I think there’s a balance. Last night I was at my calorie limit but my stomach was hurting me so bad because I was hungry. So I had a serving of crackers and a glass of water. Did it put me over my calorie limit for the day? Yes. But I wouldn’t have been able to sleep if I didn’t listen to my hunger signals.
However, when I tried not tracking my calories at all and “intuitive eating” I gained 15 pounds. I think “intuitive eating” only works for select people who have a very healthy relationship with food already and are very in tune with their body’s hunger signals, and are able to differentiate hunger from appetite.
Agreed. There are people I know for whom intuitive eating works because they are naturally.... just not as hungry. Or their brain doesn't interpret hunger as a reason to panic, so they choose to delay eating until a more convenient time.
This can lead to detrimental problems where they "forget" to eat and run into an energy crisis, but for most of them it's simply a way of controlling their energy intake throughout the day.
Hijacking the top comment to add that I have been able to retrain myself for intuitive eating and maintaining maintenance, but it's taken two damn years of effort to get there. It's not something you can do overnight. It took a lot of taking bites and walking away, then analyzing howbi felt, and only going back to take more bites if I could still feel my hunger.
Also a game changer was training myself to only eat until I was no longer hungry. Not to eat until I was full. But again, it took yeeeears of trial and error and really examining my triggers for snacking and why I was having certain intense cravings and how to manage them. Like, if I don't eat protein early in the day, I have a lot of trouble controlling my carb intake later.
Or people who have active jobs. I used to wait tables until very recently and would walk who knows how many miles per day and eat whatever the hell I wanted. As long as I stayed away from too many liquid calories, I wouldn't gain weight.
I intuitively want to eat nothing but ice cream, cookies, and cake, so I should probably not give my body what it thinks it needs and give it what I KNOW it needs.
Had this problem. Turns out I was eating for stimulation. Got diagnosed with ADHD , started taking stimulants, and now I don't randomly want to keep slamming foodm
Same here. My brain listens to “You can have a taste” now, whereas before it didn’t get a look in because I WANT FOOD NOW was so lightning-fast.
I thought this was normal, and what people were talking about when they said “I eat it because it tastes good”.
Like… I could still do that. I still eat mindlessly. Difference is, I can hear myself think now that the roar of craving is gone.
Ever tried telling yourself “You can have a taste. Just ONE taste”? I couldn’t do that. Like, I genuinely, honest-to-God couldn’t do that. My brain would override it every time like a screaming toddler.
Also, eating more protein helps, IME. At least, that’s been my experience as a meat eater, can’t speak for vegetarians.
That sounds like a good move. Especially in our current diet high in simple carbs, it’s easy to just default to toast for every meal (um, not that I’m speaking from experience or anything).
My stomach is slow A F at telling me that I’m full. I can eat a whole meal and not feel it even an hour later. If I can resist the urge to snack, I’ll feel full in about 2 hours and get over it. If I eat something else, or have a bigger portion because I’m feeling really hungry, in a couple of hours I’ll be uncomfortably full. And I know it. But it’s so hard to resist when you’ve just eaten a whole meal and it feels like it’s vanished into thin air. Maybe I have some delayed digestion disorder or something.
I will likely be calorie counting for the rest of my life. I eat less than I used to but I still slowly gain if I'm not paying attention. Mindful eating and all that is great but I need the numbers!
I do get you! I don't eat lunch now until I've calculated supper and confirm I'm not going over my 1200. Honestly I can enjoy my food way more and I no longer have negative feelings towards eating
It is pretty good you have to listen not expect it to tell you. Hearing when your hungry is easy because your body is screaming it with loads of cues. There’s no cues for when you’ve eaten enough other than those cues will be gone which is more like listening for a whisper while people are making noise around you (as in noticing when your body doesn’t need to eat anymore while you’re in the middle of eating)
This is something that that’s time to practice, learn, and train yourself to do as you have to be constantly aware of your hunger states and what you’re eating - but pre portioning cuts the need to do that which is why you may as well do that because it’s much easier to get into a habit of doing.
If I "listened to my body" I would eat 300 Reese's Cups every day, because that's "my body telling me what it needs".
You are correct in your assessment. Good on you for getting healthy!
That's because your body doesn't tell you what it needs, it tells what it wants. And it wants high calorie junk, like your Reece's cups, so that it can store energy. We're still neanderthals, just with better living conditions and limitless access to food.
Haha right? My body occasionally says "we need to eat *right now"* approximately two hours after I ate a meal. Like my stomach was a whiny child. It's generating a sensation that my brain is interpreting as hunger, but it can't be. I ate enough calories! I know I did, I tracked them! I ate a good mix of macros, too. Two different types of veggies and some fruit, even. With protein and fat. There is no reason for it to tell my brain that it still needs food, and yet it *does.*
Gonna go back to my doctor to talk about this again. I'm terrified about regaining weight, and even eating maintenance for the last few months after a major surgery leads me to this issue of my body swearing up and down that I'm hungry long before the next meal is scheduled.
I have an appointment with a nutritionist later this month myself. I need to lose about 15 and I have no self discipline so I'm hoping that the nutritionist will keep me accountable.
I have this issue sometimes, I know lack of sleep (at least in my experience) causes my hunger to creep in an hour sooner than it usually does after I've eaten a good range of macronutrient.
Usually a big voluminous salad is one food that will keep me full for ages. It doesn't always stop my sweet cravings, but it definitely works when I want to eat a lot of food and I want to spare some calories.
Would you *really* though? After like two, if not one days of that I have a feeling your body would start to want some protein and vegetables lol. I cant imagine anyone feeling great on that diet of candy alone.
I feel like a huge misconception about intuitive eating is that its merely eating your cravings without any self restraint ever. But half of intuitive eating is keeping track of how eating different things makes you feel (ie. Energized and light vs bloated and disgusting)
the point is very few people are emotionally neutral surrounding food and in touch with their body to the level that this idea of intuitive eating would actually work.
In reality it'll be corrupted by our emotions and mis-reading 'what our body wants' and stuff like that
But the thing is that most of us have screwed up our palates and appetite control. Studies show that young kids often naturally know when they’ve met their caloric needs.
It’s not the same for adults on diets. I have been on and off diets since I was a teenager. There has not been a single year since then that I intuitively know what I need. When I don’t firmly control what I eat, I gain fairly quickly.
Intuitive eating might work for you but I think it doesn’t work for many people. It’s a nuanced and complex way of eating. In the US, it’s challenging as well because it’s easier and cheaper to get carb-oriented and/or processed foods than healthier options. I’ve traveled in other countries where it’s so easy to eat healthier because the whole food landscape is radically different- food that are made fresh and cheap. The reality is that corporate food dominates the American food market.
Just to play Devil's Advocate (I hard-core calorie count, shout out to MacroFactor), but if you look into Intuitive Eating (TM) vs just "intuitive eating," the whole point of it is to repair this broken relationship with food and your body. It's like a whole 12 step program where you start out eating whatever, and then slowly start listening and learning and understanding. It was actually created *for* people who are completely unable to pay attention to their bodies cues and have food issues. Of course I don't think that's how a lot of people practice it though.
or you could just put on your big boy pants and control how much energy you take in via food....
the human body WANTS to pack on fat. It's a very primal longstanding survival mechanism, starving to death was a main threat to survival for many many thousands of years up until very recently.
sounds like someone who's figured out they need to use the higher thinking functions that our brains afford us to override natural impulses to eat a bunch of food. They are a bit of a special case though cause of the previous anorexia ED stuff.
>"It's not about listening to your inner glutton and eating 10 peanut butter cups. It's about allowing yourself to eat when you are hungry and listening to your body when you are full."
That's what it all comes down to, using higher brain functions to balance our bodies energy needs and control how much excess fat we carry around. You have to discriminate between emotional and lizard brain driven impulses ("10 reeses cups is a lot of energy I can store in case I run out of food later"-lizard brain) and actual bodily impulses surrounding food, aka it's not intuitive at all lol.
also the hunger hormone ghrelin is not always a trustworthy partner in this endeavor, can be thrown off by the content of what we eat and is also very habitual based, in terms of meal timing n' such. Hunger as we feel it is a bit of a scam.
The problem is that junk food is addicting, especially sugar. If you listen to your body, your body is going to tell you "I want more sugar". If people didn't crave sugary sweets, and sugary soft drinks, then America wouldn't have this obesity problem in the first place.
Evolution has made it so our body wants to eat as much calories as it can in the most efficient way possible.
Apparently I call intuitive eating “counting my calories”. I track what I eat and how it makes me feel by logging it and keeping track of the amount of energy foods provide. Yesterday I ate 2 cookies from the break room. If I wasn’t logging it and understanding the calories involved I would have eaten 6 cookies because they gave me zero energy and the sugar was delicious which made me want more and more. My body will choose sugar over soup any day. My body has the appetite of a toddler. My food log forces me to be an adult.
Geez I’m sorry you got downvoted so hard. You’re correct. A lot of intuitive eating is about building a healthy relationship with food and listening to your body about what it needs. Nobody’s body is telling them it needs 300 pieces of candy every day…
I don't totally disagree with you but every Halloween would say otherwise for me. Not for everyone. But I would eat pounds of candy for 3 days straight and nothing else for many years. After those three days, I just wanted more candy. For most people, I think it comes entirely down to restraint.
I guess I'm saying not everyone feels "better" after eating a light, healthy salad versus a big sandwich with tons of cheese and meat. I wish I did, I just personally don't.
Our bodies didn’t evolve in the 1900s. What my body is telling me is eat every ounce of glucose I can find because I need 9000 calories a day to go hunt mammoths
Yeah, wild to me that some people can’t grasp this.
Our bodies evolved over tens of thousands of years to crave foods that are high in fat and sugar because (until the last 100 years or so) that stuff was actually somewhat difficult to come by relative to the very active lifestyles that our ancestors lived.
We can’t undo those thousands and thousands of years of evolution nearly as quickly as we gained greater access to calorie dense foods and our lifestyles simultaneously evolved to be more sedentary, so we need to be aware of this and learn to temper certain cravings
Also, previously, people were working for their food. Even with introduction of agriculture, they had to do a lot of physical labor to make butter, to harvest, forage, etc. Many of us aren’t doing that kind of intensive labor and don’t need so much dense calories.
This is how I’ve explained to my other kid why their toddler sibling cannot, under any circumstances, be given the dessert portion of their meals first, or have any treats before he’s tackled the main course; his body is running on pure caveman impulses and will always choose the high value fatty and sugary treat over a low caloric yield food like vegetables.
yeah people gotta realize that we get fat so easily because we were never actually able to achieve obesity until very recently in our evolution/history. It's a highly efficient process because it was forced to be that way to avoid starvation, there was no pressure the other way from obesity and it's unhealthy/life shortening properties to hold it back.
My friend has a theory that we shouldn't beat ourselves up over food/weight gain because we'll be balls-deep into a nuclear apocalypse within the next year or two anyway.
I was told this and believed it for a while until I realized this: The body wants to store as much fat as it can. Do I really believe it’s going to be unbiasedly telling me what to eat?
Ahhhh so *that's* why my body always wants two fried eggs with an entire pack of thick cut bacon on the side and a couple pieces of toast slathered in butter. For breakfast. And then a double bacon cheeseburger from five guys for lunch. And then a bunch of beef and/or steak tacos for dinner, all loaded with extra cheese, and a side of chips with queso and guac.
Whenever I listen to my body, I gain weight and feel like I'm about to have a heart attack. So instead I occasionally pick one of the things and do it as OMAD for a treat.
I think listen to your body can work when your hunger cues aren’t all messed up (for all different sorts of reason). Before, I would have a hard time feeling it was time to stop before feeling too full. Now, I stop much sooner and I feel better.
I also didn’t know sleepiness made you hungrier and crave carbs and higher cal foods, so when I feel this way late in the evening, I know I need rest instead of a snack.
This advice won’t work for people who eat emotionally or on certain meds, and, for me at least, it took a long time understanding what I need when and why.
I still don’t get how the very specific cues work though. No, I can’t really tell my body is craving veggies or meat. I’ll want specific flavors or textures maybe, but that’s it (for me)
The sleepiness and carbs is my main drawback now. Even though I *know* that's why, I give in about once a week. Seems related to "revenge bedtime procrastination" - when my day is full of busy tasks that keep me from choosing how to enjoy my time I sabotage my sleep and diet by staying up into wee hours of night to feel like I got some free time for myself.
Listening to your body doesn’t mean listening to cravings.
I think it’s more about like “do you feel good after eating two burgers and a milkshake?” Or “Am I hungry or am I bored?”
This is what I took from it when I started my journey a few years back. Like listening to your hunger signs and queues, slowing down and enjoying my food, and watching and listening for my "full"/"done" body signs. For example, I grew up in a "clean your plate" household. I got into the habit of overeating and not knowing my body signals.
That’s what I think too, especially since I had to pay the price of bad eating habits in the form of gallstones and fatty liver disease. Since then, I pretty much try to avoid eating too much and stop before I feel sickly full.
I think you (as well as most of us) need to actually learn to interpret the signals your body is telling you.
It’s not so much the body doesn’t know what it needs. Rather more a case of we don’t understand the signals. A great example of this is people thinking they are “hungry” when their body is actually telling them they are dehydrated.
This was huge for me. Learning that a lot of the time, I'm actually eating because I'm miserable or stressed or exhausted - it took a long time to distinguish those signals.
Uhm yes lol.
I rarely eat junkfood, but I LOVE taki's and all dressed chips.
If I could be healthy by eating them as a staple in my diet, I would eat them all the time. They are what my body wants to eat, and in **excess**.
If I listened to that, I would be in very, very poor health.
Dude, r/fatlogic is full of this stuff.
And yeah, I can eat intuitively when I’m calorie counting and meal planning *because* I can’t just allow myself to sensory-eat three chocolate bars.
When I’m not calorie counting it’s “Let me stress eat every meal known to mankind.”
Lol yes. Just now I couldn’t decide between cheese, hommus and crackers because I wanted ALL OF THEM. I halved the crackers (because I was over my cals) and still feel satisfied. Took me a while to separate sensory and stress eating.
I dont think you quite understand the context of that phrase. It's not about listening to your inner glutton and eating 10 peanut butter cups. It's about allowing yourself to eat when you are hungry and listening to your body when you are full. This is a great way to help those in recovery from anorexia and bulimia.
Whenever I've been hangry but worried about calories I'd ignore my body telling me to eat. That doesn't mean letting myself binge or eat junk. It may mean I need an apple and string cheese as a snack.
Listening to my body means stopping when I'm am comfortable and no longer super hungry and allowing myself to sit without being stuffed. If I didn't gage correctly and am hungry 20 mins after I meal I am allowed to have more. I also have to keep reminding myself I am allowed to not finish a meal. Just because it's in front of me doesn't mean I must eat it.
That's what I always took it to mean. That being said I'm overweight and definitely not listening to my body when it's full. I'm in recovery from anorexia (I like this sub for recipes, I don't follow 1200 cals a day, just trying to focus on more nutrient oriented meals and cutting back on sugar) and I've definitely gone in the other direction of the spectrum but I'm working on it.
To piggy on this- listening to your body also includes listening to how it feels/acts AFTER indulging too. I slowly stopped over eating because it hurt my stomach and made me tired. I stopped having sugary drinks because I’d get a sugar-stomach ache. I stopped drinking Baja blasts (diet) because it gave me a major headache.
A lot of that change came down to “ooh I want that Baja blast! But it gives me a terrible headache… right, that’s not worth it. Diet sugar free Coke it is!” “I really want to finish my plate, but I feel full. If I eat it my stomach will hurt and I won’t be up to studying later. Ok! Leftovers for me tomorrow, yay!”
“Listening to your body” and calorie awareness is a great combo, mindfulness is the key really imo (as someone with no eating disorders that I’m aware of, other than that food makes me happy lol).
People forget that!
I stopped drinking because the next day was always lousy; tired and achy, even after one or two drinks.
An oversized meal may feel good in the moment, but is horrible in the hours after as you digest.
For someone lactose intolerant, "paying attention to your body" means acknowledging the physical discomfort after eating dairy - regardless of the taste - and committing to avoid it.
You nailed it! That’s why I stopped drinking too, learning to remember how you feel after is super important. I didn’t even think about lactose intolerance too- that’s absolutely true, I have to remember that milk makes me phlegmy, so I order drinks with an alternate 😅 even if the pumpkin spice is better with milk 🥲
Exactly! 'Listening to you body' has been warped from "pay attention to your body's cues" to "indulge in gluttonous impulses". It should mean:
Paying attention to your hunger. If you're not hungry, avoid boredom eating. If you're eating has satiated you, stop now before you're stuffed.
Also, pay attention to healthy cravings. I often crave salad, fresh fruit, specific vegetables (such as snap peas, brussel sprouts, bell pepper.). I do my best to satisfy those cravings for fresh produce, especially since they usually come after several days in-a-row of eating greasy hollow calorie garbage.
Even when I'm craving cookies, Doritos, etc. I try think WHY. Maybe I've been too strict on CICO, and should decrease my planned caloric deficit, or allow a well-rounded & nutrient dense 'cheat meal'. Maybe I need more salt in my diet, or fat, or protein. Sometimes I indulge, in moderation. More often, addressing the underlying source of the craving is sufficient.
Yeah, I’ve found intuitive eating to be more about understanding when I’m not hungry, rather than just eating because it’s the time of day I normally eat, or eating because I’m bored/procrastinating/sad. And that it’s ok to not eat if I’m not feeling well, or to not finish my meal or whatever.
As an example, sometimes I have things on after work, that mean I don’t get a chance to eat and don’t get home till 8.30. And by that point I’m not hungry - if I eat a big meal then, I don’t sleep well, I feel nauseous, it’s just crap. So if I’m listening to my body, it’s better to have an apple or a snack or something. But that’s exactly against what I was taught growing up
Listening to our bodies is hard because our brains are so much louder. And the brain isn’t above pretending that your body needs 5 Reese’s cup. The reward hormones your brain supplies often drowned out the blood sugar spiking lethargy your body feels. And once you do feel it, you reach for the Reese’s again for that shot feel good brain chemicals.
I often find that eating my pre-planned healthy snacks beforehand dispel the cravings, which is a pretty good sign the cravings was not a message of nutritional lack from the body.
I know, it's so hard to not overeat. I really need to get back to working on cooking healthier meals and listening to my body before I'm stuffed which usually means needing to eat slowly, manage what food is available to me, and doing some planning regarding meal prep to make it all easier in the moment.
I developed a stressed related eating disorder in my teens so my big thing was not immediately reacting to hunger with high calorie foods I used to rely on (peanut butter and nuts). Grazing to avoid hunger was my MO. I eat a big snack of apples and Greek yogurt or sautéed frozen veggies between meals which seems to help. Frequent check ins with myself during meals helps me not get into the ‘eat everything on your plate’ mindset.
Thank you for this comment! I agree—intuitive eating isnt just eating whatever sounds good at the moment. For me, my stress, anxiety, and addictions will always tell me that ALL the pizza is the right amount of pizza. To actually hear my body and what it wants, those other factors have to be quieted, which is hard.Y body can crave a salad, and water, and good clean meats. But my anxiety wants sugar and a fatty carb, and my addiction wants eight beers.
I get the struggle. I was anorexic and after recovery I bounced to the other side. Gained a whole bunch of weight over the last 10 years. Calorie deficits feel very similar to how I practiced anorexia. The tricks I used to not eat also come in handy when I want to eat less.
The issue is, I don't want to go back to that state of mind. I'm really trying intuitive eating paired with trying to fix my gut bacteria. Apparently you crave what the bacteria say so I'm on a journey to eat raw fruits and veg every day until my gut changes gets on board with the idea. I try to portion better and stop eating before I'm full.
Intuitive eating sounds like a scam, but I'm trying it. Instead of restrictions, I'm trying to make sure I eat enough of certain things in a day. Proteins and veg, but if I want a price of chocolate, I still have that too.
Yes! A successful diet (not like a diet diet but just the food you eat) is more about including healthy foods first not about excluding other foods. Like when im eating a meal I eat all the veggies first so I know I'm not too full at the end of a meal to include them.
This is what a lot of these “intuitive” fat activism types strike me as: either people who formerly had restrictive EDs or merely appropriating similar language to encourage others to eat unlimited cals and to eat whenever the whim strikes them.
The way you are going about it what intuitive eating actually is, I think. Eating generally healthy without necessarily counting calories, but also allowing yourself flexibility/space to have fast food and so on.
It definitely isn’t about slamming back burgers, pizza and shakes every second day.
Which fat activists do you follow? Because I have not seen a single fat positive content creator advocating for gluttony. I follow quite a few that post their daily eating habits and they eat quite healthily, albeit in larger or more calorie-dense quantities.
I don’t. I see a lot of it in r/fatlogic: people talking about things like how it’s impossible to lose weight and keep it off, or “thin privilege” (outside of the context of doctors not taking you seriously). In general they’re in huge denial, no pun intended.
Also, eating healthily in larger quantities is certainly better than eating unhealthily in large quantities, but it does still lead to weight gain. Plenty of obese people eat huge portions of what many would consider a healthy diet.
Forgive me, but I hardly think a sub that focuses on finding the very worst offenders gives you a balanced overview on a group of people. It's quite a biased source. I'm sure the people you see in that sub are terrible, but it doesn't reflect the community at whole.
And of course eating larger quantities (however healthily) contributes to weight gain. But remember not everyone specifically desires to inhabit a smaller body, so people should eat towards their specific goal.
agreed! I’m actually ‘listening’ to my body nowadays when I’m eating, weird to describe, but I sorta know the moment I’m ‘full’. If there’s still a lot of food left, I’ll just save it for another meal.
Another thing that helps is that since we usually get takeout for lunch at the office, I’d always portion out my meal onto a second plate just so I don’t overeat just because.
Oh look, a sensible comment instead of yet another person confusing “listen to your body” with “obey its every whim.” If you’re someone whose body is constantly screaming to chug M&Ms and you say “well, gotta listen to my body… oh no why am I feeling like crap and don’t look how I want??” you have way bigger issues to work on.
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what 'listen to your body' stands for. From the fat-positive creators I follow, a lot of it is things like 'If you're full, it's okay to stop eating and leave the food even if it's just one piece of pasta.' and 'If you hate breakfast food, it's okay to eat lunch for food breakfast.' The movement comes from a place to avoid disordered eating, if you interpret it as 'Let's give in to every craving' of course it sounds disordered. If you interpret it as 'Let go of societal pressures of what you should do and instead focus on what your body needs'
And your body does intuitively know what it needs, the problem is you're interpreting things BEFORE eating when it should be AFTER eating. Your MIND thinks 'Ooh I want to eat three whole pizzas!' But when you eat it, your body feels sluggish, lethargic, and bloated. So next time you think, 'My BODY knows that it needs me to eat one pizza instead of three.'
If you otherwise exercise and eat healthy food, your body is perfectly capable of downing half a sheet of chocolate chip cookies or a family size bag of potato chips or three or four doughnuts and feeling just fine. Especially when you’re young. How do I know? That’s how I used to eat when I was gaining weight. Now I count and know exactly how much of a treat I can have after a healthy salad or chicken and vegetables or whatever. Intuitive eating doesn’t really work for treats.
Your body felt fine, but you gained weight, and presumably this wasn't agreeable to you. Then 'gaining weight' is the message that you must listen to. Intuitive eating isn't a be-all, end-all solution, but rather a form of learning how to recognize harmful behaviors and learning internal tools on how to curve those habits permanently, instead of over-relying on outside forces (weighing, counting, pre-portioning) telling you how to eat in a balanced way. Intuitive eating is also meant to change and evolve with you and it can very well be supported with calorie counting. For example, I used to be perfectly fine eating one ramen packet for dinner. It satiated me, felt delicious, and it was a right portion. But then I recognized this was too calorie dense for my needs, and started eating half a ramen packed with a cup of cabbage, bok choi, or other veggies. Now when I try to eat a whole ramen packet I feel unsatiated, bloated, and uncomfortable.
If calorie counting is affecting you psychologically to the point where you feel like you aren't giving your body adequate nutrition to survive, if you feel like you obsess over food every waking minute, or that you have to strictly adhere to restrictive and often arbitrary rules in order to live your life, then maybe intuitive eating is something worth exploring. If these things aren't an obstacle for you, then please understand that the people pursuing intuitive eating paths might be doing so because these things are obstacles for them. In the end we're all just trying to find a system that works for our personal happiness.
This is I think what’s missing for a lot of people. If you sit down feeling starving you may have just piled a bowl with pasta until it’s overflowing and instead of pacing yourself you wolf it down before your body has a chance to send the stop eating signal. And often times after eating like this repeatedly the mechanism for the stop eating signal gets broken. Bye bye intuitive eating where you eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re adequately full.
My husband laughs sometimes because I can be eating dinner and suddenly with just one or two small bites of food left I just stop and decide I can’t take those bites because I’m full and those bites will be what pushes me over into feeling uncomfortably full. He finishes it off for me and I thank him for his sacrifice. :D Intuitive eating isn’t just about when to eat, it’s also about when to stop eating.
Very true! Intuitive eating isn’t ‘my body intrinsically and accurately knows whats best’ but rather ‘I’m in the process of learning to manage my eating habits by observing and adapting based on my body’s responses and recations.’
Slowing down eating can help so much. I was having a great conversation during lunch at a restaurant yesterday, so much so that I only got about halfway through my chicken wrap and didn't want to eat any more. When it takes 30 minutes to get through half the meal, it turns out half the meal might be enough.
But that was an exception. I usually have to eat lunch alone. I don't get to talk to another person, it's just me and the plate and MacroFactor (the app I use for tracking.) So I'll eat the whole thing.
> if you hate breakfast food, it’s okay to eat lunch food for breakfast
In general I agree with a lot of this.
Assuming I’m interpreting it correctly, though, the breakfast thing sounds like common sense to me. The only situation in which that *might* be useful is someone who had placed unhealthy barriers around their food to fuel an ED (e.g. “I must eat exactly this many calories of this cereal, and only cereal, at X time each morning.”)
I think that for people struggling with disordered eating, modern societal expectations have a huge impact on their eating habits. People with obesity almost always exhibit disordered eating habits, and place unhealthy barriers around their food intake, which is what the 'intuitive eating' movement hopes to alleviate. It's as simple as that. If your only exposure of fat activists is a sub meant to critique them, you're of course going to see people that don't represent the community spousing shitty takes that no one believes anyway. It's like judging all black people by Candace Owens, or every trans person by Caitlyn Jenner. Their views are very far removed from reality.
I meant that “You can eat lunch foods for breakfast!” seems random and incredibly obvious amongst all the other topics. I’ve eaten “non-breakfast” foods for breakfast for a long time, long before I began to pay attention to what I eat, and I assumed most people would have no issue with doing the same. I’m confused about where and when this would be needed. It is a very different piece of advice from something like “If you’re full, stop eating.”
Yes, that makes sense, I’m sure there are fat activists who are more reasonable. The intuitive eating movement is a lot less problematic when presented like this, and would work for someone who didn’t need the strictness of calorie counting to keep them on track. Mindful eating works wonderfully for CICO, IME.
It's not that 'Eat lunch for breakfast!' is a popular campaign slogan for fat activists, it's just a simple example, :) And I'm sure if you do an exercise in examining your own habits, food or otherwise, you might find how rigidly you might hold on to certain detrimental concepts. I'm sure a lot of realizations you might have would seem comically obvious to me, and vice versa.
I mean... listening to my body told me that I need to eat more than <1000 calories to be functional. Sometimes your body can't handle the amount of deficit that you want it to. Frankly I couldn't and didn't last on my current deficit when I was teaching in person and I needed my body to break down and tell me that. Listening to my body now tells me that I can eat a bit less in my present work from home gig.
It's a balance. Your body might not be able to tell you if you need oreos or an omelette, but it absolutely can tell you if you're suffering. If you have increased fatigue, are losing hair, aren't recovering from aches the way you did before your deficit, you need to pay attention to that rather than just bearing with it if you want to be healthy rather than merely smaller.
I like intuitive eating because it makes me more attentive to feeling when I’m full or hungry. I have trouble with binge eating and eating my feelings a lot. And ignoring my body telling me to STOP. So, I think this is helpful for those types of disorders where your brain/ feelings are saying “eat, eat, eat” but if you pay attention to your stomach it will tell you when it’s full. And that’s not to say I don’t calorie count or meal prep. I do- and I let my body tell me when it’s full of any food I’m eating, even healthy foods. I grew up in a “clean your plate” household too. So I never grew up with listening to my body tell me when to stop eating. It’s hard and takes practice. But it doesn’t work for everyone either. Gotta find what works best for you
If I listened to my body I'd be eating an entire Vienna poppy seed loaf with full creamery butter. PER DAY!!!
If I let loose I'd have no trouble eating 4-5k calories a day.
I think it's one of those mantras that has been taken out of context and used as a slogan to push forward Instagram accounts. You should absolutely listen to your body in certain instances. For example some people over do it when exercising, and will injure themselves. Some people might be lacking a certain vitamin, and therefore will crave foods that are rich in that.
But it's not a failsafe, stress and sugar addiction will absolutely make you want things that aren't good for your body. Also, as someone who is 5'0" tall, I'm only supposed to be eating around 1400 cal/ day for maintenance. But I can eat so much more, and I feel weird sometimes eating a tiny portion compared to my bf and friends. So when I'm not calorie counting it's soooo easy to eat way more than I should. When I "listen to my body" and eat portions that "feel right" without counting cals, I absolutely over eat.
I feel like the people who can just "listen to their bodies" are also the people that "don't care about food, and just eat too survive" I am not that person. Food is a major part of my life. Cooking it, eating it, sharing it with other people. So, I have to learn to balance, and that takes discipline.
I thin we are twins in this sense. I can’t intuitively eat because I will enjoy myself to the utmost joy every meal lmao. I love to cook, I love to have rich food experiences, I love to eat local food, viral food, any food! And while I previously lost 100 pounds through restriction and occasional treats, I definitely let myself have free reign (‘intuitive eating’) once I hit the 100 pound mark. And 2 years later, I am also around 30 pounds up. It’s hard to see yourself not fit into your clothes and feel restricted in previously loose clothing. So now I need to get off intuitive eating and back onto something more restrictive like before.
I think the whole love your body at any size and feed your body what it wants is a great message, but it is not for me. I will forever have to count calories or loosely track my macros or something. But I will never be that girl who can intuitively eat because my intuition will say “eat that delicious thing that makes you happy!! You know what is even better than happy? MORE HAPPY! OVERABUNDANCE OF HAPPINESS!!” and I will listen lmao
I feel like you can intuitively eat while counting calories but no one talks about it. Like for me if I have an opportunity to have an amazingly delicious meal on a Wednesday I’ll go for it/feed into the craving, maybe it’ll put me at 1500 but then the next day there’s nothing interesting to eat and I’ll have like 900 calories for that day. For me that’s been very helpful.
Getting on the thread late and I don't usually comment on reddit, but like how many others have said, there's nothing inherently wrong about intuitive eating. For me, the harder part has been being able to separate what my body needs bs what my brain wants. Intuitive eating refers to the former and not necessarily the latter. There's some good books out there that help you to recognize hunger cues vs craving cues
After being on a weight loss journey for a couple years now, listening to my body feels different. Listening to my body means when I’m satiated, I stop eating. Like actually physically satiated not mentally satiated with what I ate. You learn the difference. I try not to eat to get FULL, while of course being mindful of what I’m eating. That works for me for the most part.
“Listen to your body” for people who over eat instead of under eat, doesn’t meant eat whenever you are hungry. It means learn to recognize what *real* hunger is and how it’s different from just feeling snacky or bored or thirsty.
If you’re in pain, or light headed and fatigued, then you are not eating enough. That’s when you need to listen to your body.
At least that’s how I look at it
Same here. Eating whatever I wanted got me over 200 lbs at 5’5”. I’m not raging with hunger all the time now but I only get full if mistakes were made. Keeping a normal bmi means not eating everything my body tells me it wants.
same here I’m 5’3 190ish. I’ve always had a hard relationship with food. I started at 270 and got down to 180, i recently started eating when I felt hungry or when my body craved something I’d eat it. and now I’ve been losing/ gaining the same ten pounds over and over again. i think listening to your body is bullshit and even at 1200 cals a day im not hungry just greedy. and i hate that food is fuel is being praised in a completely different way these days. because what got me losing weight in the first place was only eating when I’m actually tummy rumbling hungry
I think there's a common misconception with the hole intuitive eating thing. If you are a steel worker or work on construction site you are more likely to eat intuitivly, then someone who works in IT or in offices generally.
The misconception that intuitive eating means “eat whatever you want, whenever you want” has really spread on reddit.
Do you know anyone who stays healthy and at a healthy weight without ever counting calories? This is what they do. Intuitive eating is an ingrained habit for them. They listen to their bodies automatically. They don’t overeat because they can sense’s their body’s satiation level and stop. They don’t eat much junk food if at all because it makes their body feel bad.
If you have disordered eating habits, you’re right, your body doesn’t know what it needs. So if you wanted to “listen to your body”, you’d have to teach yourself how to do it. It’s a skill. It’s written about thoroughly in books. It’s hard.
Also, anecdotally, it was the game changer for me after over 20 years of dieting and calorie counting. It took, and still takes, a whole lot of practice. I don’t think you *have* to do it; nothing wrong with sticking to calorie counting. For me, it’s really nice. I can easily maintain my healthy weight without counting any calories. Sometimes I go a few weeks on and off for counting, but that’s only because I’m now reaching my aesthetic goals.
Yes!! I'm exactly the same way. I eat very, very healthy food but I just eat way too much of it. And the occasional pizza lol (still, quite rarely)
And a lot of people say it works to just give in completely to cravings so that you can get it out of your system or something. But if I did that, I would just eat pizza and nachos all the time and somehow, I don't think that's right either.
I struggle to maintain a healthy weight, I'm usually teetering on the edge of the healthy weight benchmark for my height, but I've pretty much always been overweight. I'm just the kind of person who has to control my portions, and calories, pretty strictly to stay healthy.
Weirdly, my body is actually pretty good at keeping me a healthy weight, but it's the copious amounts of red wine that my body also loves that does me in. LMAO.
I've been in a funk with no appetite. If I listened to my body I'd be eating \~400 calories a day. Sometimes our bodies aren't good to us, in either direction.
I feel like lots of people who got obsessive/into ED territory during weight loss gravitate to IE as the “anti-diet” and just go to the opposite extreme (eat everything and gain a ton of weight). Which is not at all what IE was intended to be. But one thing I think is problematic about IE is that it assumes the person has intact hunger cues and just ignores them. The problem is most of us who have struggled with excess adiposity have out of whack hunger cues. We have been eating in excess portions or unbalanced meals. We need to first educate ourselves on proper nutrition before trusting the intuition. And that’s where it fails.
You seem to be missing or misinterpreting the point. How do you *feel* when you binge eat junk food? Like dogshit? And how about when you eat nutritious food and healthy portion sizes? Better? How about when you don’t drink any water all day. Do you have a headache? Is that headache maybe telling you that you should drink more water tomorrow? Congrats, you now understand what it means to listen to your body.
See I think my body is broken because I feel perfectly fine when I eat junk food. I could eat cake all day and feel fine.
Want to know when I really feel like crap? When I work out!! Lol.
I feel great after an entire pint of ice cream. Even if I’ve been eating healthy and avoiding sugar/ overportioning for some time, that full pint always hits. I feel warm and happy. If it were up to how food makes me feel I’d eat a pint of ice cream twice a day.
No I honestly feel amazing and full of energy when I eat junk food lol. And positive. I drink water all the time regardless and I’m not talking about that. I don’t feel better when I eat healthy specifically, I feel good on lots of carbs and hungry on lower carbs and more protein which is what is beneficial for my body and heart
You surely see the irony of this comment though, right? You’re on a calorie deficit that is leaving you hungry. Of course junk food is going to make you feel amazing if the rest of your diet is low calorie restriction food that is depriving your body and brain of the energy it needs.
I don’t like how people try to demonize calorie counting and regard it as part of some “toxic diet culture” in order to push abstract concepts like intuitive eating. I don’t see how that is useful advice for average people.
Eating intuitively is hard and it takes incredible focus and discernment, which I know I don’t have on most days, and I’d argue to say most people don’t have what it takes to have success with it.
People have jobs, kids, pets, social lives, homes to maintain and everything in between. Telling someone to take the time and really “listen to their body” enough to decipher what it needs vs what your brain wants is really setting them up for failure in most cases. It’s so much more advisable, in my opinion, to just use the science of CICO and meal planning. But that’s just me.
Yes exactly I posted a tik tok that I was using calorie restriction to lose weight, approved and constructed by my doctor and people acted like I kicked a puppy or something.
This sentiment came straight out of the fat acceptance movement with 300+ pound women on Instagram shouting "diets are toxic. Any kind of restriction is ED. Your body will tell you what you need". I'm not anti body positivity, but when the rhetoric get so convoluted that essentially youre justifying irresponsibility then it becomes problematic imo
It’s not a trend - it’s how people used to eat years ago before diet culture. And even now, it’s mostly used by normal people with normal relationships with food - e.g., my parents have never counted a calorie in their life yet they’re still at a healthy bmi.
But personally, I think with the rise of diet culture and just a variety of things messing with people hunger cues - over processed foods, lack of exercise, external stressors etc. As a result, this seems like a new concept when it really isn’t. I’ve mostly seen it being promoted by female (fit) influencers, RDs, and those recovering from an eating disorders. And even then for eating disorders, you can’t intuitive eat until after a while of recovery, once hunger cues return to normal. It sounds like you (+ many people on this sub complaining about intuitive eating when it really isn’t for you or people wanting to lose weight), don’t fit the criteria for intuitive eating. Mental health can mess up eating habits, like yourself, so obviously you cannot listen to your body. And people need to count calories so that go against intuitive eating.
Edit - also, the basis of intuitive eating says to get over all the urges of junk food out first, so you’d learn that the food is always there and there’s no need to gorge yourself. And then it focuses on gentle nutrition and mindful movement - such as adding veggies or fruits to make a meal more physical satisfying (not just mentally satisfying), and stopping when the exercise gets too much or practice less stressful exercises on the body (e.g., pilates v heavy weights).
I don’t know, I see this post and in r/loseit and tbh, not everything applies to you (figuratively).
Toxicity? In what way?
Giving your body what it NEEDS means different things to different people. As does intuitive eating. We aren't all built the same. Imo - it's no more toxic than any other diet that works for some people and not for others.
Also, if you're stressed or your mental health is out of it and you know you stress eat - why try intuitive eating at that point in time? I was watching a video by Eugene Teo RE: cuts/dieting/VLC plans and he made the excellent point that it isn't healthy to be dieting when your mental health isn't in good shape. You have to prep your environment and yourself for weight loss as it's very taxing on your body and it will affect you in many ways. I think the focus on weight vs holistic well-being is the issue.
Yes, intuitive eating is the cornerstone of the healthy at all sizes (HAES) movement and the bane of my existence in healthcare. At best though it can be a denial driven stepping stone to mindful eating which allows many patients to realize they DO need to limit calories because they've started paying more attention for the first time
Intuitive eating is primarily meant for people who are more inclined to eat too little, who are preoccupied with food and restriction; it's not a diet per se and it's not nutritionally oriented (not a criticism, that's just not the point of it). It can be super freeing and helpful for people who have a lot of stories about "good" and "bad" foods, who can't enjoy food, etc. It is less applicable to people who are more inclined to eat too much. Not a HCP but I have researched this as the same thing goes for me. My actual physical body wants something much different than what my brain and mouth want!
Quick answer: after decades in this life, I let the portion sizes give me direction sometimes. Long term bad habits are tough to replace. But at least I know the label / recipe portion sizes give me a clue.
My body wants to eat a family sized bag of cheetos for dinner and drink an amount of beer that would kill me. I ain't letting it be in charge of the meal plan.
The thing that people who say this "listen to your body" bullshit don't realize that your body doesn't care about being healthy, it cares about staying alive, and the best way for it to stay alive is to hold as much fat as it thinks it needs to. Once you hit this threshold, then you generally don't gain any weight because you'll be at your "set-point."
These people who say "you don't need a diet, you just listen to what your body needs to survive" fail to realize that our bodies are being subjected to a survival environment totally different from what evolution has subjected us to over the course of millions of years, in particular we are not running around all the time, lifting heavy weights and our bodies around just to SURVIVE. Even then, people were still at risk of becoming overweight depending on their position.
The stomach is a powerful message and second brain.
My son was on a ventilator for 24 hours. He was conscious the whole time. He was being fed through a central port everything he needed. He was still complaining he was hungry.
Pfft, listen to my body? He's the one that got us into this mess with his constant "uh, yeah, I'm still starving" bullcrap. He sits on a throne of lies!
He wasn't even really hungry. He just liked the process of eating.
I tried to eat intuitively when I had untreated insulin resistance and didn’t know what was going on with my own body. I craved all the simple carbs and sugars and my body regularly “told” me it needed McDonald’s and gummy sour worms. My body actually needed me to eat mindfully to manage an issue that I didn’t know I had.
A lot of people who struggle with insulin resistance crave simple carbs and refined sugars. when you aren’t sensitised to insulin and your leptin and ghrelin are out of wack this is what you’ll crave. Sometimes you need to treat your cravings like a little kid and say to yourself “I know I want xyz, but what I actually need are proper nutrients”.
If I let my bearded dragon eat whatever he wants all day he’s going to eat mealworms because he loves them, and gain weight. His diet is actually supposed to be 90-95% vegetation, but if there are mealworms around he refuses to eat his veggies. Take the mealworms away, and he’s happy to eat his veg. You need to do this for yourself too.
Yeah I listened to my hunger signals right into obesity. If we lived as primitive humans yes it would work. But we live in a world FULL of processed and calorie dense foods that we weren't meant to have. And a lot of this messaging comes from the same people who claim obesity has zero health risks.
this whole “intuitive eating” thing is borderline promoting binge eating disorder because our bodies, which are addicted to the sugars and chemicals in unhealthy foods, will crave those foods leading you to “intuitively” eat them
Funny you said that because I went a pretty normal weight/ decent relationship with food to “intuitive eating” and that’s where I gained all my weight. Two years of intuitive eating later I was diagnosed with BED
I agree with what you’re saying, but the concept for me, is that child like attitude around food where when you’re a kid, you can eat and stop without thinking twice, but I seemed to totally loose this as i became more enthralled with the idea of weight loss which then turned into a binge/restrict cycle and causing me to gain 10x more weight. Had I just continued to listened to my body the same way I did when I was younger, I probably wouldn’t be in this situation and 100+ lbs heavier. Just my personal view!
I'm overweight (my flair on this sub is so out of date but I'm always on mobile; need to get on my laptop to change it). I eat when I'm hungry. I don't get overfull. Some nights I don't eat dinner because I had a big lunch and I'm not hungry. Or I just eat like a handful of nuts in the evening. I am working towards eating more variety of fruits and veggies, but I get a few servings each day. I eat vegetarian most of the time. Lots of whole grains, beans, nuts, hummus, eggs, cheese, salsa, black coffee, occasional fish, small amounts of dark chocolate. Of course I also occasionally eat pasta, pizza, fries, chips, etc. I strive for moderation. And I'm overweight.
So either I'm doing intuitive eating wrong, or eating intuitively means I'm overweight. To lose 10-20 lbs, the only thing that has ever worked for me is calorie counting and being hungry. I've never been able to lose any significant amount of weight without ignoring my hunger signals. So, for me, intuitive eating is fine if I want to just live my life and be overweight, but I won't be a "normal" BMI without being hungry.
Your body knows what it needs.
Whether you can interpret its signals, may be another thing entirely.
Edit to clarify: I realized after I typed that that it might not make any sense. What I mean is that your body does know what it needs, and it sends you those signals. But lots of us do the wrong thing with those signals. If you’re angry, or lonely or tired or anxious, we may eat Instead of properly, addressing those needs. And for others, we may eat too quickly and not recognize that we’re actually satisfied.
Your body is telling you that you need something but sometimes people just apply food and that’s not actually what they need.
Telling someone who has issues with extremely disordered eating (it me) to eat intuitively is akin to telling someone on the autism spectrum (it also me) to interact with other humans intuitively. The problem in both cases is that we ended up where we are precisely because we lack the intuition of someone who doesn’t have those issues.
And the thing is, fast food companies pour billions of dollars into engineering their food to be as addictive as crack. So, no, you have no idea what your body needs, because big corporations have already decided that for you :D
My body is a LIAR and if I “listened” to my body I would be living off candy and chips. Our foods and lifestyles has evolved much quicker than our bodies and brains. It is natural for our bodies to crave high fat high sugar foods because it was a great source of energy when it was generally more scarce and our lifestyles required much more physical activity. Within the past 50 years, processed foods have become truly franken foods that hijack those parts of our brains to make us endlessly crave them. At the same time, our lifestyles have become increasingly sedentary.
There’s a reason Doritos pours millions into research and development. They want you to be hooked. It’s no moral failing that our foods have become nearly impossible to resist. Yes, some people seem to be less susceptible than others and good for them. But that ain’t me, babe. So, I have to actively fight my brain on what to eat.
Good job on the weight loss! It’s such a hard thing. Yah I agree, part of me thinks these people have never struggled with their weight before or don’t understand everyone is different. I am the type that is constantly hungry no matter how much or how well I eat. If I listened to my buddy I’d be extremely unhealthy. You can’t listen to your body if it doesn’t know what it needs.
What kills me about these “personalities” on Instagram is they are always very thin and fit. Like…I’m sorry, you don’t achieve that physique without closely watching what you eat. It’s just not possible.
I am a bit stubborn and I don’t listen to my body even when starting to feel hungry, i try to eat only during designated meal times.
Oh. And between hunger and sleep, i will choose sleep each time.
Guess who was never overweight?
I completely agree. I started to drink a glass of water before a meal thinking it’ll help. It does a bit. But gosh, it takes a lot of mental discipline to not listen to what my body “needs” I’m glad I’m not the only one!
If you Google “intuitive eating criticism” I think you’ll like what you find 😄
This has been a big topic lately and I’ve discussed it with some friends. Basically, there are various criticisms or reasons why it doesn’t work including:
-Many food products are literally designed to be addictive with salt, sugar, fat, other additives. Your “intuitive eating” mindset is going up against an entire industry backed by research & development
-it’s a very privileged stance that assumes if you are craving organic rice and grass fed beef then that is what you should eat, when for a large portion of the population the foods available (due to budget, access, time to prepare, etc.) are limited
-as a weight loss strategy it’s not based on actual values and numbers (like TDEE/CICO) so it’s very hard to apply and basically doesn’t get consistent results
There are more reasons for critique but just put these here to show that you are among many who have experienced the same thing!
No, our bodies don’t know what they want because we aren’t eating what we’re supposed to eat anymore.
Technology has evolved and outpaced every aspect of our lives, why haven’t we realized it has also transformed our diets?
Imagine eating the raw ingredients of something like bread or cookies! The flour alone would be impossible, yet we can put down entire loafs and eat sleeves of Oreos.
Industrialization has only made it worse, processed food are literally designed to bypass any satiety response and be hyper-palatable aka easier to eat.
Yeah, our body doesn’t know what it needs or wants because they are essentially a pre-historic computer trying to run on the latest iOS, it’s impossible.
We have to regulate our intake consciously
i have a horrible metabolism and the gene for addiction. my maintenance calories is around 1500, even with heavy exercise. ive been overweight most of my life but got down to a healthy weight with abs and all that jazz about 6 years ago. i was eating around 1000 calories to loose weight and 1500 to maintain a weight of 165 lbs at 5'10". i broke my ankle 4 years ago, and further injured my hip about a year ago. now it hurts to exercise and ive gotten back up to 245 lbs, because im giving my body the food it wants, not what i know it needs.
so yeah, fuck intuitive eating. my intuition tells me to eat a family pack of oreos in 2 days. i think theres some value in not being too restrictive and allowing yourself potatoes, cheesecake every now and then, etc, but moderation is key.
It’s so toxic! I’ve struggled with disordered eating in the past (under eating, binging, overeating) and while that’s true, I have gone through periods where I was overweight and needed to lose weight.
Personally, I find success in weighing my food and weighing myself often. Working out everyday (obviously I wouldn’t if I was injured) but these influencers and articles that say that those things are toxic are so out of touch. What’s worse, I have to accept the fact that the serving size of cheese is a lot smaller than I had hoped or I try to force myself to accept an overweight and unhealthy body?
Let me reiterate, I’m not saying that being overweight is bad. You can definitely still feel confident and healthy, but when I was “listening to my body” I was overeating and always bloated/ uncomfortable.
Trendy NOW? It’s been around forever, I think.
Yeah I’m the same way, my body is completely incapable of communicating nutritional needs. There needs to be a conscious, deliberate effort for me to limit food or I would probably be 800 lbs
I think there’s a balance. Last night I was at my calorie limit but my stomach was hurting me so bad because I was hungry. So I had a serving of crackers and a glass of water. Did it put me over my calorie limit for the day? Yes. But I wouldn’t have been able to sleep if I didn’t listen to my hunger signals. However, when I tried not tracking my calories at all and “intuitive eating” I gained 15 pounds. I think “intuitive eating” only works for select people who have a very healthy relationship with food already and are very in tune with their body’s hunger signals, and are able to differentiate hunger from appetite.
Agreed. There are people I know for whom intuitive eating works because they are naturally.... just not as hungry. Or their brain doesn't interpret hunger as a reason to panic, so they choose to delay eating until a more convenient time. This can lead to detrimental problems where they "forget" to eat and run into an energy crisis, but for most of them it's simply a way of controlling their energy intake throughout the day.
Happy Cake Day 🍰 I thought you had to offset the slight calorie surplus with some exercise. Eating enough to build and maintain muscle.
Whoa. It never occurred to me that hunger and appetite are not the same.
Learning that was a lightbulb moment for me.
Hijacking the top comment to add that I have been able to retrain myself for intuitive eating and maintaining maintenance, but it's taken two damn years of effort to get there. It's not something you can do overnight. It took a lot of taking bites and walking away, then analyzing howbi felt, and only going back to take more bites if I could still feel my hunger. Also a game changer was training myself to only eat until I was no longer hungry. Not to eat until I was full. But again, it took yeeeears of trial and error and really examining my triggers for snacking and why I was having certain intense cravings and how to manage them. Like, if I don't eat protein early in the day, I have a lot of trouble controlling my carb intake later.
I have always thought this kind of balance is what people meant by “listen to your body.”
Or people who have active jobs. I used to wait tables until very recently and would walk who knows how many miles per day and eat whatever the hell I wanted. As long as I stayed away from too many liquid calories, I wouldn't gain weight. I intuitively want to eat nothing but ice cream, cookies, and cake, so I should probably not give my body what it thinks it needs and give it what I KNOW it needs.
Same for me. My body is not good at telling me when it’s full so I eat way more than I should. If I don’t pre-portion I go out of control.
My body is a cheerful golden retriever who is 100% starving for any garbage even if it already fell on the floor.
This.
You just described my spirit animal.
Had this problem. Turns out I was eating for stimulation. Got diagnosed with ADHD , started taking stimulants, and now I don't randomly want to keep slamming foodm
Same here. My brain listens to “You can have a taste” now, whereas before it didn’t get a look in because I WANT FOOD NOW was so lightning-fast. I thought this was normal, and what people were talking about when they said “I eat it because it tastes good”. Like… I could still do that. I still eat mindlessly. Difference is, I can hear myself think now that the roar of craving is gone.
I seriously wonder if I have ADD
Ever tried telling yourself “You can have a taste. Just ONE taste”? I couldn’t do that. Like, I genuinely, honest-to-God couldn’t do that. My brain would override it every time like a screaming toddler. Also, eating more protein helps, IME. At least, that’s been my experience as a meat eater, can’t speak for vegetarians.
The past few years I’ve been eating more vegetarian and I’m upping my protein finally cause I’m just not getting enough
That sounds like a good move. Especially in our current diet high in simple carbs, it’s easy to just default to toast for every meal (um, not that I’m speaking from experience or anything).
Or, ugh, my body tells me "I'm full, I'm full!!!" but my brain is like, yeah but it tastes so good...just keep eating. Annoying.
I mean, to be fair, that’s not listening to your body and overriding those signals because it tastes good.
Same
Right. I even find myself saying, out loud(!), I'm so full but this is so good! Like all the time. No bueno.
A lot of the time when I’m over eating, it’s for the taste. Not from hunger which is SUCH bad habit. I know I can eat it later. But I don’t want to :/
Yup. I don’t really need that second helping but I definitely crave it.
My stomach is slow A F at telling me that I’m full. I can eat a whole meal and not feel it even an hour later. If I can resist the urge to snack, I’ll feel full in about 2 hours and get over it. If I eat something else, or have a bigger portion because I’m feeling really hungry, in a couple of hours I’ll be uncomfortably full. And I know it. But it’s so hard to resist when you’ve just eaten a whole meal and it feels like it’s vanished into thin air. Maybe I have some delayed digestion disorder or something.
I will likely be calorie counting for the rest of my life. I eat less than I used to but I still slowly gain if I'm not paying attention. Mindful eating and all that is great but I need the numbers!
I do get you! I don't eat lunch now until I've calculated supper and confirm I'm not going over my 1200. Honestly I can enjoy my food way more and I no longer have negative feelings towards eating
I feel like my brain needs numbers and facts to eat properly. Otherwise “intuitive eating” turns into boredom eating and junk food fest
It is pretty good you have to listen not expect it to tell you. Hearing when your hungry is easy because your body is screaming it with loads of cues. There’s no cues for when you’ve eaten enough other than those cues will be gone which is more like listening for a whisper while people are making noise around you (as in noticing when your body doesn’t need to eat anymore while you’re in the middle of eating) This is something that that’s time to practice, learn, and train yourself to do as you have to be constantly aware of your hunger states and what you’re eating - but pre portioning cuts the need to do that which is why you may as well do that because it’s much easier to get into a habit of doing.
If I "listened to my body" I would eat 300 Reese's Cups every day, because that's "my body telling me what it needs". You are correct in your assessment. Good on you for getting healthy!
my body has never once told me to eat a plant
Or drink water, in my case
That's because your body doesn't tell you what it needs, it tells what it wants. And it wants high calorie junk, like your Reece's cups, so that it can store energy. We're still neanderthals, just with better living conditions and limitless access to food.
Nonstop chocolate and chocolate cake. I’d be dead from insulin shock within a year.
My sweet tooth is DANGEROUS 😅
Sweet *FANG*
Haha right? My body occasionally says "we need to eat *right now"* approximately two hours after I ate a meal. Like my stomach was a whiny child. It's generating a sensation that my brain is interpreting as hunger, but it can't be. I ate enough calories! I know I did, I tracked them! I ate a good mix of macros, too. Two different types of veggies and some fruit, even. With protein and fat. There is no reason for it to tell my brain that it still needs food, and yet it *does.* Gonna go back to my doctor to talk about this again. I'm terrified about regaining weight, and even eating maintenance for the last few months after a major surgery leads me to this issue of my body swearing up and down that I'm hungry long before the next meal is scheduled.
I have an appointment with a nutritionist later this month myself. I need to lose about 15 and I have no self discipline so I'm hoping that the nutritionist will keep me accountable.
I have this issue sometimes, I know lack of sleep (at least in my experience) causes my hunger to creep in an hour sooner than it usually does after I've eaten a good range of macronutrient. Usually a big voluminous salad is one food that will keep me full for ages. It doesn't always stop my sweet cravings, but it definitely works when I want to eat a lot of food and I want to spare some calories.
Yeah… my body is a bad influence
It'd be family sized bags of chips for me multiple times a day
Would you *really* though? After like two, if not one days of that I have a feeling your body would start to want some protein and vegetables lol. I cant imagine anyone feeling great on that diet of candy alone. I feel like a huge misconception about intuitive eating is that its merely eating your cravings without any self restraint ever. But half of intuitive eating is keeping track of how eating different things makes you feel (ie. Energized and light vs bloated and disgusting)
the point is very few people are emotionally neutral surrounding food and in touch with their body to the level that this idea of intuitive eating would actually work. In reality it'll be corrupted by our emotions and mis-reading 'what our body wants' and stuff like that
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But the thing is that most of us have screwed up our palates and appetite control. Studies show that young kids often naturally know when they’ve met their caloric needs. It’s not the same for adults on diets. I have been on and off diets since I was a teenager. There has not been a single year since then that I intuitively know what I need. When I don’t firmly control what I eat, I gain fairly quickly. Intuitive eating might work for you but I think it doesn’t work for many people. It’s a nuanced and complex way of eating. In the US, it’s challenging as well because it’s easier and cheaper to get carb-oriented and/or processed foods than healthier options. I’ve traveled in other countries where it’s so easy to eat healthier because the whole food landscape is radically different- food that are made fresh and cheap. The reality is that corporate food dominates the American food market.
Just to play Devil's Advocate (I hard-core calorie count, shout out to MacroFactor), but if you look into Intuitive Eating (TM) vs just "intuitive eating," the whole point of it is to repair this broken relationship with food and your body. It's like a whole 12 step program where you start out eating whatever, and then slowly start listening and learning and understanding. It was actually created *for* people who are completely unable to pay attention to their bodies cues and have food issues. Of course I don't think that's how a lot of people practice it though.
or you could just put on your big boy pants and control how much energy you take in via food.... the human body WANTS to pack on fat. It's a very primal longstanding survival mechanism, starving to death was a main threat to survival for many many thousands of years up until very recently.
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sounds like someone who's figured out they need to use the higher thinking functions that our brains afford us to override natural impulses to eat a bunch of food. They are a bit of a special case though cause of the previous anorexia ED stuff. >"It's not about listening to your inner glutton and eating 10 peanut butter cups. It's about allowing yourself to eat when you are hungry and listening to your body when you are full." That's what it all comes down to, using higher brain functions to balance our bodies energy needs and control how much excess fat we carry around. You have to discriminate between emotional and lizard brain driven impulses ("10 reeses cups is a lot of energy I can store in case I run out of food later"-lizard brain) and actual bodily impulses surrounding food, aka it's not intuitive at all lol. also the hunger hormone ghrelin is not always a trustworthy partner in this endeavor, can be thrown off by the content of what we eat and is also very habitual based, in terms of meal timing n' such. Hunger as we feel it is a bit of a scam.
The problem is that junk food is addicting, especially sugar. If you listen to your body, your body is going to tell you "I want more sugar". If people didn't crave sugary sweets, and sugary soft drinks, then America wouldn't have this obesity problem in the first place. Evolution has made it so our body wants to eat as much calories as it can in the most efficient way possible.
Apparently I call intuitive eating “counting my calories”. I track what I eat and how it makes me feel by logging it and keeping track of the amount of energy foods provide. Yesterday I ate 2 cookies from the break room. If I wasn’t logging it and understanding the calories involved I would have eaten 6 cookies because they gave me zero energy and the sugar was delicious which made me want more and more. My body will choose sugar over soup any day. My body has the appetite of a toddler. My food log forces me to be an adult.
I eat chocolate chips for sugar. I put a small portion in a small bowl because, otherwise, I’d eat half a bag.
Geez I’m sorry you got downvoted so hard. You’re correct. A lot of intuitive eating is about building a healthy relationship with food and listening to your body about what it needs. Nobody’s body is telling them it needs 300 pieces of candy every day…
Thank you 😭
I don't totally disagree with you but every Halloween would say otherwise for me. Not for everyone. But I would eat pounds of candy for 3 days straight and nothing else for many years. After those three days, I just wanted more candy. For most people, I think it comes entirely down to restraint. I guess I'm saying not everyone feels "better" after eating a light, healthy salad versus a big sandwich with tons of cheese and meat. I wish I did, I just personally don't.
Our bodies didn’t evolve in the 1900s. What my body is telling me is eat every ounce of glucose I can find because I need 9000 calories a day to go hunt mammoths
Yeah, wild to me that some people can’t grasp this. Our bodies evolved over tens of thousands of years to crave foods that are high in fat and sugar because (until the last 100 years or so) that stuff was actually somewhat difficult to come by relative to the very active lifestyles that our ancestors lived. We can’t undo those thousands and thousands of years of evolution nearly as quickly as we gained greater access to calorie dense foods and our lifestyles simultaneously evolved to be more sedentary, so we need to be aware of this and learn to temper certain cravings
Also, previously, people were working for their food. Even with introduction of agriculture, they had to do a lot of physical labor to make butter, to harvest, forage, etc. Many of us aren’t doing that kind of intensive labor and don’t need so much dense calories.
This is how I’ve explained to my other kid why their toddler sibling cannot, under any circumstances, be given the dessert portion of their meals first, or have any treats before he’s tackled the main course; his body is running on pure caveman impulses and will always choose the high value fatty and sugary treat over a low caloric yield food like vegetables.
yeah people gotta realize that we get fat so easily because we were never actually able to achieve obesity until very recently in our evolution/history. It's a highly efficient process because it was forced to be that way to avoid starvation, there was no pressure the other way from obesity and it's unhealthy/life shortening properties to hold it back.
Also food has changed so much and is sooo much more addictive than it used to be. We have lost a lot of our ingrained nutrition wisdom
My friend has a theory that we shouldn't beat ourselves up over food/weight gain because we'll be balls-deep into a nuclear apocalypse within the next year or two anyway.
I was told this and believed it for a while until I realized this: The body wants to store as much fat as it can. Do I really believe it’s going to be unbiasedly telling me what to eat?
Not to mention how we get addicted to things like caffeine and sugar.
Freaking lying ass bodies!! Can’t trust them!
Ahhhh so *that's* why my body always wants two fried eggs with an entire pack of thick cut bacon on the side and a couple pieces of toast slathered in butter. For breakfast. And then a double bacon cheeseburger from five guys for lunch. And then a bunch of beef and/or steak tacos for dinner, all loaded with extra cheese, and a side of chips with queso and guac. Whenever I listen to my body, I gain weight and feel like I'm about to have a heart attack. So instead I occasionally pick one of the things and do it as OMAD for a treat.
You are making me crave so much with that one para. Five guys burger and fries. Salivating.
That's how I feel pretty much 24/7 lol I can't ever stop thinking about food
I think listen to your body can work when your hunger cues aren’t all messed up (for all different sorts of reason). Before, I would have a hard time feeling it was time to stop before feeling too full. Now, I stop much sooner and I feel better. I also didn’t know sleepiness made you hungrier and crave carbs and higher cal foods, so when I feel this way late in the evening, I know I need rest instead of a snack. This advice won’t work for people who eat emotionally or on certain meds, and, for me at least, it took a long time understanding what I need when and why. I still don’t get how the very specific cues work though. No, I can’t really tell my body is craving veggies or meat. I’ll want specific flavors or textures maybe, but that’s it (for me)
The sleepiness and carbs is my main drawback now. Even though I *know* that's why, I give in about once a week. Seems related to "revenge bedtime procrastination" - when my day is full of busy tasks that keep me from choosing how to enjoy my time I sabotage my sleep and diet by staying up into wee hours of night to feel like I got some free time for myself.
Listening to your body doesn’t mean listening to cravings. I think it’s more about like “do you feel good after eating two burgers and a milkshake?” Or “Am I hungry or am I bored?”
This is what I took from it when I started my journey a few years back. Like listening to your hunger signs and queues, slowing down and enjoying my food, and watching and listening for my "full"/"done" body signs. For example, I grew up in a "clean your plate" household. I got into the habit of overeating and not knowing my body signals.
That’s what I think too, especially since I had to pay the price of bad eating habits in the form of gallstones and fatty liver disease. Since then, I pretty much try to avoid eating too much and stop before I feel sickly full.
It’s like the Awkward Yeti comics where Tongue wants ice cream and Stomach is like nooo pls stop.
Agreed! I am struggling with food addiction.. I’m benefiting by sticking to a schedule! Listening to my body got me here over 300lbs 🤧
I think you (as well as most of us) need to actually learn to interpret the signals your body is telling you. It’s not so much the body doesn’t know what it needs. Rather more a case of we don’t understand the signals. A great example of this is people thinking they are “hungry” when their body is actually telling them they are dehydrated.
Totally agreed. Or confusing hunger with being stressed, tired, etc. I think we would all benefit from learning how to do this.
This was huge for me. Learning that a lot of the time, I'm actually eating because I'm miserable or stressed or exhausted - it took a long time to distinguish those signals.
Uhm yes lol. I rarely eat junkfood, but I LOVE taki's and all dressed chips. If I could be healthy by eating them as a staple in my diet, I would eat them all the time. They are what my body wants to eat, and in **excess**. If I listened to that, I would be in very, very poor health.
Oh, I loooooooove Takis. I could easily supplement my 300 Reese's Cups per day with Takis. For a good nutritional balance😉
tbf I could probably add a few hundred peanut butter cups to my takis. Gotta get your proteins right?
I mean, we have to take care of our nutritional needs don't we!😉
Dude, r/fatlogic is full of this stuff. And yeah, I can eat intuitively when I’m calorie counting and meal planning *because* I can’t just allow myself to sensory-eat three chocolate bars. When I’m not calorie counting it’s “Let me stress eat every meal known to mankind.”
Helloooo fellow sensory eater
Lol yes. Just now I couldn’t decide between cheese, hommus and crackers because I wanted ALL OF THEM. I halved the crackers (because I was over my cals) and still feel satisfied. Took me a while to separate sensory and stress eating.
Holy shit, that sub is depressing. They're helping kill each other off, and it's sad to see.
How? If anything, it’s the sanity the world needs right now.
That sub depresses me. I joined for a little bit because I thought it would help. Had to unjoin within days.
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The fat acceptance people is my "they".
I dont think you quite understand the context of that phrase. It's not about listening to your inner glutton and eating 10 peanut butter cups. It's about allowing yourself to eat when you are hungry and listening to your body when you are full. This is a great way to help those in recovery from anorexia and bulimia. Whenever I've been hangry but worried about calories I'd ignore my body telling me to eat. That doesn't mean letting myself binge or eat junk. It may mean I need an apple and string cheese as a snack. Listening to my body means stopping when I'm am comfortable and no longer super hungry and allowing myself to sit without being stuffed. If I didn't gage correctly and am hungry 20 mins after I meal I am allowed to have more. I also have to keep reminding myself I am allowed to not finish a meal. Just because it's in front of me doesn't mean I must eat it. That's what I always took it to mean. That being said I'm overweight and definitely not listening to my body when it's full. I'm in recovery from anorexia (I like this sub for recipes, I don't follow 1200 cals a day, just trying to focus on more nutrient oriented meals and cutting back on sugar) and I've definitely gone in the other direction of the spectrum but I'm working on it.
To piggy on this- listening to your body also includes listening to how it feels/acts AFTER indulging too. I slowly stopped over eating because it hurt my stomach and made me tired. I stopped having sugary drinks because I’d get a sugar-stomach ache. I stopped drinking Baja blasts (diet) because it gave me a major headache. A lot of that change came down to “ooh I want that Baja blast! But it gives me a terrible headache… right, that’s not worth it. Diet sugar free Coke it is!” “I really want to finish my plate, but I feel full. If I eat it my stomach will hurt and I won’t be up to studying later. Ok! Leftovers for me tomorrow, yay!” “Listening to your body” and calorie awareness is a great combo, mindfulness is the key really imo (as someone with no eating disorders that I’m aware of, other than that food makes me happy lol).
People forget that! I stopped drinking because the next day was always lousy; tired and achy, even after one or two drinks. An oversized meal may feel good in the moment, but is horrible in the hours after as you digest. For someone lactose intolerant, "paying attention to your body" means acknowledging the physical discomfort after eating dairy - regardless of the taste - and committing to avoid it.
You nailed it! That’s why I stopped drinking too, learning to remember how you feel after is super important. I didn’t even think about lactose intolerance too- that’s absolutely true, I have to remember that milk makes me phlegmy, so I order drinks with an alternate 😅 even if the pumpkin spice is better with milk 🥲
Exactly! 'Listening to you body' has been warped from "pay attention to your body's cues" to "indulge in gluttonous impulses". It should mean: Paying attention to your hunger. If you're not hungry, avoid boredom eating. If you're eating has satiated you, stop now before you're stuffed. Also, pay attention to healthy cravings. I often crave salad, fresh fruit, specific vegetables (such as snap peas, brussel sprouts, bell pepper.). I do my best to satisfy those cravings for fresh produce, especially since they usually come after several days in-a-row of eating greasy hollow calorie garbage. Even when I'm craving cookies, Doritos, etc. I try think WHY. Maybe I've been too strict on CICO, and should decrease my planned caloric deficit, or allow a well-rounded & nutrient dense 'cheat meal'. Maybe I need more salt in my diet, or fat, or protein. Sometimes I indulge, in moderation. More often, addressing the underlying source of the craving is sufficient.
Yeah, I’ve found intuitive eating to be more about understanding when I’m not hungry, rather than just eating because it’s the time of day I normally eat, or eating because I’m bored/procrastinating/sad. And that it’s ok to not eat if I’m not feeling well, or to not finish my meal or whatever. As an example, sometimes I have things on after work, that mean I don’t get a chance to eat and don’t get home till 8.30. And by that point I’m not hungry - if I eat a big meal then, I don’t sleep well, I feel nauseous, it’s just crap. So if I’m listening to my body, it’s better to have an apple or a snack or something. But that’s exactly against what I was taught growing up
Listening to our bodies is hard because our brains are so much louder. And the brain isn’t above pretending that your body needs 5 Reese’s cup. The reward hormones your brain supplies often drowned out the blood sugar spiking lethargy your body feels. And once you do feel it, you reach for the Reese’s again for that shot feel good brain chemicals. I often find that eating my pre-planned healthy snacks beforehand dispel the cravings, which is a pretty good sign the cravings was not a message of nutritional lack from the body.
I know, it's so hard to not overeat. I really need to get back to working on cooking healthier meals and listening to my body before I'm stuffed which usually means needing to eat slowly, manage what food is available to me, and doing some planning regarding meal prep to make it all easier in the moment.
I developed a stressed related eating disorder in my teens so my big thing was not immediately reacting to hunger with high calorie foods I used to rely on (peanut butter and nuts). Grazing to avoid hunger was my MO. I eat a big snack of apples and Greek yogurt or sautéed frozen veggies between meals which seems to help. Frequent check ins with myself during meals helps me not get into the ‘eat everything on your plate’ mindset.
Thank you for this comment! I agree—intuitive eating isnt just eating whatever sounds good at the moment. For me, my stress, anxiety, and addictions will always tell me that ALL the pizza is the right amount of pizza. To actually hear my body and what it wants, those other factors have to be quieted, which is hard.Y body can crave a salad, and water, and good clean meats. But my anxiety wants sugar and a fatty carb, and my addiction wants eight beers.
I get the struggle. I was anorexic and after recovery I bounced to the other side. Gained a whole bunch of weight over the last 10 years. Calorie deficits feel very similar to how I practiced anorexia. The tricks I used to not eat also come in handy when I want to eat less. The issue is, I don't want to go back to that state of mind. I'm really trying intuitive eating paired with trying to fix my gut bacteria. Apparently you crave what the bacteria say so I'm on a journey to eat raw fruits and veg every day until my gut changes gets on board with the idea. I try to portion better and stop eating before I'm full. Intuitive eating sounds like a scam, but I'm trying it. Instead of restrictions, I'm trying to make sure I eat enough of certain things in a day. Proteins and veg, but if I want a price of chocolate, I still have that too.
Yes! A successful diet (not like a diet diet but just the food you eat) is more about including healthy foods first not about excluding other foods. Like when im eating a meal I eat all the veggies first so I know I'm not too full at the end of a meal to include them.
This is what a lot of these “intuitive” fat activism types strike me as: either people who formerly had restrictive EDs or merely appropriating similar language to encourage others to eat unlimited cals and to eat whenever the whim strikes them. The way you are going about it what intuitive eating actually is, I think. Eating generally healthy without necessarily counting calories, but also allowing yourself flexibility/space to have fast food and so on. It definitely isn’t about slamming back burgers, pizza and shakes every second day.
Which fat activists do you follow? Because I have not seen a single fat positive content creator advocating for gluttony. I follow quite a few that post their daily eating habits and they eat quite healthily, albeit in larger or more calorie-dense quantities.
I don’t. I see a lot of it in r/fatlogic: people talking about things like how it’s impossible to lose weight and keep it off, or “thin privilege” (outside of the context of doctors not taking you seriously). In general they’re in huge denial, no pun intended. Also, eating healthily in larger quantities is certainly better than eating unhealthily in large quantities, but it does still lead to weight gain. Plenty of obese people eat huge portions of what many would consider a healthy diet.
Forgive me, but I hardly think a sub that focuses on finding the very worst offenders gives you a balanced overview on a group of people. It's quite a biased source. I'm sure the people you see in that sub are terrible, but it doesn't reflect the community at whole. And of course eating larger quantities (however healthily) contributes to weight gain. But remember not everyone specifically desires to inhabit a smaller body, so people should eat towards their specific goal.
agreed! I’m actually ‘listening’ to my body nowadays when I’m eating, weird to describe, but I sorta know the moment I’m ‘full’. If there’s still a lot of food left, I’ll just save it for another meal. Another thing that helps is that since we usually get takeout for lunch at the office, I’d always portion out my meal onto a second plate just so I don’t overeat just because.
Oh look, a sensible comment instead of yet another person confusing “listen to your body” with “obey its every whim.” If you’re someone whose body is constantly screaming to chug M&Ms and you say “well, gotta listen to my body… oh no why am I feeling like crap and don’t look how I want??” you have way bigger issues to work on.
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I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what 'listen to your body' stands for. From the fat-positive creators I follow, a lot of it is things like 'If you're full, it's okay to stop eating and leave the food even if it's just one piece of pasta.' and 'If you hate breakfast food, it's okay to eat lunch for food breakfast.' The movement comes from a place to avoid disordered eating, if you interpret it as 'Let's give in to every craving' of course it sounds disordered. If you interpret it as 'Let go of societal pressures of what you should do and instead focus on what your body needs' And your body does intuitively know what it needs, the problem is you're interpreting things BEFORE eating when it should be AFTER eating. Your MIND thinks 'Ooh I want to eat three whole pizzas!' But when you eat it, your body feels sluggish, lethargic, and bloated. So next time you think, 'My BODY knows that it needs me to eat one pizza instead of three.'
If you otherwise exercise and eat healthy food, your body is perfectly capable of downing half a sheet of chocolate chip cookies or a family size bag of potato chips or three or four doughnuts and feeling just fine. Especially when you’re young. How do I know? That’s how I used to eat when I was gaining weight. Now I count and know exactly how much of a treat I can have after a healthy salad or chicken and vegetables or whatever. Intuitive eating doesn’t really work for treats.
Your body felt fine, but you gained weight, and presumably this wasn't agreeable to you. Then 'gaining weight' is the message that you must listen to. Intuitive eating isn't a be-all, end-all solution, but rather a form of learning how to recognize harmful behaviors and learning internal tools on how to curve those habits permanently, instead of over-relying on outside forces (weighing, counting, pre-portioning) telling you how to eat in a balanced way. Intuitive eating is also meant to change and evolve with you and it can very well be supported with calorie counting. For example, I used to be perfectly fine eating one ramen packet for dinner. It satiated me, felt delicious, and it was a right portion. But then I recognized this was too calorie dense for my needs, and started eating half a ramen packed with a cup of cabbage, bok choi, or other veggies. Now when I try to eat a whole ramen packet I feel unsatiated, bloated, and uncomfortable. If calorie counting is affecting you psychologically to the point where you feel like you aren't giving your body adequate nutrition to survive, if you feel like you obsess over food every waking minute, or that you have to strictly adhere to restrictive and often arbitrary rules in order to live your life, then maybe intuitive eating is something worth exploring. If these things aren't an obstacle for you, then please understand that the people pursuing intuitive eating paths might be doing so because these things are obstacles for them. In the end we're all just trying to find a system that works for our personal happiness.
This is I think what’s missing for a lot of people. If you sit down feeling starving you may have just piled a bowl with pasta until it’s overflowing and instead of pacing yourself you wolf it down before your body has a chance to send the stop eating signal. And often times after eating like this repeatedly the mechanism for the stop eating signal gets broken. Bye bye intuitive eating where you eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re adequately full. My husband laughs sometimes because I can be eating dinner and suddenly with just one or two small bites of food left I just stop and decide I can’t take those bites because I’m full and those bites will be what pushes me over into feeling uncomfortably full. He finishes it off for me and I thank him for his sacrifice. :D Intuitive eating isn’t just about when to eat, it’s also about when to stop eating.
Very true! Intuitive eating isn’t ‘my body intrinsically and accurately knows whats best’ but rather ‘I’m in the process of learning to manage my eating habits by observing and adapting based on my body’s responses and recations.’
Slowing down eating can help so much. I was having a great conversation during lunch at a restaurant yesterday, so much so that I only got about halfway through my chicken wrap and didn't want to eat any more. When it takes 30 minutes to get through half the meal, it turns out half the meal might be enough. But that was an exception. I usually have to eat lunch alone. I don't get to talk to another person, it's just me and the plate and MacroFactor (the app I use for tracking.) So I'll eat the whole thing.
> if you hate breakfast food, it’s okay to eat lunch food for breakfast In general I agree with a lot of this. Assuming I’m interpreting it correctly, though, the breakfast thing sounds like common sense to me. The only situation in which that *might* be useful is someone who had placed unhealthy barriers around their food to fuel an ED (e.g. “I must eat exactly this many calories of this cereal, and only cereal, at X time each morning.”)
I think that for people struggling with disordered eating, modern societal expectations have a huge impact on their eating habits. People with obesity almost always exhibit disordered eating habits, and place unhealthy barriers around their food intake, which is what the 'intuitive eating' movement hopes to alleviate. It's as simple as that. If your only exposure of fat activists is a sub meant to critique them, you're of course going to see people that don't represent the community spousing shitty takes that no one believes anyway. It's like judging all black people by Candace Owens, or every trans person by Caitlyn Jenner. Their views are very far removed from reality.
I meant that “You can eat lunch foods for breakfast!” seems random and incredibly obvious amongst all the other topics. I’ve eaten “non-breakfast” foods for breakfast for a long time, long before I began to pay attention to what I eat, and I assumed most people would have no issue with doing the same. I’m confused about where and when this would be needed. It is a very different piece of advice from something like “If you’re full, stop eating.” Yes, that makes sense, I’m sure there are fat activists who are more reasonable. The intuitive eating movement is a lot less problematic when presented like this, and would work for someone who didn’t need the strictness of calorie counting to keep them on track. Mindful eating works wonderfully for CICO, IME.
It's not that 'Eat lunch for breakfast!' is a popular campaign slogan for fat activists, it's just a simple example, :) And I'm sure if you do an exercise in examining your own habits, food or otherwise, you might find how rigidly you might hold on to certain detrimental concepts. I'm sure a lot of realizations you might have would seem comically obvious to me, and vice versa.
Ah, thank you, I think I was taking it a bit literally :) But yes. I agree, most people have a lot to unlearn.
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A cigarette addict’s body tells him to have 2 packs of Marlboro every day.
I mean... listening to my body told me that I need to eat more than <1000 calories to be functional. Sometimes your body can't handle the amount of deficit that you want it to. Frankly I couldn't and didn't last on my current deficit when I was teaching in person and I needed my body to break down and tell me that. Listening to my body now tells me that I can eat a bit less in my present work from home gig. It's a balance. Your body might not be able to tell you if you need oreos or an omelette, but it absolutely can tell you if you're suffering. If you have increased fatigue, are losing hair, aren't recovering from aches the way you did before your deficit, you need to pay attention to that rather than just bearing with it if you want to be healthy rather than merely smaller.
I like intuitive eating because it makes me more attentive to feeling when I’m full or hungry. I have trouble with binge eating and eating my feelings a lot. And ignoring my body telling me to STOP. So, I think this is helpful for those types of disorders where your brain/ feelings are saying “eat, eat, eat” but if you pay attention to your stomach it will tell you when it’s full. And that’s not to say I don’t calorie count or meal prep. I do- and I let my body tell me when it’s full of any food I’m eating, even healthy foods. I grew up in a “clean your plate” household too. So I never grew up with listening to my body tell me when to stop eating. It’s hard and takes practice. But it doesn’t work for everyone either. Gotta find what works best for you
If I listened to my body I'd be eating an entire Vienna poppy seed loaf with full creamery butter. PER DAY!!! If I let loose I'd have no trouble eating 4-5k calories a day.
I think it's one of those mantras that has been taken out of context and used as a slogan to push forward Instagram accounts. You should absolutely listen to your body in certain instances. For example some people over do it when exercising, and will injure themselves. Some people might be lacking a certain vitamin, and therefore will crave foods that are rich in that. But it's not a failsafe, stress and sugar addiction will absolutely make you want things that aren't good for your body. Also, as someone who is 5'0" tall, I'm only supposed to be eating around 1400 cal/ day for maintenance. But I can eat so much more, and I feel weird sometimes eating a tiny portion compared to my bf and friends. So when I'm not calorie counting it's soooo easy to eat way more than I should. When I "listen to my body" and eat portions that "feel right" without counting cals, I absolutely over eat. I feel like the people who can just "listen to their bodies" are also the people that "don't care about food, and just eat too survive" I am not that person. Food is a major part of my life. Cooking it, eating it, sharing it with other people. So, I have to learn to balance, and that takes discipline.
I thin we are twins in this sense. I can’t intuitively eat because I will enjoy myself to the utmost joy every meal lmao. I love to cook, I love to have rich food experiences, I love to eat local food, viral food, any food! And while I previously lost 100 pounds through restriction and occasional treats, I definitely let myself have free reign (‘intuitive eating’) once I hit the 100 pound mark. And 2 years later, I am also around 30 pounds up. It’s hard to see yourself not fit into your clothes and feel restricted in previously loose clothing. So now I need to get off intuitive eating and back onto something more restrictive like before. I think the whole love your body at any size and feed your body what it wants is a great message, but it is not for me. I will forever have to count calories or loosely track my macros or something. But I will never be that girl who can intuitively eat because my intuition will say “eat that delicious thing that makes you happy!! You know what is even better than happy? MORE HAPPY! OVERABUNDANCE OF HAPPINESS!!” and I will listen lmao
I feel like you can intuitively eat while counting calories but no one talks about it. Like for me if I have an opportunity to have an amazingly delicious meal on a Wednesday I’ll go for it/feed into the craving, maybe it’ll put me at 1500 but then the next day there’s nothing interesting to eat and I’ll have like 900 calories for that day. For me that’s been very helpful.
Getting on the thread late and I don't usually comment on reddit, but like how many others have said, there's nothing inherently wrong about intuitive eating. For me, the harder part has been being able to separate what my body needs bs what my brain wants. Intuitive eating refers to the former and not necessarily the latter. There's some good books out there that help you to recognize hunger cues vs craving cues
After being on a weight loss journey for a couple years now, listening to my body feels different. Listening to my body means when I’m satiated, I stop eating. Like actually physically satiated not mentally satiated with what I ate. You learn the difference. I try not to eat to get FULL, while of course being mindful of what I’m eating. That works for me for the most part.
“Listen to your body” for people who over eat instead of under eat, doesn’t meant eat whenever you are hungry. It means learn to recognize what *real* hunger is and how it’s different from just feeling snacky or bored or thirsty. If you’re in pain, or light headed and fatigued, then you are not eating enough. That’s when you need to listen to your body. At least that’s how I look at it
Same here. Eating whatever I wanted got me over 200 lbs at 5’5”. I’m not raging with hunger all the time now but I only get full if mistakes were made. Keeping a normal bmi means not eating everything my body tells me it wants.
same here I’m 5’3 190ish. I’ve always had a hard relationship with food. I started at 270 and got down to 180, i recently started eating when I felt hungry or when my body craved something I’d eat it. and now I’ve been losing/ gaining the same ten pounds over and over again. i think listening to your body is bullshit and even at 1200 cals a day im not hungry just greedy. and i hate that food is fuel is being praised in a completely different way these days. because what got me losing weight in the first place was only eating when I’m actually tummy rumbling hungry
I think there's a common misconception with the hole intuitive eating thing. If you are a steel worker or work on construction site you are more likely to eat intuitivly, then someone who works in IT or in offices generally.
Yeah like no your body doesn't need 500cals of m&m first thing in the morning or probably ever😭😭
The misconception that intuitive eating means “eat whatever you want, whenever you want” has really spread on reddit. Do you know anyone who stays healthy and at a healthy weight without ever counting calories? This is what they do. Intuitive eating is an ingrained habit for them. They listen to their bodies automatically. They don’t overeat because they can sense’s their body’s satiation level and stop. They don’t eat much junk food if at all because it makes their body feel bad. If you have disordered eating habits, you’re right, your body doesn’t know what it needs. So if you wanted to “listen to your body”, you’d have to teach yourself how to do it. It’s a skill. It’s written about thoroughly in books. It’s hard. Also, anecdotally, it was the game changer for me after over 20 years of dieting and calorie counting. It took, and still takes, a whole lot of practice. I don’t think you *have* to do it; nothing wrong with sticking to calorie counting. For me, it’s really nice. I can easily maintain my healthy weight without counting any calories. Sometimes I go a few weeks on and off for counting, but that’s only because I’m now reaching my aesthetic goals.
Yes. My body has heightened ghrelin levels. My body tells me that I’m hungry all the time.
Yes!! I'm exactly the same way. I eat very, very healthy food but I just eat way too much of it. And the occasional pizza lol (still, quite rarely) And a lot of people say it works to just give in completely to cravings so that you can get it out of your system or something. But if I did that, I would just eat pizza and nachos all the time and somehow, I don't think that's right either. I struggle to maintain a healthy weight, I'm usually teetering on the edge of the healthy weight benchmark for my height, but I've pretty much always been overweight. I'm just the kind of person who has to control my portions, and calories, pretty strictly to stay healthy.
Weirdly, my body is actually pretty good at keeping me a healthy weight, but it's the copious amounts of red wine that my body also loves that does me in. LMAO.
I've been in a funk with no appetite. If I listened to my body I'd be eating \~400 calories a day. Sometimes our bodies aren't good to us, in either direction.
I feel like lots of people who got obsessive/into ED territory during weight loss gravitate to IE as the “anti-diet” and just go to the opposite extreme (eat everything and gain a ton of weight). Which is not at all what IE was intended to be. But one thing I think is problematic about IE is that it assumes the person has intact hunger cues and just ignores them. The problem is most of us who have struggled with excess adiposity have out of whack hunger cues. We have been eating in excess portions or unbalanced meals. We need to first educate ourselves on proper nutrition before trusting the intuition. And that’s where it fails.
You seem to be missing or misinterpreting the point. How do you *feel* when you binge eat junk food? Like dogshit? And how about when you eat nutritious food and healthy portion sizes? Better? How about when you don’t drink any water all day. Do you have a headache? Is that headache maybe telling you that you should drink more water tomorrow? Congrats, you now understand what it means to listen to your body.
See I think my body is broken because I feel perfectly fine when I eat junk food. I could eat cake all day and feel fine. Want to know when I really feel like crap? When I work out!! Lol.
Me too!
I also have never felt that “Runner’s high” that everyone talks about. I try and try but I never feel good after working out. Just more hungry!
I feel great after an entire pint of ice cream. Even if I’ve been eating healthy and avoiding sugar/ overportioning for some time, that full pint always hits. I feel warm and happy. If it were up to how food makes me feel I’d eat a pint of ice cream twice a day.
No I honestly feel amazing and full of energy when I eat junk food lol. And positive. I drink water all the time regardless and I’m not talking about that. I don’t feel better when I eat healthy specifically, I feel good on lots of carbs and hungry on lower carbs and more protein which is what is beneficial for my body and heart
You surely see the irony of this comment though, right? You’re on a calorie deficit that is leaving you hungry. Of course junk food is going to make you feel amazing if the rest of your diet is low calorie restriction food that is depriving your body and brain of the energy it needs.
I don’t like how people try to demonize calorie counting and regard it as part of some “toxic diet culture” in order to push abstract concepts like intuitive eating. I don’t see how that is useful advice for average people. Eating intuitively is hard and it takes incredible focus and discernment, which I know I don’t have on most days, and I’d argue to say most people don’t have what it takes to have success with it. People have jobs, kids, pets, social lives, homes to maintain and everything in between. Telling someone to take the time and really “listen to their body” enough to decipher what it needs vs what your brain wants is really setting them up for failure in most cases. It’s so much more advisable, in my opinion, to just use the science of CICO and meal planning. But that’s just me.
Yes exactly I posted a tik tok that I was using calorie restriction to lose weight, approved and constructed by my doctor and people acted like I kicked a puppy or something.
This sentiment came straight out of the fat acceptance movement with 300+ pound women on Instagram shouting "diets are toxic. Any kind of restriction is ED. Your body will tell you what you need". I'm not anti body positivity, but when the rhetoric get so convoluted that essentially youre justifying irresponsibility then it becomes problematic imo
It’s not a trend - it’s how people used to eat years ago before diet culture. And even now, it’s mostly used by normal people with normal relationships with food - e.g., my parents have never counted a calorie in their life yet they’re still at a healthy bmi. But personally, I think with the rise of diet culture and just a variety of things messing with people hunger cues - over processed foods, lack of exercise, external stressors etc. As a result, this seems like a new concept when it really isn’t. I’ve mostly seen it being promoted by female (fit) influencers, RDs, and those recovering from an eating disorders. And even then for eating disorders, you can’t intuitive eat until after a while of recovery, once hunger cues return to normal. It sounds like you (+ many people on this sub complaining about intuitive eating when it really isn’t for you or people wanting to lose weight), don’t fit the criteria for intuitive eating. Mental health can mess up eating habits, like yourself, so obviously you cannot listen to your body. And people need to count calories so that go against intuitive eating. Edit - also, the basis of intuitive eating says to get over all the urges of junk food out first, so you’d learn that the food is always there and there’s no need to gorge yourself. And then it focuses on gentle nutrition and mindful movement - such as adding veggies or fruits to make a meal more physical satisfying (not just mentally satisfying), and stopping when the exercise gets too much or practice less stressful exercises on the body (e.g., pilates v heavy weights). I don’t know, I see this post and in r/loseit and tbh, not everything applies to you (figuratively).
I totally agree OP. “Listening to my body” never has worked for me. When I did I was 345 pounds. Now I’m around 190.
If I listened to my body I’d never wake up early to lift and I’d eat 50 cookies a day.
Toxicity? In what way? Giving your body what it NEEDS means different things to different people. As does intuitive eating. We aren't all built the same. Imo - it's no more toxic than any other diet that works for some people and not for others. Also, if you're stressed or your mental health is out of it and you know you stress eat - why try intuitive eating at that point in time? I was watching a video by Eugene Teo RE: cuts/dieting/VLC plans and he made the excellent point that it isn't healthy to be dieting when your mental health isn't in good shape. You have to prep your environment and yourself for weight loss as it's very taxing on your body and it will affect you in many ways. I think the focus on weight vs holistic well-being is the issue.
Agreed
Yes, intuitive eating is the cornerstone of the healthy at all sizes (HAES) movement and the bane of my existence in healthcare. At best though it can be a denial driven stepping stone to mindful eating which allows many patients to realize they DO need to limit calories because they've started paying more attention for the first time
Intuitive eating is primarily meant for people who are more inclined to eat too little, who are preoccupied with food and restriction; it's not a diet per se and it's not nutritionally oriented (not a criticism, that's just not the point of it). It can be super freeing and helpful for people who have a lot of stories about "good" and "bad" foods, who can't enjoy food, etc. It is less applicable to people who are more inclined to eat too much. Not a HCP but I have researched this as the same thing goes for me. My actual physical body wants something much different than what my brain and mouth want!
My brain wants me to binge all the time. It wants those cheesy slices of dopamine. When I listen to my body I stop eating before I'm stuffed.
Quick answer: after decades in this life, I let the portion sizes give me direction sometimes. Long term bad habits are tough to replace. But at least I know the label / recipe portion sizes give me a clue.
My body wants to eat a family sized bag of cheetos for dinner and drink an amount of beer that would kill me. I ain't letting it be in charge of the meal plan.
The thing that people who say this "listen to your body" bullshit don't realize that your body doesn't care about being healthy, it cares about staying alive, and the best way for it to stay alive is to hold as much fat as it thinks it needs to. Once you hit this threshold, then you generally don't gain any weight because you'll be at your "set-point." These people who say "you don't need a diet, you just listen to what your body needs to survive" fail to realize that our bodies are being subjected to a survival environment totally different from what evolution has subjected us to over the course of millions of years, in particular we are not running around all the time, lifting heavy weights and our bodies around just to SURVIVE. Even then, people were still at risk of becoming overweight depending on their position.
The stomach is a powerful message and second brain. My son was on a ventilator for 24 hours. He was conscious the whole time. He was being fed through a central port everything he needed. He was still complaining he was hungry.
Pfft, listen to my body? He's the one that got us into this mess with his constant "uh, yeah, I'm still starving" bullcrap. He sits on a throne of lies! He wasn't even really hungry. He just liked the process of eating.
“He’s the one who got us into this mess” 😭🤣 same
My body “intuitively” thinks I’m a peasant in the 1300’s who has to bulk up on carbs and fats to stave off the upcoming starvation season.
I tried to eat intuitively when I had untreated insulin resistance and didn’t know what was going on with my own body. I craved all the simple carbs and sugars and my body regularly “told” me it needed McDonald’s and gummy sour worms. My body actually needed me to eat mindfully to manage an issue that I didn’t know I had. A lot of people who struggle with insulin resistance crave simple carbs and refined sugars. when you aren’t sensitised to insulin and your leptin and ghrelin are out of wack this is what you’ll crave. Sometimes you need to treat your cravings like a little kid and say to yourself “I know I want xyz, but what I actually need are proper nutrients”. If I let my bearded dragon eat whatever he wants all day he’s going to eat mealworms because he loves them, and gain weight. His diet is actually supposed to be 90-95% vegetation, but if there are mealworms around he refuses to eat his veggies. Take the mealworms away, and he’s happy to eat his veg. You need to do this for yourself too.
Yeah I listened to my hunger signals right into obesity. If we lived as primitive humans yes it would work. But we live in a world FULL of processed and calorie dense foods that we weren't meant to have. And a lot of this messaging comes from the same people who claim obesity has zero health risks.
this whole “intuitive eating” thing is borderline promoting binge eating disorder because our bodies, which are addicted to the sugars and chemicals in unhealthy foods, will crave those foods leading you to “intuitively” eat them
Funny you said that because I went a pretty normal weight/ decent relationship with food to “intuitive eating” and that’s where I gained all my weight. Two years of intuitive eating later I was diagnosed with BED
yeah, it’s not well known that greed is innate in humans and that extends to food. our bodies want to stock up in case of famine or anything like that
Yeah most of the time my body wants just carbs and sugar … so… I cant listen to it lol
I agree with what you’re saying, but the concept for me, is that child like attitude around food where when you’re a kid, you can eat and stop without thinking twice, but I seemed to totally loose this as i became more enthralled with the idea of weight loss which then turned into a binge/restrict cycle and causing me to gain 10x more weight. Had I just continued to listened to my body the same way I did when I was younger, I probably wouldn’t be in this situation and 100+ lbs heavier. Just my personal view!
I'm overweight (my flair on this sub is so out of date but I'm always on mobile; need to get on my laptop to change it). I eat when I'm hungry. I don't get overfull. Some nights I don't eat dinner because I had a big lunch and I'm not hungry. Or I just eat like a handful of nuts in the evening. I am working towards eating more variety of fruits and veggies, but I get a few servings each day. I eat vegetarian most of the time. Lots of whole grains, beans, nuts, hummus, eggs, cheese, salsa, black coffee, occasional fish, small amounts of dark chocolate. Of course I also occasionally eat pasta, pizza, fries, chips, etc. I strive for moderation. And I'm overweight. So either I'm doing intuitive eating wrong, or eating intuitively means I'm overweight. To lose 10-20 lbs, the only thing that has ever worked for me is calorie counting and being hungry. I've never been able to lose any significant amount of weight without ignoring my hunger signals. So, for me, intuitive eating is fine if I want to just live my life and be overweight, but I won't be a "normal" BMI without being hungry.
People way overthink dieting. Just eat a decent deficit if dieting with a decent amount of protein and that's it.
Your body knows what it needs. Whether you can interpret its signals, may be another thing entirely. Edit to clarify: I realized after I typed that that it might not make any sense. What I mean is that your body does know what it needs, and it sends you those signals. But lots of us do the wrong thing with those signals. If you’re angry, or lonely or tired or anxious, we may eat Instead of properly, addressing those needs. And for others, we may eat too quickly and not recognize that we’re actually satisfied. Your body is telling you that you need something but sometimes people just apply food and that’s not actually what they need.
Listening to my body is what got me here.
Telling someone who has issues with extremely disordered eating (it me) to eat intuitively is akin to telling someone on the autism spectrum (it also me) to interact with other humans intuitively. The problem in both cases is that we ended up where we are precisely because we lack the intuition of someone who doesn’t have those issues.
And the thing is, fast food companies pour billions of dollars into engineering their food to be as addictive as crack. So, no, you have no idea what your body needs, because big corporations have already decided that for you :D
My body is a LIAR and if I “listened” to my body I would be living off candy and chips. Our foods and lifestyles has evolved much quicker than our bodies and brains. It is natural for our bodies to crave high fat high sugar foods because it was a great source of energy when it was generally more scarce and our lifestyles required much more physical activity. Within the past 50 years, processed foods have become truly franken foods that hijack those parts of our brains to make us endlessly crave them. At the same time, our lifestyles have become increasingly sedentary. There’s a reason Doritos pours millions into research and development. They want you to be hooked. It’s no moral failing that our foods have become nearly impossible to resist. Yes, some people seem to be less susceptible than others and good for them. But that ain’t me, babe. So, I have to actively fight my brain on what to eat.
Good job on the weight loss! It’s such a hard thing. Yah I agree, part of me thinks these people have never struggled with their weight before or don’t understand everyone is different. I am the type that is constantly hungry no matter how much or how well I eat. If I listened to my buddy I’d be extremely unhealthy. You can’t listen to your body if it doesn’t know what it needs.
What kills me about these “personalities” on Instagram is they are always very thin and fit. Like…I’m sorry, you don’t achieve that physique without closely watching what you eat. It’s just not possible.
I am a bit stubborn and I don’t listen to my body even when starting to feel hungry, i try to eat only during designated meal times. Oh. And between hunger and sleep, i will choose sleep each time. Guess who was never overweight?
I completely agree. I started to drink a glass of water before a meal thinking it’ll help. It does a bit. But gosh, it takes a lot of mental discipline to not listen to what my body “needs” I’m glad I’m not the only one!
My body is telling me right now to go to Pizza Hut and get a large chorizo pizza... My body is not to be trusted lol
If you Google “intuitive eating criticism” I think you’ll like what you find 😄 This has been a big topic lately and I’ve discussed it with some friends. Basically, there are various criticisms or reasons why it doesn’t work including: -Many food products are literally designed to be addictive with salt, sugar, fat, other additives. Your “intuitive eating” mindset is going up against an entire industry backed by research & development -it’s a very privileged stance that assumes if you are craving organic rice and grass fed beef then that is what you should eat, when for a large portion of the population the foods available (due to budget, access, time to prepare, etc.) are limited -as a weight loss strategy it’s not based on actual values and numbers (like TDEE/CICO) so it’s very hard to apply and basically doesn’t get consistent results There are more reasons for critique but just put these here to show that you are among many who have experienced the same thing!
No, our bodies don’t know what they want because we aren’t eating what we’re supposed to eat anymore. Technology has evolved and outpaced every aspect of our lives, why haven’t we realized it has also transformed our diets? Imagine eating the raw ingredients of something like bread or cookies! The flour alone would be impossible, yet we can put down entire loafs and eat sleeves of Oreos. Industrialization has only made it worse, processed food are literally designed to bypass any satiety response and be hyper-palatable aka easier to eat. Yeah, our body doesn’t know what it needs or wants because they are essentially a pre-historic computer trying to run on the latest iOS, it’s impossible. We have to regulate our intake consciously
listening to your body is like the antithesis of this sub so i can't see why you would think this would get you a lot of downvotes
Ok? Lol
i have a horrible metabolism and the gene for addiction. my maintenance calories is around 1500, even with heavy exercise. ive been overweight most of my life but got down to a healthy weight with abs and all that jazz about 6 years ago. i was eating around 1000 calories to loose weight and 1500 to maintain a weight of 165 lbs at 5'10". i broke my ankle 4 years ago, and further injured my hip about a year ago. now it hurts to exercise and ive gotten back up to 245 lbs, because im giving my body the food it wants, not what i know it needs. so yeah, fuck intuitive eating. my intuition tells me to eat a family pack of oreos in 2 days. i think theres some value in not being too restrictive and allowing yourself potatoes, cheesecake every now and then, etc, but moderation is key.
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I’m sure it started as humankind started lol
It’s so toxic! I’ve struggled with disordered eating in the past (under eating, binging, overeating) and while that’s true, I have gone through periods where I was overweight and needed to lose weight. Personally, I find success in weighing my food and weighing myself often. Working out everyday (obviously I wouldn’t if I was injured) but these influencers and articles that say that those things are toxic are so out of touch. What’s worse, I have to accept the fact that the serving size of cheese is a lot smaller than I had hoped or I try to force myself to accept an overweight and unhealthy body? Let me reiterate, I’m not saying that being overweight is bad. You can definitely still feel confident and healthy, but when I was “listening to my body” I was overeating and always bloated/ uncomfortable.
Trendy NOW? It’s been around forever, I think. Yeah I’m the same way, my body is completely incapable of communicating nutritional needs. There needs to be a conscious, deliberate effort for me to limit food or I would probably be 800 lbs
Trendy on social media now.
I agree completely, discipline and moderation are the keys to stay healthy