Miracle Diet Number XXVXIIII
A new diet plan idea that involves stocking your pantry with Ding Dongs and Tollhouse cookie dough. Or whatever. Hypothetically.
"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."
The trick is stopping eating when you're full, something that the Weight Watchers Core Plan also attempts to teach you. I call it dieting without the training wheels.
Thanks to Shannon for the heads up, and for pointing out that this new miracle diet has a sample size of two.
"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."
The trick is stopping eating when you're full, something that the Weight Watchers Core Plan also attempts to teach you. I call it dieting without the training wheels.
Thanks to Shannon for the heads up, and for pointing out that this new miracle diet has a sample size of two.
21 Comments:
I've seen this diet mentioned a couple places now and the biggest problem I have with it is that it completely ignores health issues. Hypothetically, I could eat a stick of butter a day on this diet and lose weight. But should I really act surprised when I have a heart attack a couple years later when my arteries are clogged full of margerine or my hair has fallen out due to malnutrition?
I saw this on the news the other night and just laughed out loud. Just eat until your 80% full or something like that. And he thinks he is enlightening us all with this never-before-heard-of way of thinking.
Actually, this "diet" is NOT a diet. It is 'intuitive eating' - eating what your body is craving and stopping when you have had enough. We are all born innately knowing how to do this (just like we "know" how to go the bathroom) but our eating disordered society wreaks havoc with our internal hunger/satiety cues. See Suzie Orbach, Geneen Roth or Munter&Hirschmann for more info
This sounds similar to Geneen Roth's approach in her books, namely "Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating". While I appreciate the idea of intuitive eating, I question its effectiveness in practice. I've unintentionally been doing this for years (allowing myself free access to all the "trigger foods" I want regardless of nutritional value, and eating what I "intuitively" want) and I've gained A LOT of weight. It may work for some people but I think that for those of us who consider ourselves "addicted" to sugar and who eat for deep-seated emotional reasons, it's counterproductive.
I read this in _Diets Don't Work_ twenty years ago -- and that book uses as an example eating mint chocolate chip ice cream for breakfast (hmmm).
It sounds so simple: eat when you're hungry! eat only what you truly want to eat! Of course, things that sound so simple usually aren't.
Hypothetically, I could eat a stick of butter a day on this diet and lose weight.
I think the philosophy behind this is that you wouldn't want a stick of butter every day. Your body would fill up on butter and then say, Okay, I want something else now. Theoretically.
T'would be nice if we were all so clear on messages we get from our bodies.
It turns out that on closer reading, the article does mention a small study of BYU students that showed "those who were intuitive eaters typically weighed less and had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than other students." (That is what I get for sending you links at 6 a.m. or whatever.) Still, it's not a very long study, and I'm not sure that college students are much at risk for cardivascular disease anyway. (Dr. Wade can probably speak more to that, though. I am not a scientst.)
Still, his approach does seem to blithely skip over the step where you can start eating intuitively and stop eating when you're full. He's covered the easy, "duh" part but skipped over the most difficult thing, for some people.
It turns out that on closer reading, the article does mention a small study of BYU students that showed "those who were intuitive eaters typically weighed less and had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than other students." (That is what I get for sending you links at 6 a.m. or whatever.) Still, it's not a very long study, and I'm not sure that college students are much at risk for cardivascular disease anyway. (Dr. Wade can probably speak more to that, though. I am not a scientst.)
Still, his approach does seem to blithely skip over the step where you can start eating intuitively and stop eating when you're full. He's covered the easy, "duh" part but skipped over the most difficult thing, for some people.
I think the Weight Watchers Core plan really does a good job of incorporating this. Because the idea is to eat until you're full and all, but not unrestricted, only the "core" foods. So you can kind of test out this method on foods that aren't going to put three hundred pounds on you.
That said, to Anonymous: if we all knew how to "innately" listen to our bodies and stop eating when we were full and all of that, none of us would have weight problems! That's why Weight Watchers tries to teach that, I think.
I read that article a few days ago, and my first thought was "my god, who has time to eat like that?" While it would be nice to base my meal times on hunger cues alone, in reality, they are governed by the times I can take a break from my work, the time I've planned to work out that day, and the availability of food at any given time.
I'm sure this works great for some people (like the aforementioned college students). But it doesn't seem like it would be feasible for a busy person.
Margaret Cho wrote about this a couple of years ago, about how she could have one piece of cake instead of the whole cake because she didn't have to sneak it or hide it or eat it before anyone took it away from her. She was not going to let it rule her life, and she found that she lost weight by truly not even trying.
Here t'is -- She calls it the Fuck It Diet.
http://www.margaretcho.com/blog/fuckitdiet.htm
Jen, you ask who has time to only eat when they're hungry? I think that's a startling comment on how messed up we are as a culture. It shouldn't (and really doesn't) take extra time to follow your body's natural hunger cues. I often grab a snack or a meal that travels well (I either prepare the food myself or buy it) so I can eat exactly when I'm hungry. What's so difficult about that?
Regina, I work in a lab where we're not allowed to have food on the premises, and the nature of my work is such that once I start something I have to see it through to completion, which can take several hours. My job is fairly unusual, but there are plenty of other kinds of work where people can't just take breaks whenever they want: schoolteachers, doctors, construction workers, parents of small children...I don't think it has anything to do with "the culture," it's just that certain kinds of work inherently require conformity to a fixed schedule.
In my case, it's a challenge I've learned to live with. I'm not overweight, but my eating is largely based on anticipation of what I'll be doing later in the day rather than hunger cues. My point is really that while this system sounds like it works for some people, it's not feasible for everyone, but that people should not feel like just because they can't always follow their body's cues exactly they are doomed to diet failure.
I'm so disconnected from my body cues, I wouldn't even recognize hunger. Not that I ever stop eating long enough to actually get hungry.
I can do this now, because I have a desk job w/ snacks at my desk and ready access to a fridge. But if I'm in meetings all day? Or back when I was a bank teller? Or worked in retail? Oh heck no, it's definitely "Eat now while you have the chance!"
Also, if I'm stressed/under a deadline and have food at my desk (e.g. this week) it's gone in 30 seconds and immediately forgotten.
Good in theory, hard to practice.
I liked Helen Cho's post, good stuff.
Geneen Roth (geneenroth.com, Feeding the Hungry Heart) espoused this ages ago. She also addresses the reasons why we eat more than we need to (i.e., not only "allowing" the forbidden foods, but also examining the underlying reasons behind emotional eating).
Yeah...like everyone is saying, this is *not* a new idea, and while I think it's actually a very good intermediary step in learning to deal with your food issues, I really don't think anyone can expect to lose weight doing it, and will probably gain. My major problem food (like Margaret Cho's) was cake - so I kept myself supplied with unlimited cake for a month in order to "break the taboo." I ate a LOT of cake, and I never got tired of it. At the end of the month, I was still going strong, eating a cake every couple of days. It was so festive! I think I gained about 30 lbs that month.
I've since lost 120, but that didn't happen until I was finally able to let go of needing to have absolute 'freedom' to eat whatever I wanted. I was violently resistant to the idea of restricting my food, and it was totally an emotional thing - -- had nothing to do with what my body intuitively craved, etc. etc. bla de bla. I was obsessed with maintaining my freedom to eat too much, and often ate rich stuff I wasn't craving at all just because, damn it, I was free to do so.
I lost the weight through calorie counting, and the one thing I took away from the whole "intuitive eating" experiment was the conviction that within my caloric limit, I could in fact eat whatever I wanted; and if that meant 2000 calories worth of cake and gravy, so be it. That was what made it possible for me to lose the weight, so I guess I have the intuitive eating experiment to thank for that. It did help. But I spent three years at over 300 lbs working through issues after that month of cake eating - - - - so it's not a quick fix, that's for sure.
Thanks for your fab blog!
Wow Mary Garden, I can SO relate to what you said about having to give up the absolute freedom to eat whatever you want and accept that, at least for a while, restriction is what you need. I also resist restrictions. That's why I've joined Weight Watchers about six times now only to stop going after a few weeks because, dammit! I know what I should be eating and don't want to be so persnickety as to count every glass of wine I drink or spoonful of honey in my tea.
Congratulations on losing 120 pounds. Coincidentally, that is about the amount I should lose to be in a normal BMI range. Your comment has given me a lot to think about. thanks!
Actually, it's been proven by psychologist that overweight people are lacking or have severely lessened ability to tell when they are "full." If a person was able to do this in the first place, he or she would not be overweight.
This approach can work, but it is not new. It is just common sense. It is diets and weight obsession that are the real problems. Of course, with this approach, skinny should not be the goal, finding one's natural weight should be! We were meant to be different shapes and sizes. I did lose some weight when I made the decision to accept myself and listen to my body. I hate to admit that because I would never voluntarily dimininsh myself, and I certainly never want to be a person who rants on and on about weight loss. But at least it is a step in the right direction against dieting! - Fat and VERY happy!
I love the Core plan... I'm able to easily tell when I'm satisfied and I have trained myself to stop there. Unless I splurge and use one of my wpa on something full of sugar (like what this professor is packing in his pantry). Sugar is a trigger to keep eating and eating and eating. I understand the concept of his "diet" but it seriously wouldn't work for those of us with sugar triggers. But, only if it did! "I lost 50 pounds eating raw cookie dough and doritos."
Now THAT'S a diet I could succeed on.
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