Intuitive Eating Club

So I've been thinking ...

I want to start an Intuitive Eating club. We'll meet once a month and have a great meal and then discuss one of the chapters in the book. Becoming an intutive eater is hard and I could use as much support as possible. Who's in? I could even record the discussions and start a podcast from our meetings so anyone who cannot attend can at least hear the discussion. I got the idea from ieating.net - the lady that started that site has a Intuitive Eating peer group in Los Angeles. I'll get it going iif enough people are seriously interested. Let me know.

Honor your hunger

I haven't posted for awhile - it might mean that I've been struggling with Intuitive Eating or maybe it doesn't mean that at all.

Lets just say I need to post more often!

Anyway, HONOR YOUR HUNGER (Chapter 6, principle 2) ---
Although you should eat only when you are hungry, you should "honor your hunger" and eat every time your body tells you to. It's all about how you feel - if your stomach is sending signals that it is hungry then your body must need energy so HONOR YOUR HUNGER and eat. If you let yourself get too hungry you are in danger of over eating. I'll talk about the hunger and fullness chart in another post. Don't you know people who eat all day long but they never eat too much? Aren't they also skinny? I think they are intutive eaters.

This concept takes planning cause you always have to have snacks available. I usually over eat at dinner because I haven't eaten anything since lunch and that was like 5 or 6 hours ago.

Now that I'm trying to become an intutive eater, I've made a conscious effort to have a snack around 3:00 or 4:00 so I'm not starving for dinner. It helps.

I also take snacks to church and will eat cheezits or fruit snacks during Sunday School. I feel a little bit like a baby - maybe I should pack baggies of cheerios. Doesn't this make sense because kids are intutive eaters and if they need a snack mid morning or mid afternoon, then wouldn't we as adults?

I've also started to eat breakfast first thing in the morning before I do anything else. This has helped because I'm not rushed and I'm honoring my hunger.

Charley Horse - what do I do?

I woke up in the middle of the night with a Charley Horse. I get them every so often and it always wakes me up and I have to stretch and rub out my calf. I hate getting woken up from a great sleep with pain like that. Is this part of Intuitive Eating? Is my body telling me something? I've always heard I need more potassium - eat bananas. But ... I don't really like bananas and they go bad so quickly. Any ideas? I want to be intuitive and give my body what it needs.

Gyosa - my birthday eve dinner

It was a struggle ... Here's how it went down:

We were planning to have gyosa (a family favorite food for years) the night before my birthday. I was worried. Kristi, who had been claiming that she has been eating intuitively said, "I'm not going to eat gyosa intuitively." This sacred me. I started to wonder if I could eat gyosa intuitively.

In the book, they classify this type of eating as "once in a lifetime" or "one last shot" (pg 80). Because this is such a traditional, family favorite meal and because we don't have it often, we all seem to have the need to finish every bite.

I had a plan - variety. Lets have 2 or 3 other things to eat at the same time so we don't all scarf the gyosa batch by batch. Once I got to Karen's house I thought of something else we could do to make the eating experience more enjoyable - and encourage intuitive eating. My idea: set the table, sit down and have all the food on the table. This doesn't happen much - especially when eating gyosa. There was some resistance but I used the excuse, "this is my birthday dinner". After all my demands, we finally all sat down at the table and ate intuitively. We had a great discussion during dinner about intuitive eating and I think it made more sense about why I insisted that we sit and eat together and have options available. I explained the hunger and fullnes scale and everyone seemed to get into it.






Mr. Baby always eats intuitively.

I felt good emotionally after the dinner as well - which J said I can use as a gauge as to whether or not I over ate.

Ah ... success. We'll see if I can do it again tomorrow on my 31st!

Why do I over eat?

J is helping me realize that I overeat for many reasons. In the past I would just overeat and feel bad, sick and guilty and not care why I did it. I would just eat more- it was a destructive cycle. I honestly thought that I simply really like food and I have no self control or willpower. Since I've been trying to eat intuitively, my binging has gone from every night to once or twice a week. I admit, I feel a little bit guilty for that once or twice a week binge.

The book tells me to lose the guilt and to be nice to myself and learn from these experiences.

From page 31: "It's important to be kind to yourself and appreciate the learning that comes out of the experience. This process involves coming from a place of curiosity rather than a place of judgment, so whatever you do, don't beat yourself up mentally!"

From page 32: "As with any process, it's important to stay focused in the present, and grow from the many experiences you will encounter. If, however, you focus on the end result (which for most people is the amount of pounds lost), it can make you feel overwhelmed and discouraged and end up sabotaging the process. Instead, if you acknowledge small changes along the way and value the learning experiences (which can be frustrating), it will help you stay on the Intuitive Eating path and move forward."

Ok so now that I'm not going to beat myself up for overeating, lets look at why I do it.

1. EMOTIONS - way too big of a topic to discuss here (more will follow, I promise). I will say that this is the main reason I overeat and now I am conscious of it so I'm doing better.
2. "One Last Shot" (pg.80) - I eat out a lot but every Sunday I eat dinner at my brother's house and his wife is the best darn cook - I know I won't have food that good again until next Sunday so I keep eating.
3. People make fun of me and my new approach to eating. This one was hard to figure out - J helped me here. I felt dumb when I was around people that poked fun at Intuitive Eating so I started joking about it too and eating more and exclaiming, "I can eat this, I can eat whatever I want. I'm being intuitive." In reality I was already full and didn't actually want anything more to eat. PLEASE DON'T TEASE PEOPLE ABOUT EATING ISSUES. I mean even if they are still in the dieting mode, I can see the same thing happening. I could also try not telling people about my new approach to eating ... Lets face it, that is impossible for me - I started a blog about it. Come on.
4. Rebellion - I want to prove to myself that I am in control of my life not someone else telling me what to eat. This is actually part of #1 above (emotions).
4. Food lacked the satisfaction factor (Chapter 10, principle 6). This one happened to me awhile ago. I ate dinner - it was fine, not particularly good but I checked in with my fullness and I was done so I stopped. About an hour later, I was dying for something more tasty and when I finally decided what I wanted, I couldn't stop.
5. I let myself get too hungry (Chapter 6, principle 2).

I NEVER feel good (physically or emotionally) after I overeat, if I'm honest with myself. And because my new goal is NOT weight loss but feeling good, it makes no sense for me to overeat anymore.

From page 33: "You'll find that your body feels so much better when your stomach isn't overfilled, when your muscles are toned and your heart is fit. If you focus on how you feel as the goal, rather than on weight loss, you'll find, ironically, that you can't help but lose weight."

From page 30: "Intuitive Eating depends on ... how willing you are to make weight loss a secondary goal and learning to become an Intuitive Eater the primary goal"