If your wish is to:
 
Eat what you want,
Enjoy every guiltless bite,
and Be happy with
whatever way your body looks,

Intuitive Eating works flawlessly,
… but it stops at that point.

Intuitive Eating is letting your body tell you What, When, and How Much to eat.
                             It is NOT a weight-loss tool. 

Intuitive eating means making decisions based on what your body wants, rather than what your mind thinks it should eat. 

The body has a survival mechanism that determines the weight it wants to be. 

When a person who is currently at the weight that their body naturally wants to be, begins to successfully eat intuitively, that body weight will be "effortlessly" maintained.

However, almost every person who is under a “normal” weight, or who is at a “reduced obese” weight, weighs less … sometimes far less … than the higher number that their body’s survival mechanism considers optimal or “normal” for them. 

This means that when those people begin to successfully follow their body signals, they are going to gain weight.  "Reduced obese" people will usually re-gain ALL of their lost weight.

The practice of Intuitive Eating is sometimes called the “hunger and fullness diet”.

When you believe that you can only eat when you are hungry, and that you have done something wrong if you have eaten when you were full, you are using Intuitive Eating as a diet.

When a person feels like...

Below is advice on how to mentally handle the holidays from someone that I consider to be one of the more reasonable online “Health Coaches”.  Isabel Foxen Duke comes from the position of: Stop Dieting.  Peace of mind will come when you entirely stop trying to control your weight, and when you accept Your Own Body Size and Set Point, whether it is fat or thin. 

Although I, personally, don’t choose to follow her position, I understand and agree with a great deal of what she says.  Perhaps her presentations resonate with me more because I, too, have a BA in Sociology, and so we share that specific undergraduate educational background.

I respect, and agree with, her references to “intuitive eating” as the “Hunger & Fullness Diet”.  She says: “While intuitive eating itself is not “the answer” to your food problem, the basics are helpful to know if you’re struggling to get off traditional dieting.”

You Are Allowed.
by Isabel Foxen Duke,
BA in Sociology and online “Health Coach”.
at “How To Not Eat Cake … really fast,
standing up, when nobody’s looking.”

You are allowed to disagree with food and body shamers this year,
you are allowed to have a different opinion,
you are allowed to request that someone withhold body or food shaming comments around you,
you are allowed to leave the table if your request is not respected.

You are also allowed to sit quietly and disagree with them in your own mind,
with the understanding that their beliefs don’t have to be your own;
you do not need to convert others to validate your own experience,
and their approval is not needed for you to be yourself.

You are allowed to not diet, when other people are dieting.
and you can feel compassionately for dieters,
who are likely struggling just like you have,
and who are also victims of an unfortunately weight-discriminating world.

Recognize that you cannot control other people,
you cannot educate someone without their permission,
and also recognize, that doesn’t make them right,
nor does it make food or body shaming okay.

We do not understand how the body resists weight change and why, after weight loss, so many people regain it. The concept of a set point for weight is widely accepted.

The set point is like the thermostat in our central heating system. It is switched on when the temperature falls below a critical (set point) temperature and is switched off when that is exceeded.

Using the word “rachet” might help one conceptualize the set point concept.

To rachet is to cause to increase or decrease by increments. A rachet is a mechanical device consisting of a toothed wheel or rack engaged with a pawl that permits it to move in only one direction.

A person has an existing set point. That person gains weight, and then gains and sustains even more weight gain. This causes the set point to be racheted up, and once it passes each rachet, there is no going back. The rachet is the biological set point and it can be easily driven upwards, but is very difficult to drive back down.

Using the fat cell theory is helpful to further explain how this works.

For an example, let’s assume an average fat cell contains 0.4 micrograms of fat each. A person gaining weight might see that fat cell load expand to 0.6 micrograms. This is an acceptable load increase, and when the person loses weight, the fat cell level drops back to 0.4 micrograms.

 This seesaw can go on forever, but when the weight gain loads the fat cell up to 0.8 micrograms, a tipping point is reached, and the fat cell divides. Now we have two fat cells, each containing 0.4 micrograms. Click! That was the ratchet turning irreversibly.

When we want to return to the previous weight, we must lose half the fat we gained. The problem with this is that each fat cell now has the standard fat load of 0.4 micrograms each, and to halve this to just 0.2 micrograms per cell requires us to get the cells to live a life they do not like. If we let our mind tell us what to eat, we can overcome the disgruntled fat cells which are below their fat quota. But all the time the basic animal biology of our body will be waiting to return to 0.4 micrograms per cell.

Then, along comes an event like a vacation, a holiday, or other eating occasion, and we take our eye off the ball .. lose our mental concentration, but the fat cells in our body didn’t rest, and we’ve regained our w...