Recently I ran across a series of three articles about the basic Intutive Eating Concepts by UK addiction counselor, Gillain Riley, who appears to share my point of view about the general ineffectiveness of this Diet. Ms. Riley states her professional knowledge about these concepts in a thoughtful and precise manner, and I am sharing this series here at DietHobby. 

Advocates of Intutitive Eating insist that this diet / manner-of-eating / way-of-eating / lifestyle is "not a diet". My belief is that every diet works for someone, and this includes Intutive Eating.

The first of the three articles can be found at: "Does Our Body Tell Us WHAT to eat - Intutive Eating 1"

Are You Hungry? 
      by Gillian Riley, Author of Ditching Diets (Revised edition of Eating Less)

The assumption behind this advice is that hunger means you are depleted of energy or nutrients, and therefore in need of food. But it's considerably more complicated than that. For example, when people fast or follow extremely low calorie diets, their hunger doesn't become increasingly more intense as time goes on and nutrient stores dwindle. Any anorexic will tell you that after a short time without food, their hunger fades away. If hunger accurately reflected nutritional status, this wouldn't happen. The reverse would happen, and hunger would intensify day by day.

To make the same point in a different way, if hunger expresses genuine nutritional need, it would begin to subside after the first few mouthfuls of a meal. But this doesn't necessarily happen either, and most people have at least some experience of the reverse occurring. Many people can begin a meal not feeling especially hungry, and then, after just a few bites of tasty food, feel a strong sense of hunger suddenly arrive. It doesn't make sense that your body would signal depletion after those bites but not before. (1)

We often think of those first few bites as a way to stimulate hunger, to awaken it. After all, the whole point of the 'starter' course is supposed to be to awaken our appetite and get our 'gastric juices flowing'. But how can we rely on this hunger signal if it needs to be stimulated to appear in the first place?

Rather than a signal of nutritional need, hunger is, to a great extent, a response to cues, at least some of which will be learned. The cue prompts an expectation of eating, and it's this expectation that sets off all those hungry sensations in our stomach. The cue could be the time of day, or the sudden availability of food along with the sights and smells of its arrival. There may well be no problem at all in responding to this by eating.

The problem arises for those who have overeaten so much that the cues triggering feelings of hunger happen much too frequently. It's okay for the expectation of eating to prod...

 
Intuitive Eating is a Diet which claims it is not a diet.
I've shared about the IE concepts here on DietHobby before, and I personally believe they are ineffective for almost everyone. However, it is NOT a one-size-fits-all world, and I am certain, that ... just like every other diet ... Intuitive Eating works for someone.

One of the primary eating concepts of Intutive Eating is:

 "eat whatever you want - because your body has natural wisdom about what it needs, and it will provide you with that information."

Unfortunately, this is an Untrue Statement,... merely a crock of magical, wishful thinking with no basis in reality,... not through Basic Science, Research Studies, or documented Real Life Experiences of People. I find it amazing that Nutritionists and other Medical Professionals continue to adopt and broadly disperse that totally flawed concept.

Recently I ran across a series of articles about the basic Intutive Eating Concepts by UK addiction counselor, Gillain Riley, who appears to share my own point of view on this matter. She states her professional knowledge about these concepts in a thoughtful and precise manner.

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT TO EAT?
                  by Gillian Riley, Author of Ditching Diets (Revised edition of Eating Less)

'Intuitive Eating' promotes eating when hungry, stopping when full, and eating whatever you want. I've heard people say that this makes so much sense, they don't understand why they can't manage to do it. Well, this advice doesn't make any sense to me at all, so maybe you'll let me know what it is that I'm not understanding!

These ideas are widespread, having been promoted by Susie Orbach for years, among many others. Just google 'intuitive eating' and you'll see it's all over the place. This will take a while to cover, so I'll start with the suggestion to 'eat whatever you want' (because the innate wisdom of your body lets you know what it needs) and continue with the other aspects of this advice in my next newsletter.

The experience of 'wanting to eat' something is going to feel very different to each person, and even for each person from occasion to occasion. It's feeling attracted towards some food, certainly, and most likely thinking you would enjoy eating it, that you fancy it. This attraction could be barely conscious, but when we are aware of it, it often gets called a craving. (I think of attraction, desire, urge and craving as the same thing, with varying degrees of intensity, just as irritation is a less intense form of rage.)

I have heard people say that they crave greens sometimes, and perhaps that's true for you. But if you had some raw spinach leaves in a bowl in the kitchen and a slice of cake on a plate next to it, we surely know which one would be more likely to grab your attention and not let go. A 'craving for greens' may be no more than the awareness that you haven't had any for a whi...

After’The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight
by Gina Kolata,   - New York Times, May 2, 2016

Danny Cahill stood, slightly dazed, in a blizzard of confetti as the audience screamed and his family ran on stage. He had won Season 8 of NBC’s reality television show “The Biggest Loser,” shedding more weight than anyone ever had on the program — an astonishing 239 pounds in seven months.

When he got on the scale for all to see that evening, Dec. 8, 2009, he weighed just 191 pounds, down from 430. Dressed in a T-shirt and knee-length shorts, he was lean, athletic and as handsome as a model.

“I’ve got my life back,” he declared. “I mean, I feel like a million bucks.”

Mr. Cahill left the show’s stage in Hollywood and flew directly to New York to start a triumphal tour of the talk shows, chatting with Jay Leno, Regis Philbin and Joy Behar. As he heard from fans all over the world, his elation knew no bounds.

But in the years since, more than 100 pounds have crept back onto his 5-foot-11 frame despite his best efforts. In fact, most of that season’s 16 contestants have regained much if not all the weight they lost so arduously. Some are even heavier now.

Yet their experiences, while a bitter personal disappointment, have been a gift to science. A study of Season 8’s contestants has yielded surprising new discoveries about the physiology of obesity that help explain why so many people struggle unsuccessfully to keep off the weight they lose.

Kevin Hall, a scientist at a federal research center who admits to a weakness for reality TV, had the idea to follow the “Biggest Loser” contestants for six years after that victorious night. The project was the first to measure what happened to people over as long as six years after they had lost large amounts of weight with intensive dieting and exercise.



The results, the researchers said, were stunning. They showed just how hard the body fights back against weight loss.

“It is frightening and amazing,” said Dr. Hall, an expert on metabolism at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. “I am just blown away.”

It has to do with resting metabolism, which determines how many calories a person burns when at rest. When the show began, the contestants, though hugely overweight, had normal metabolisms for their size, meaning they were burning a normal number of calories for people of their weight. When it ended, their metabolisms had slowed radically and their bodies were not burning enough calories to maintain their thinner sizes.

Researchers knew that just about anyone who deliberately loses weight — even if they start at a normal weight or even underweight — will have a slower metabolism when the diet ends. So they were not surprised to see that “The Biggest Loser” contestants had slow metabolisms when the show ended.

What shocked the researchers was what happened next: As the years went by and the numbers on the s...