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I was thinking about this in my log. I was walking home today, past the veggie stand, and I got some egg plants and garlic for a specific salad. The other day it was kiwi. 2 months ago it was pineapple. Last week it was salmon and spinach. When I open the fridge I seem to choose a different type of protein almost every time, same with veggies or fruit.
Is it possible that when you've eaten unprocessed foods for a long time, there is something your body develops to "tell" which foods you need most at the moment. Everything I read online is new age bs. What are your thoughts?
I'm tempted to say "new age BS" but for someone with your knowledge and experience, Galya, I suspect there may be some subconscious reasoning process going on. Maybe you're not conscientiously picking a variety of protein, fruit and veggies, but you know the importance of maintaining that variety and getting all those micronutrients instead of eating the same thing again and again. Of course, your brain is part of your body, too, so perhaps trying to distinguish between subconscious reasoning and intuition isn't possible.
__________________ The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same. -- Carlos Castaneda
That's a good point, and maybe a valid one. We would dig into even deeper BS if we tried to connect food choices with certain past experiences. If I had pineapple with my dad as a kid, maybe those are the memories I want to bring back. Or purely physiological, I need the digestive enzymes from it?
Kicking this one up as it best fits the question I had.
How many here actually follow principles of Intuitive Eating? I've been reading a book with the same name but there's a problem inside: it encourages you to not consider anything OFF plan and eat whatever you fancy, ... with a few caveats:
- only eat when you've worked up an appetite.. not out of boredom/frustration/anger
- sit down for your meals
- don't eat what you dislike (throw it out) and savour what you do like (so you will enjoy every bite).
Sofar nearly everyone told me: hah.. in that case I'd be eating X for breakfast, lunch AND dinner... I've tried it for a bit in the past week and yep.. I've been eating licorice (the national candy addiction) by the bucketfuls. But not really savouring as much as I should.
Another main problem is that left to your own desires, nearly everyone eats far less protein and far more carbs than is recommended by nearly everyone whose opinion I respect. I'm seeing people post macros as being 40-40-20 (CPF). Left to my own devises I'd be eating something like 40-20-40 which is more or less exactly what the general population (of my country at least) eats: 45-15-40 (CPF).
So.. how to combine fitness goals with intuitive eating? Or, for that matter, combine known allergies (dairy, many legumes like soy & peanuts & some nuts) & intolerances (gluten). That can't be done, esp. since we tend to be addicted to precisely those foods that make us ill.
I'm referring to an actual book while Galya is referring to something inside her. But the concept is the same: eating what the inner self dictates you to eat.
The book is more like diet psychology book written by 2 ladies that are both nutritionists/dieticians who have specialized in treating eating disorders.
It's for those that have a messed relationship with food and are eternally dieting but never succeed since the diet is too strict.. too many food taboos etc..
The book claims that most people who overeat will end up losing or maintaining with the rules given in the book and will spontaneously start opting for 'healthy' choices.
This sounds very much like South Beach where the author claims you'll retrain your taste buds /body to opt for 'healthy' choies after a mere 2 weeks of induction.
F..k.. I've been onto this low(ered) carb path since 2002 (have reached my goal wt but not yet my goal bf%) and still gravitate towards candy if I let my inner child choose what she wants (they call it the 'Diet Rebel'). I'm assuming the authors want you to get rid of any disordered eating, even when it means you'll never achieve total 'hawtness'/ripptness.. not that this has ever been my goal.
I think intuitive eating is something that works for SOME people - pretty much what I would say about almost any diet plan / way of eating. TNT is great - for SOME people. Atkins, IF (ESE), BFL, Weight Watchers, South Beach, Zone - you name it, it worked for someone, they swear by it, just as many someones failed miserably with it.
I would be like you Espi - I'd eat candy or chips or crap if I ate only what I really felt like eating. (Licorice... hmmm... yum!). Intuitive eating doesn't work for me - I used to do it. I was fat and unhealthy. Hmmmm... did I also eat when bored and not entirely just out of hunger - sure. Did I savor? I doubt it. But it was "intuitive" for me and it didn't get me to my goals.
Yeah, right.. at the same time I don't want to be tracking for life, nor ban fun foods.
In the end the only thing that may work is to have a fairly rigid diet plan for your ON days and then eat whatever you fancy a few meals a week. This is how my great BB-hero does it.. she says that she works Mon thru Fri (diet , training, quite a lot of cardio), while enjoying whatever she wants to eat (in moderation) and doesn't train in the weekend.
Isn't this exactly what we all do when it comes to our jobs? Even when we love the job, there's always things we don't like about it, but yet.. it's got to be done.
Yet, there's a few things that I indeed like about the book and wouldn't mind applying. I'm pretty sure that my body would not really lose muscle when I'd drop protein back to the 'bare' minimum of 2g/kg BW or less as this is still way more than 2.5g/kg LBM or 2-3 times the recommended RDA for protein.
Reason I'm saying this is that in the past I'd just cram in the protein and get up to 4g/kg LBM and .. still end up overeating since I craved fats/carbs so much , while the protein itself already used up a large part of the dietary budget. Now I've cut back on protein, it's immensely easy to indulge in a few 'naughty' foods and still end up within the 'calorie budget'. In that sense, seeing a diet as 'balancing the budget book' rather than 'eating intuitively' is a lot more successful. Too many people bankrupt themselves by spending money 'intuitively'
On the original post: I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility. You hear about pregnant women craving certain foods that they supposedly need, I don't see why a "normal" person "couldn't" have similar triggers.
Rolling into the second topic, I wonder if total calorie intake would play a role. Your body can pretty well deal with having a shit diet if you're eating enough in the first place. If you're rolling around at a low BF and high activity level, you might be at the threshold for requiring legitimate nutrients before things start going wrong.
Like RL said, healthy habits almost certainly come into play with intuitive eating (especially on over all intake). If you're eating meat\vegi's\fruit then you can almost certainly get by eating what you want, when you want. The more you toss in calorie dense sources the more likely you are to fuck it up.
Yeah, I think that excluding true fast/junkfood will make it far easier to eat intuitively. I've been trying this for a bit over a week and didn't exclude them.. it would have been a total disaster if I hadn't had a (quite liberal) calorie target to work with.
Using natural foods.. a total different matter.
A nice example for natural balance can be salts. Don't we all crave salts after very intense exercise? I do..
When it comes to sensing the need for smaller subtler things like micronutrients and so on, I'm always thinking about the story of a boy who died due to malabsorption of salt. He'd been admitted to hospital to check out why he was eating salt by the handful. Since he didn't have access to salt himself, he died.. dunno if this is urban myth or an actual true story, but it impressed me very much when I first heard about it.
I read the book Intuitive Eating a while ago but never actually did the "work" that went along with it but think it is a vastly overlooked concept. We put so much energy into calorie counts, macros, workouts yet many of us don't know the first thing about eating intuitively and that ultimately causes us to gain and/or not lose or maintain weight that we have lost.
IF you think about it, naturally thin people eat "intutively"--they eat when hungry, stop when full. They eat what they want, not worrying about macros or grams of this or that. I think for myself (and many others on the boards) we have made ourselves crazy with meaningless details. Sure it is important to healthy but do we really need to be so anal about x grams of protein, x grams of carbs, etc? Methinks not.
I think that for those of us with food hangups and issues that learning to eat intuitively is the MOST important thing we can do for ourselves. Forget about tracking/hitting macros etc for a while and really learn to eat. Don't eat every 2-3 hours just because some "guru" says it is important to eat every few hours, etc. Sure, when you are getting down to very low BF% or want to compete it is very important to eat a structured diet and really tweak things. But I think many of us would be a lot happier and healthier if we learn to eat intuitively.
I know several people that followed the principles of the book and have lost weight and kept it off for many years. Two of them actually went to the author's workshops one weekend. They don't go and eat candy all day long (although at first they might have) they have learned to truly savor food and have treats but not overeat. No more "mental" stuff about food and dieting. This is something I long for.
I've done it. Worked fine. So long as my activity remains higher than "sitting on my ass doing nothing."
But, then again, I don't eat meat, I don't like a lot of traditional junk foods that tend to get people in trouble, and I usually end up excluding candy (pretty naturally, actually, because though it's my weakness, after a bit I just tire of it and moderate it back down).
I maintain pretty well, at given set points with given activity levels. In fact, right now my real problem, almost always my real problem, is activity. Since january, any time Ive stopped cutting and tracking, I've floated back up the water weight, and then maintained easily. I'm just not where I want to maintain.
It's much easier with an entirely natural food approach. Esp if foods are fairly separated or only loosely combined.
Aoife, you're right about how it may still work (with junkfood) as long as you're very active, since there's a lot of extra calories you can squeeze in as fuel for workouts.
A big problem remains that traditionally I'm a very fast eater... the food is gone before I've had a chance to let my stomach know there's food coming. This doesn't make it any easier to let the stomach decide when it's full.
The worst can be that I tend to get hungry after eating.. imagine what torture that was in the time of 6 meals a day! IF (intermittent fasting) and then later on 3 meals a day was the end of the torture.
I'm doing both ways now.. counting macros/calories , trying to get in the appropriate amounts but trying to not be too anal about things when I want to eat more or less than planned.
I find that the more I eat, the more I … get used to eating, and therefore, yes, when restricting especially, it becomes tough to just not eat. It's actually easier for me to only eat a few times a day, and to really just hang on until I'm hungry in the mornings before eating. Especially during dieting. Likely a holdover from secondary school days, when I'd find that not eating breakfast made me less hungry throughout the day, whereas eating breakfast made it impossible to make it till lunch.
I usually eat slow-ish… that's something that's changed over the years. I used to eat slow, sped up, and now I'm slower again.
I find it interesting to look back at the changes of the last 15 years, and how they tended to directly correlate to my weight and trending and activity.
I suspect it's not that easy for everyone. (Well, I KNOW it's not.) I only relatively recently have gotten my head wrapped around my own blocks to know that it's activity that is my key. Mostly.
Aoife, you're right about how it may still work (with junkfood) as long as you're very active, since there's a lot of extra calories you can squeeze in as fuel for workouts.
A big problem remains that traditionally I'm a very fast eater... the food is gone before I've had a chance to let my stomach know there's food coming. This doesn't make it any easier to let the stomach decide when it's full.
The worst can be that I tend to get hungry after eating.. imagine what torture that was in the time of 6 meals a day! IF (intermittent fasting) and then later on 3 meals a day was the end of the torture.
I'm doing both ways now.. counting macros/calories , trying to get in the appropriate amounts but trying to not be too anal about things when I want to eat more or less than planned.
I tend to be a fast eater as well. I start the meal with the intent of eating slowly but don't always do so well. And I am often hungry 1-2 hours later even with a good size meal. I think years of dieting restrictively, alternating with periods of overeating has really messed up my ability to really tune into hunger.
For me, activity doesn't seem to play a role one way or the other. It is all about what I eat. I have gained during periods of high activity due to eating too much, and lost during periods of almost no activity due to eating less. I have a hard time differentiating between physical hunger and emotional/stress/boredom hunger. I also have a huge capacity for food. It takes A LOT of food to make me feel full, much more so than my husband.
Sorry original poster, sort of hijacked your thread!
Intuitive eating is interesting since it's mostly what I do with some extras (eat more). I guess I'm lucky in the fact that given the choice of meals I would eat an outback steak, sweet potato, and a side of broccoli for every meal Since I can't afford that meal, I have to make up for it in other ways.
For me I'm a hardgainer because eating bores me. I had to train myself to eat enough so I could finally get my weight up to 200lbs. Even now it's easy to skip my snacks throughout the day and see my weight start to drop into the 190s pretty quickly. Intuitively I only eat when I'm hungry and then it's just enough to make me full (so I can get back to doing whatever it is I was doing). Now I eat when I'm hungry, but force myself to eat a little more. Then I add a few snacks through the day and in the end it has worked pretty well.
I know most people seem to be trying to lose weight, but gaining can be just as hard for some people
__________________
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"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit."-- Aristotle
Indeed you're very right. Some people just don't have a big appetite even and sometimes especially when they are very active. Activity does weird things to your appetite : it makes some people extremely hungry and with others it shuts off their appetite.
Seems like I'm a failure at intuitive eating when it comes to adding fun foods into the mix. Succumbed to buying a 175g caramel filled white chocolate 'bar' (a festive seasonal one, shaped into an S' which stands for St.Nicholas , a Dec5 event) and hoped I'd be able to savour every bite and eat slowly.
Ain't gonna happen any time soon. Apparently there's an inverse law of needing very small amounts of great foods in order to be able to eat it slowly and savour every bite. Once you have a ton of it (well 175g is 6 oz.) this just won't work and you're not appreciating it as much. The only bad part is.. why does nearly everything that really tastes good, come in a bigger size?
The potato crisps I like best? Only available in a 150g bag, not in party-size bags. The licorice? Same thing except when you go to the 'scoop it yourself bulk candy store' where you get into trouble because it's like a buffet and you want a sample of everything.
How to incorporate daily indulgances w/o having to buy bulk-size bags or end up buying miniature-sized things that aren't what you wanted?
I guess the only solution is to eat out or to buy it and then bag it up and give it away to friends/family/collegues @ work.
We divvy up bulk (or just "too much for one sitting") items into snack sized containers/bags pre-measured for an appropriate amount. If you eat out of the big bag of fun-food, it's hard to quantify what you're eating. If you come home, weigh and measure and repackage, you're forced to have to go get another, and another, and another if you want more than your "savor this" allotment. It's the "make the decision beforehand, then you have to stick to it later" strategy.
Yep..that is what used to work very well for me when I was more diligent about portioning out snacks. Bagging up everything in 30g or 50g amounts and then only eating 1 bag at the time. The amount had to be enough to satisfy but not so much that it would be overkill.
This also works great for dark chocolate which I buy as 100g bars with 24 squares of 4g each. I'll have 2 squares every morning in my coffee and sometimes another portion of it in the afternoon and that's it.. it's a rare occasion I will have more.
Works just fine for dark chocolate that I like but not love. Just not for white chocolate which is a trigger food.
It's been a while I am stunned this discussion is alive
Since my original post I got to experience many new "food moods" and I can say intuitive eating does work and does happen under normal circumstances, "normal" being a true happy state of mind. Outside of that, it proved to fail miserably for me.
Thinking of bulk sizes, I have only had that issue with grapes recently, I ate a bit, then froze the rest. So far to get rid of bulk things I freeze, or share. I remember finding a piece of frozen chocolate cake a year after I hid it from myself deep in the freezer. Other than that, if you're my height, it's just easy to stick something in a cupboard where you really have to work to get it out. When you see yourself grabbing a chair to climb to reach for your PB jar, your intuition will tell you you're half way screwed.
Galya!!! So glad to see you again! You've been missed, my friend!
__________________ The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same. -- Carlos Castaneda
Other than that, if you're my height, it's just easy to stick something in a cupboard where you really have to work to get it out. When you see yourself grabbing a chair to climb to reach for your PB jar, your intuition will tell you you're half way screwed.
That's an implementation of the "outta sight, outta mind" methodology.
Yay she's back!!! You starting this thread was the reason to not start another one but just catching onto this one.
Out of sight , out of mind does work very well, also for frozen foods even when it is not all that hard to reach.
It's been a while I am stunned this discussion is alive
Since my original post I got to experience many new "food moods" and I can say intuitive eating does work and does happen under normal circumstances, "normal" being a true happy state of mind. Outside of that, it proved to fail miserably for me.
Thinking of bulk sizes, I have only had that issue with grapes recently, I ate a bit, then froze the rest. So far to get rid of bulk things I freeze, or share. I remember finding a piece of frozen chocolate cake a year after I hid it from myself deep in the freezer. Other than that, if you're my height, it's just easy to stick something in a cupboard where you really have to work to get it out. When you see yourself grabbing a chair to climb to reach for your PB jar, your intuition will tell you you're half way screwed.
Intuitive eating? Is there such a thing?
Since I can't afford that meal, I have to make up for it in other ways. 
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