Part 2 Dieting and Hunger: Based on the book "Intuitive Eating Workbook"
There is a huge cost to the pursuit of dieting, beyond financial. Dieting can cause a lot of harm to your behavioral and mental health, as well as your social, relationship, and physical health. Take inventory of how dieting has interfered with your life. Physical symptoms include weight gain, blunted metabolism, excessive cravings for carbs, blood sugar swings, disconnected from hunger cues, disconnected from satiety cues, chronically tired, even when sleeping well, hair loss (more than usual), if female: missed or inconsistent menses, and physical numbness. Social symptoms can include eating differently when others are present, comparing food to what others are eating, in quantity and type of foods, worrying about what people think about my eating, worrying about what people think about my body, trying to eat the same type and quantity of food that others are eating, canceling social events because of the food or meals served, avoiding eating in social situations, and behavior and beliefs about eating and body image have interfered with relationships. Psychological symptoms include worrying about my eating, having strict rules about eating, counting calories, carbs, or other factors about food, thinking of foods as “good” or “bad,” feeling guilty if I eat a “bad” food, having mood swings, afraid of feeling hungry, afraid of feeling too full, distrusting my body, afraid that if I start eating “forbidden” foods, I won’t stop eating, and fantasizing about food and am preoccupied by thoughts about what I eat and don’t eat. Behavioral symptoms include if I break a food rule, I eat even more of it, If I eat too much, I make up for it by skipping a meal or eating less food at the next meal, even if I am hungry, eating more food when I’m stressed, only exercising to burn calories or lose weight, talk a lot about dieting, weight, and food, when on vacation, ignoring my food rules and eat more than I need, no matter how full I feel, engaging in binge eating, and avoiding physical intimacy. When you embark on diet after diet, it leads to weight fluctuations, which researchers call weight cycling. Weight cycling itself takes a toll on your physical and mental health. Research over the past twenty-five years has shown that weight cycling is inextricably linked to adverse physical health and psychological well-being. Weighing, measuring, and counting are external tools of dieting. And so is collecting dieting books and articles. As you begin to practice the principles of Intuitive Eating, these thoughts and behaviors will fade into the background and eventually disappear. Whenever you’re feeling bad about what you ate, reflect on what you’ve just said to yourself—there’s a good chance it was some form of dieting mentality. For now, simply labeling these types of thoughts as “diet mentality” is a great step. Because paying attention—without judgment—is needed for meaningful change to take place. This is a characteristic of compassion, which plays an important role in the journey of becoming an Intuitive Eater. Hunger is a natural biological cue that lets you know that your body needs sustenance. Nourishing your body is as essential to life as is breathing. Honoring your hunger is an important part of Intuitive Eating. Chronic dieters often deny their biological hunger, only to have it backlash. Their hunger increases and sets off a biological cascade, both physically and psychologically—“primal hunger,” an urgent and intense desire to eat—which often results in overeating. Primal hunger is a state that occurs when biological hunger has gone unanswered for far too long. The term hunger technically refers to the biological need to eat, but it often is used to describe the mere desire to eat (without the presence of hunger cues). We use the description of biological hunger as a point of clarity, which refers to the cues originating from your body saying it needs nourishment. Many individuals view hunger as the enemy—something to fight off or ignore, or something to be tricked. When experiencing biological hunger, the mind of a chronic dieter will habitually say Don’t, It’s not time to eat, or You can’t be hungry yet. But ignoring hunger and employing trickery—such as drinking water or eating “air food”—makes the process of eating confusing to the body. Air foods are foods that provide volume with little substance or energy, like rice cakes or sugar-free gelatin. Perceiving the physical sensations that arise from within your body is called interoceptive awareness or interoception. Interoceptive awareness is a powerful and innate ability, which includes perceiving the physical cues of hunger and satiety, bodily states such as a rapid heartbeat and a full bladder, and the physical sensations produced by emotions, like the rush of heat and jitteriness you feel when you panic. This is the direct experience of your physical body. Being attuned to these sensations gives you powerful information into your physiological and psychological state, which can help determine what you need to do in order to meet your needs. Paying attention to your body’s physical sensations on a regular basis will help you learn to hear your hunger sensations. Listening to different body sensations is a form of cross-training for body cue awareness. Please keep in mind that these body sensations are not “right” or “wrong”—they are just information. An attunement disrupter is anything that interferes with your ability to hear and respond to the needs of your body in a timely manner. Disrupters include distractions, thoughts, rules, beliefs, and a lack of self-care. When you are in times of stress, whether it’s fighting deadlines or chasing toddlers in diapers, your body’s biological fight-or-flight survival system is activated. Your blood flow is diverted away from your digestive system and shunted to your extremities to help you flee or fight the enemy—resulting in a lack of hunger cues. Self-care is defined as the daily process of attending to your basic physical and emotional needs, which include the shaping of your daily routine, relationships, and environment, as needed to promote self-care. It includes a broad range of activities, such as getting enough sleep and attending to emotional, physical, relationship, and spiritual needs. When your body is hungry, it tries to get your attention in a variety of ways, from mood and energy changes to increased thoughts about food. The longer you wait to nourish your body, the more intense these experiences will be. Getting to know your hunger cues might seem frustrating, especially if you have not experienced hunger in a long time—perhaps because you’ve been numb from stress or perhaps you don’t let yourself get hungry at all. The more you listen to your body, the more you will begin to hear and experience the subtler signs of hunger. Keep in mind that everyone is different, and there is no right or wrong way to experience hunger. Stomach: A variety of sensations including rumbling, gurgling, gnawing, or emptiness. While this is a common way of experiencing hunger, there are many people who do not experience hunger signs in their stomach. Throat and esophagus: Dull ache, gnawing. Head: Cloudy thinking, light-headedness, headache, difficulty focusing and concentrating. Experiencing more thoughts about food and eating. Mood: Irritability or crankiness. Perhaps you have to work harder to refrain from snapping, even though you don’t present as irritable to the outside world. Energy: Waning, perhaps even to the point of sleepiness. There can be a dullness and even apathy toward doing anything. Numbness: Overall lethargy. If you are under chronic stress or have an illness, you really can’t rely on hunger cues to adequately nourish your body. This can also be the case if you are an athlete undergoing intense training—hunger is temporarily blunted for a couple of hours. These conditions are usually temporary, but your body still needs nourishment. Similarly, if you do not experience hunger cues, you will need to call upon your rational thought to keep yourself nourished. (Remember, Intuitive Eating is a dynamic interplay of instinct, emotion, and rational thought.) This might seem like it goes against the Intuitive Eating protocol of listening to your body, but in situations where your hunger cues are offline, it is really a type of self-care in the form of nourishment. Sometimes there is confusion about whether or not to eat, because thoughts may interfere with the direct experience of hunger cues from your body. Here’s a common scenario we hear over and over again: Let’s say you ate breakfast at seven this morning. Yet just one hour later, at eight, you are clearly biologically hungry. Your stomach is gnawing and growling. You feel empty and have a desire to eat. But your first thought is, I can’t be hungry, I just ate. And then you try to distract yourself from your hunger and wait it out until lunch. It’s understandable to feel puzzled or even annoyed that you are experiencing hunger so soon after eating a meal. Yet there are a number of reasons why your body might simply need more nourishment: The day before, you had an unusually higher level of physical activity. You ate markedly less the day before. Your breakfast at seven might, in actuality, have been more of a snack than a meal. You are just having a hungrier day. You worked out early that morning, so your hunger was somewhat blunted when you sat down for breakfast, and you didn’t eat enough. You have a physical condition, such as being premenstrual, which is making you hungrier than usual. Every time you experience biological hunger and you respond by honoring that hunger with nourishment, you build trust and connection with your body. Every time you honor hunger because your here-and-now body is hungry, you will get clarity, not confusion. You can’t make peace with your eating by declaring a war on your body or the foods you put into it. Forbidding yourself specific foods can have a paradoxical rebound effect that triggers overeating. You have already seen how biological deprivation (hunger) can lead to overeating. But there’s also another powerful factor at play—the psychological effects of deprivation—which uncannily fuels obsessive thinking about food, ultimately leading to overeating and disconnection from your body. Making peace with food is a critical component of Intuitive Eating, which involves eating the food you desire with attunement to your hunger and fullness levels. It is the process of making your food choices emotionally equal, without placing shame or judgment on them, whether you are eating green jelly beans or a piece of broccoli. Your dignity remains intact, regardless of your food choices. You are not a bad or good person based on what you eat. Permission to eat is to quell the deprivation backlash, which builds with each new diet you try, with yet another food foisted onto the do-not-eat list. Ultimately, this principle is about valuing your emotional health and taking morality out of your eating, all while increasing the flexibility of your food choices.
