The Duh-Diet. Steven Hawks, a health-science professor at Utah's Brigham Young University, has come up with a "no-diet diet" that he calls "intuitive eating". It has just two rules: (1) eat only when you're hungry and (2) stop when you're full.
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This is the way most people have always eaten until very recent times, historically speaking. A few things came into play to alter that behavior. One was schedules for work and school that put restrictions on when one could eat, so forced us to eat at only certain times. Another was sedentary entertainments, such as television in one's own home, such that one could place snacks and beverages within easy reach of one's seat and eat not from need but from habit — and to have something to do with one's hands. You can't do that with active entertainments, such as sports (except maybe bowling). Coaches look askance at the guy eating when he should be guarding first base or fiting for a rebound.
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Obvious as this approach to eating may be, it plainly won't work for some segments of the overweight population, such as people who use food for psychological reasons and those who experience a change in activity level or metabolism but continue to eat the way they have always eaten. It may take the latter group of people a while to realize that they aren't really as hungry as they used to be, and cut back on calories. If they heed their needs and understand that being accustomed to being hungry at a given time or being accustomed to feeling the need to consume a given quantity is not the same as actually being hungry or actually needing to consume as much as one has in the past consumed, they too should be able to adjust their consumption around actual hunger.
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That requires, however, awareness of food as a thing in itself, not just part of the environment. That means no bowls or bags of snacks, no glasses of drinks by the recliner when you're watching television. If you feel hungry, you go to a table and eat as a purposeful activity, not an unconscious behavior. And if you're full but there's something left on your plate, give it to the dog or cat, or put some plastic wrap over it and put it into the frij for when you become hungry again later.
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It's sad that we seem as a society actually to have to be told to eat when hungry and stop when full. Duh!
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,154.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:43 PM