Intuitive Eating

At least 60% of Americans are overweight or obese. They are addicted to fat, sugar, and salt, and completely out of touch with what foods are healthy. They do not understand appropriate portion sizes. Intuitive eating for anyone who is overweight makes about as much sense as intuitive drinking when you're an alcoholic.

I would love to be able to, and maybe someday I will. Right now, I doubt that could do it.

Our body's hunger and fullness cues developed when food was scarce and we were spending all our time looking for food and the most caloric of it too thousands of years ago.
I wouldn't trust them with my life.

Hm, it seems nuture is being downplayed quite a bit for the role in learning to eat intuitively. It is not entirely in our nature to eat poorly - I hope that would be obvious.

Intuitive doesn’t mean on impulse. However, learning to interpret your body’s signals is a skill that only becomes intuitive with habit and experience. Many people have not been taught how to interpret these signals in a way that promotes health - or, in my more paranoid view, some of those skills have actively been destroyed in the American psyche to promote consumerism (reading J.R. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society is enlightening).

I find it interesting how Americans have a prejudice about “cleaning the plate”, or at least many of us grew up that way. A study I read once compared American and French eaters in how they decided to stop eating - a bowl of soup constantly filled as they ate it, and the study measured how much was consumed. Americans ate much more, and in a questionnaire told the researchers they knew to stop eating when the bowl was empty, where the French participants said they knew to stop eating when they were full.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/23449358/ns/health-diet_and_nutrition/t/stop-when-youre-full-you-must-be-french/

This is just one example, but I believe much of our eating habits are culturally determined, not just biological. I feel lucky that my parents did well in teaching me good eating habits, and my weight issues are much less severe than many of my peers, despite being subject to much of the same pressures of overconsumption and many, many incentives and opportunities to make poor decisions about food.

Eating intuitively to me means being able to know what I need without requiring external input - whether that leads to a poor food decision or a good one depends on how attuned I am to my body and previous experiences with food.

I feel maybe 80% confident in my intuitive sense about food, and that 20% of doubt has to do with all the unknowns about a different way of living because I am entrenched in my habits. Even when I try to break and form new ones, I am surprised how many options I am blind to, or would never believe as possible.

My intuitive eating experiment led me to my highest ever weight with no signs of rate of gain tapering off.
Calorie counting helped me lose weight.
Eating mindfully to my needs and without calorie counting enables me to maintain long term.

My son is a true intuitive eater, eats very erratically to his hunger and varied needs but maintains at a healthy weight.