There’s no food you can’t ever have

There’s no food you can’t ever have. "And that’s scary for people who say, ’If I abandon my diet rules, then I’ll fill a pillowcase full of M&M’s, dive into it and never come up again. That’s what I crave, I know that’s what I crave, that’s all I will always crave.No Food Is TabooOne part of intuitive eating that may be counterintuitive to people conditioned to restrictive dieting is the concept that with intuitive eating there is a place for every food."It’s an extremely difficult attitude adjustment for many people to make, but they have to come to a conscious decision that personal worth is not a function of body size," says Hawks. "It certainly has worked for me. That, in a nutshell, is the argument in favor of "intuitive eating," or letting your body tell you when, what and how much to eat."If people are committed to recognizing what their bodies really want, the vast majority of people will say that they very quickly overcame cravings," Hawks says, opening an office desk drawer filled with untouched junk food. While people may experience some binges when they first start eating intuitively, they eventually will learn to trust themselves and that behavior will disappear, Hawks maintains."The second behavior is learning how to interpret body signals, cravings and hunger, and how to respond in a healthy, positive, nurturing way. It’s a nurturing approach to nutrition, health and fitness as opposed to a regulated, coercive, restrictive approach.Learning the body’s signals can be difficult at first, but Hawks suggests thinking about hunger and satiety on a 10-point scale, where "10" is eating until one is sick and "1" is starving.Two Attitudes, Two BehaviorsTo become an intuitive eater, a person has to adopt two attitudes and two behaviors."The first behavior is learning how to not eat for emotional, environmental or social reasons."

The second attitude is that dieting is harmful."The findings provide support for intuitive eating as a positive approach to healthy weight management," says Hawks, who plans to do a large-scale study of intuitive eating across several cultures.’ But that’s not the reality. "Rather than having an adversarial relationship with my body, where I have to control it, and force it to submit to my will so that I can make it thin, I’m going to value my body because it allows me to accomplish some higher good with my life. They’ve been conditioned to believe that the purpose of food is to enjoy, to nurture.Approximately one-third of the variance in body mass index was accounted for by intuitive eating scores, while 17 to 19 percent of the variance in blood lipid profiles and cardiovascular risk was accounted for by intuitive eating. Participants then were tested to evaluate their health.Intuitive eaters keep themselves at or around a "5."It is dieting that creates psychological and physiological urges to binge on taboo foods. You eat when you’re hungry, you stop when you’re not hungry any more." If they feel they are getting hungry, they eat until they are back at a "5" or "6." They stop eating when they’re satisfied, even if that means leaving food on the plate.

The findings are reported in the American Journal of Health Education."The basic premise of intuitive eating is, rather than manipulate what we eat in terms of prescribed diets -- how many calories a food has, how many grams of fat, specific food combinations or anything like that -- we should take internal cues, try to recognize what our body wants and then regulate how much we eat based on hunger and satiety," says professor of health science Steven Hawks, lead researcher of an intuitive-eating study at Brigham Young University. "Being able to recognize all the emotional, environmental and cultural relationships we have with food and finding better ways to manage our emotions is part of the process.Hawks, who adopted an intuitive-eating lifestyle himself several years ago and lost 50 pounds as a result, says that "normal" dieting in the United States doesn’t result in long-term weight loss and contributes to food anxiety and unhealthy eating practices, and can even lead to eating disorders."In less developed countries in Asia, people are primarily intuitive eaters," notes Hawks.All Diets Work Against Human BiologyHawks and colleagues Hala Madanat, Jaylyn Hawks and Ashley Harris identified a handful of college students who were naturally intuitive eaters and compared them with other students who were not. In other words, there is no food that’s ever taboo.Stop hating your body, stop counting calories and stop using food for purposes other than to satisfy hunger, and you’ll be healthier and slimmer."Socially we eat all the time in our culture.

The reality is that our bodies crave good nutrition. The first attitude is body acceptance. Once the foods are no longer forbidden, a person quickly loses interest in them."Copyright 2005 Daily News Central."Part of adopting an anti-dieting attitude is the recognition that you have unconditional permission to eat any kind of food that you want," says Hawks."They haven’t been conditioned to artificially structure their relationship with food like we have in the United States. They have a much healthier relationship with food, far fewer eating disorders, and interestingly, far less obesity," he points out.’ For people who are deep into dietary restraint and dietary rules, again, that’s a very difficult attitude adjustment to make, to give up all those rules."Rather than a prescriptive diet, it’s really about increasing awareness and understanding of your body."Dieting does not lead to the results that people think it will lead to, and so I try to help people foster an anti-dieting attitude," says Hawks. We go out to eat ice cream if we break up with our boyfriend, we eat to celebrate, we eat when we’re lonely, we eat when we’re sad, we eat when we’re stressed out," says Hawks. That’s why diets fail, and that’s why intuitive eating has a better chance of being successful in the long term," he maintains.One technique he suggests is having an abundance of previously taboo foods on hand.As measured by the Intuitive Eating Scale, developed by Hawks and others to measure the degree to which a person is an intuitive eater, the researchers found that intuitive eating correlated significantly with lower body mass index (BMI), lower triglyceride levels, higher levels of high density lipoproteins and decreased risk of cardiovascular disease. "You have to say to yourself, ’I will not base my food intake on diet plans, food-based rules, good and bad foods, all of that kind of thing."What makes intuitive eating different from a diet, is that all diets work against human biology, whereas intuitive eating teaches people to work with their own biology, to work with their bodies, to understand their bodies," Hawks explains