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Intuitive Eating: Complete Solution To Weight Management
Stop hating your body, stop counting calories and stop
using food for purposes other than to satisfy hunger, and
you'll be healthier and slimmer. That, in a nutshell, is
the argument in favor of "intuitive eating," or letting
your body tell you when, what and how much to eat.
"The basic premise of intuitive eating as a complete solution
to weight management is, rather than manipulate what we eat
in terms of prescribed diets -- how many calories a food
has, how many grams of fat, specific food combinations or
anything like that -- we should take internal cues, try to
recognize what our body wants and then regulate how much
we eat based on hunger and satiety," says
professor of health science Steven Hawks, lead researcher
of an intuitive-eating study at Brigham Young University.
The findings are reported in the American Journal of Health
Education.
Hawks, who adopted
an intuitive-eating lifestyle himself several years ago
and lost 50 pounds as a result, says that "normal" dieting
in the United States doesn't result in long-term weight loss
and contributes to food anxiety and unhealthy eating practices,
and can even lead to eating disorders.
All Diets Work Against Human Biology
Hawks and colleagues Hala Madanat, Jaylyn Hawks and Ashley
Harris identified a handful of college students who were
naturally intuitive eaters and compared them with other students
who were not. Participants then were tested to evaluate their
health.
As measured by the Intuitive Eating Scale, developed by
Hawks and others to measure the degree to which a person
is an intuitive eater, the researchers found that intuitive
eating correlated significantly with lower body mass index
(BMI), lower triglyceride levels, higher levels of high density
lipoproteins and decreased risk of cardiovascular disease.
Approximately one-third of the variance in body mass index
was accounted for by intuitive eating scores, while 17 to
19 percent of the variance in blood lipid profiles and cardiovascular
risk was accounted for by intuitive eating.
"The findings provide support for intuitive eating as a
positive approach to healthy weight management," says Hawks,
who plans to do a large-scale study of intuitive eating across
several cultures.
"In less developed countries in Asia, people are primarily
intuitive eaters," notes Hawks.
"They haven't been conditioned to artificially structure
their relationship with food like we have in the United States.
They’ve been conditioned to believe that the purpose
of food is to enjoy, to nurture. You eat when you're hungry,
you stop when you're not hungry any more. They have a much
healthier relationship with food, far fewer eating disorders,
and interestingly, far less obesity," he points out.
"What makes intuitive eating different from a diet, is that
all diets work against human biology, whereas intuitive eating
teaches people to work with their own biology, to work with
their bodies, to understand their bodies," Hawks explains.
"Rather than a prescriptive diet, it's really about increasing
awareness and understanding of your body. It's a nurturing
approach to nutrition, health and fitness as opposed to a
regulated, coercive, restrictive approach. That's why diets
fail, and that's why intuitive eating has a better chance
of being successful in the long term," he maintains.
Two Attitudes, Two Behaviors
To become an intuitive eater, a person has to adopt two
attitudes and two behaviors. The first attitude is body acceptance.
"It’s an extremely difficult attitude adjustment for
many people to make, but they have to come to a conscious
decision that personal worth is not a function of body size," says
Hawks. "Rather than having an adversarial relationship with
my body, where I have to control it, and force it to submit
to my will so that I can make it thin, I'm going to value
my body because it allows me to accomplish some higher good
with my life."
The second attitude is that dieting is harmful.
"Dieting does not lead to the results that people think
it will lead to, and so I try to help people foster an anti-dieting
attitude," says Hawks. "You have to say to yourself, 'I will
not base my food intake on diet plans, food-based rules,
good and bad foods, all of that kind of thing.' For people
who are deep into dietary restraint and dietary rules, again,
that's a very difficult attitude adjustment to make, to give
up all those rules."
The first behavior is learning how to not eat for emotional,
environmental or social reasons.
"Socially we eat all the time in our culture. We go out
to eat ice cream if we break up with our boyfriend, we eat
to celebrate, we eat when we're lonely, we eat when we're
sad, we eat when we're stressed out," says Hawks. "Being
able to recognize all the emotional, environmental and cultural
relationships we have with food and finding better ways to
manage our emotions is part of the process."
The second behavior is learning how to interpret body signals,
cravings and hunger, and how to respond in a healthy, positive,
nurturing way.
Learning the
body's signals can be difficult at first, but Hawks suggests
thinking about hunger and satiety on a 10-point scale,
where "10" is eating until one is sick and "1" is
starving.
Intuitive eaters
keep themselves at or around a "5." If
they feel they are getting hungry, they eat until they are
back at a "5" or "6." They stop eating when they're satisfied,
even if that means leaving food on the plate.
No Food Is Taboo
One part of intuitive eating that may be counterintuitive
to people conditioned to restrictive dieting is the concept
that with intuitive eating there is a place for every food.
In other words, there is no food that's ever taboo. There's
no food you can't ever have.
"Part of adopting an anti-dieting attitude is the recognition
that you have unconditional permission to eat any kind of
food that you want," says Hawks. "And that's scary for
people who say, 'If I abandon my diet rules, then I'll fill
a pillowcase full of M&M's, dive into it and never come
up again. That's what I crave, I know that's what I crave,
that's all I will always crave.' But that’s not the
reality. The reality is that our bodies crave good nutrition."
It is dieting that creates psychological and physiological
urges to binge on taboo foods. While people may experience
some binges when they first start eating intuitively, they
eventually will learn to trust themselves and that behavior
will disappear, Hawks maintains.
One technique he suggests is having an abundance of previously
taboo foods on hand. Once the foods are no longer forbidden,
a person quickly loses interest in them.
"If people are committed
to recognizing what their bodies really want, the vast majority
of people will say that they very quickly overcame cravings," Hawks
says, opening an office desk drawer filled with untouched
junk food. "It certainly
is the complete solution to weight management for me."
Authors
Details: Intuitive Eating: Complete Solution
To Weight Management
Rita Jenkins Web Site |
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