dysfunctional ideas about food wouldn't cure obesity or prevent it, IMO, whereas instead returning on average to more cultural limits on eating probably would, and is related to why people were less fat in other recent times and in other countries.*

I think the way humans use food for far more than physical hunger is more fundamental than being taught to fear and love food by the diet industry or the like. I was pretty lucky in my relationship to food growing up and was never forced to eat when not hungry and never actually bothered dieting until my early 30s (after I'd gotten overweight--I was never overweight growing up and was never bothered enough about being thin to diet), and yet I can't intuitive eat either. (I can find some of the relevant ideas helpful, though.)

*Of course, even more fundamental is activity, activity, activity.

I do both. They are not mutually exclusive. I try to eat intuitively and log everything I eat in my diary. Sometimes I go overboard so the diary helps me catch it and correct it with a lower calorie structured day. So why do I do intuitive eating if calorie counting alone works you ask? Because it's easier for me to eat until I'm content instead of stuffing myself just because I'm having a low appetite day and want to meet my calorie goal, or starving myself when I have a high appetite day just to stay under a certain goal. I can manage a hungry day every week or two if it comes to it and I need a "correction day", but having to stress about food at all times is a less appealing option in my case.