The changes have to be a lifestyle. Yeah, sure, there are people who can eliminate things that make my knees go weak (chocolate chip cookies, anyone?) from their diets permanently, but I'm not one of those. No matter how healthy my lifestyle, I will always need chocolate, I will always drink some alcohol, and I'll always be a bread and pasta freak. So diets always ultimately fail.
A few days ago I had several discussions with various people about our bodies' ability to tell us what we need. For example, even my friend who is a vegetarian craves red meat sometimes. He knows that when he has one of those urges, he needs to either eat a bunch of spinach or take an iron pill. A lot of women feel a major need for red meat during menstruation. That's because we lose iron when we lose blood, and we need to replenish. Most people can tell when they've had too much starch and crave veggies or meat instead. This is the idea behind intuitive eating:
Professor loses weight with no-diet diet
By BROCK VERGAKIS
Associated Press Writer
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- When Steven Hawks is tempted by ice cream bars, M&Ms and toffee-covered almonds at the grocery store, he doesn't pass them by. He fills up his shopping cart.
It's the no-diet diet, an approach the Brigham Young University health science professor used to lose 50 pounds and to keep it off for more than five years.
Hawks calls his plan "intuitive eating" and thinks the rest of the country would be better off if people stopped counting calories, started paying attention to hunger pangs and ate whatever they wanted.
As part of intuitive eating, Hawks surrounds himself with unhealthy foods he especially craves. He says having an overabundance of what's taboo helps him lose his desire to gorge.
There is a catch to this no-diet diet, however: Intuitive eaters only eat when they're hungry and stop when they're full.
That means not eating a box of chocolates when you're feeling blue or digging into a big plate of nachos just because everyone else at the table is.
The trade-off is the opportunity to eat whatever your heart desires when you are actually hungry.
"One of the advantages of intuitive eating is you're always eating things that are most appealing to you, not out of emotional reasons, not because it's there and tastes good," he said. "Whenever you feel the physical urge to eat something, accept it and eat it. The cravings tend to subside. I don't have anywhere near the cravings I would as a 'restrained eater.'"
"You definitely lose weight on a diet, but resisting biological pressures is ultimately doomed," Hawks said.
...overweight at a new job at BYU, Hawks decided it was time for a lifestyle change.
He stopped feeling guilty about eating salt-and-vinegar potato chips. He also stopped eating when he wasn't hungry.
Slowly and steadily his weight began to drop. Exercise helped.
"I was pretty skeptical of the idea you could eat anything you wanted until you didn't feel like it. It struck me as odd," said Peck, who is an assistant professor at BYU.
But 11 months later, Peck sometimes eats mint chocolate chip ice cream for dinner, is 35 pounds lighter and a believer in intuitive eating.
"There are times when I overeat. I did at Thanksgiving," Peck said. "That's one thing about Steve's ideas, they're sort of forgiving. On other diets if you slip up, you feel you've blown it and it takes a couple weeks get back into it. ... This sort of has this built-in forgiveness factor."
"The one thing all diets have in common is that they restrict food," said Michael Goran, an obesity expert at the University of Southern California. "Ultimately, that's why they usually fail," he said.
"At some point you want what you can't have," Goran said. Still, he said intuitive eating makes sense as a concept "if you know what you're doing."
In a small study published in the American Journal of Health Education, Hawks and a team of researchers examined a group of BYU students and found those who were intuitive eaters typically weighed less and had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than other students.
He said the study indicates intuitive eating is a viable approach to long-term weight management and he plans to do a larger study across different cultures. Ultimately, he'd like intuitive eating to catch on as a way for people to normalize their relationship with food and fight eating disorders.
"Most of what the government is telling us is, we need to count calories, restrict fat grams, etc. I feel like that's a harmful message," he said. "I think encouraging dietary restraint creates more problems. I hope intuitive eating will be adopted at a national level."
I believe I'll try this out. I'll let you know how it works for me.
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