The Health and Fitness blog has an article about Intuitive Eating, or eating whatever you want when you are hungry, but not eating anything if you are not hungry.
One pays attention to hunger pangs, eats whatever they want and stops eating when full. The proponent of intuitive eating, Steven Hawks, surrounds himself with an overabundance of unhealthy foods and eats whatever he wants when he is actually hungry. The plan forbids emotional eating and eating when you are not hungry. Hawks says: “Whenever you feel the physical urge to eat something, accept it and eat it.
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My guess is that true intuitive eaters, i.e., those with the special knack to listen to their body and to instinctively eat only what they need are a small slice of the population and probably already enjoying a healthy weight.
I have to agree with their conclusion. Most people, Americans especially, probably have little concept of when they are actually full. I do disagree with their ongoing theory that all you need to do to lose weight is to eat less than you burn, since losing weight and keeping weight off are two different animals; losing weight and being healthy are two other different animals.
I think that if you want to lose weight, exercise more and eat healthier. Your body will take care of itself as long as you give it the right tools and don’t abuse it (too much).
Sorry, I really don’t agree with the idea of eating only when you’re hungry. When you’re happy and completely awake it isn’t usually a problem – it’s when you’re tired, ill, stressed etc that you really can’t rely on your feelings alone.
I’m also a little puzzled as to why Stephen Hawks would intentionally surround himself with unhealthy foods and suggest that it’s still possible to lose weight? Surely he’d be better to advocate a healthy diet, and _still_ lose weight. After all, being thin and unhealthy isn’t really a great thing.
I’ll clarify and say that I agreed with the blog not the program. The program is irrelevant to anybody except those that wouldn’t look for it in the first place.
i havent read the paper – have not got access to it. but isnt it an odd methodology? to find “a handful of intuitive eaters” and compare them to regular people and show the benefits? sounds to me alot like finding a few healthy eaters in the first place!?!
i think the real problem is that people easily become accustommed to a certain level of excess caloric intake at many levels (developing resistance to leptin signalling aswell as insulin resistance etc). reversing this process is MUCH harder than causing it in the first place. “intuitive eating” is FAR from optimal for the overfat who wish to lose weight.
Yeah, it is really odd. The only possible people it can work with are the ones who wouldn’t look for it in the first place.
I think I tend to agree with the principle, mainly because it is usually how I eat. I have more energy, and stamina when I eat smaller portions throughout the day, when I get hungry as opposed to when I sit down for the big lunch and try and fill myself up for the rest of the day. I think a lot of it has to do with society and its attachment to the “3 squares a day” principle, which if you think about how your body works as a continuous mechanism really doesn’t seem that healthy.
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