Eating is pleasurable
Eating is delicious
Eating is sensual
But for lots of people, it is also anguishing and fraught with difficulties.
This book gives you keys to transform your eating. From eating that hurts or is chaotic into eating that calms you and nourishes you.
How to Use This Book
Allow yourself to take this book slowly. Read a few pages at a time and read them as often as you find helpful.
You may absorb the ideas at first reading. Or you may want to go back to particular parts of it again and again to understand the ideas and put them into practice.
Sometimes just one key or one page will give you the clue you need to calm eating.
Order the keys in your own personal way. No key is more important than the other. They work together, although any particular one might have special meaning for you.
Start with what works best for you.
First things first.
We each have a mechanism – our personal set point – that regulates our body size. It works best when we eat when we are hungry and stop when we are full.
Eat too little and your metabolism also slows down. It can’t process the excess food effectively.
Eat what’s just right for you and your metabolism will be efficient. Your body will be stable and content at its set point. As well as our personal set point, we each have an inner register that can tell us:
how to eat
when to eat
what to eat
when to stop eating.
Eating is like other bodily functions – sleeping, peeing, walking, and sneezing. Our body sends us signals, which we can respond to.
This book will help you to respond to your body’s inner register. It will be your personal guide to eating.
Undoing years of chaotic or unhealthy eating takes time. Learning to eat in a new way, a way that will work for you for the rest of your life, is like an injured person learning to walk or talk again.
The things we do automatically are all based on lots of practice.
Then they become second nature.
Eating well can become that for you if you give it a chance.
Take your problem seriously.
Give it the attention it needs.
Eating when you are hungry, stopping when you are full, isn’t magic, it may not happen overnight; it takes work. Sometime a lot of work, but once you’ve got the knack, it feels magically different from the way you’ve eaten before.
Don’t expect miracles. Follow the ideas in this book. In time you will notice that your eating is relaxed and easy. Better than a miracle.
Eating this way means:
an end to diets
an end to binges
an end to special schemes to control your food
an end to denying yourself the food you would really like to be eating.
First KeyEat when you are hungry
Don’t wait until you are very very hungry or starving.
If you have no idea when you are hungry, do not eat.
It means you aren’t hungry.
You may have messed about so much with the signals that tell you about hunger that you have to learn them again.
In either case, do not eat unless you feel hunger pangs.
Learning to discover your hunger signals can take a bit of practice and a lot of attention.
Your aim is to get your hunger signal to work as clearly as the one that tells you when to pee. This signal tells you that:
sometimes you need to pee a lot
sometimes you just have a trickle.
So too with hunger. Your hunger signals can tell you that:
sometimes your body will want to eat a lot
sometimes your body wants just a little.
It isn’t always the same and there may not be a pattern. But whatever the amount your body needs, it can give you the right signal.
Hints
The hunger mechanism will be there if you let it emerge and then treat it right when it does.
Some people feel hunger in their belly.
Some in their chest.
Some in their throat.
As long as you don’t interrupt the process by eating before you feel it, you’ll get your personal signal, the one that lets you know it is time for you to eat.
If you are not used to recognizing your hunger, don’t despair. There are reasons.
Perhaps you don’t know when you are hungry because:
you eat before you get hungry
you eat because everyone else is eating
you eat because you are miserable, weepy, angry
you eat because you are happy
you eat because you passed a bakery with wonderful smells
you eat because it’s mealtime
you eat because you mother told you to
you eat because you feel fat and hopeless
you eat because you are bored
you eat the food your child left over.
Sometimes we can be afraid to feel hunger. The very sensation frightens us and so we eat in advance of it or try to ignore it.
That can happen because as children:
we didn’t have enough food
we had to clear our plates whether we wanted to or not
we sensed our mother’s disapproval if we said we weren’t hungry
eating was the shared family activity.
Working through this book you will find out the personal emotional reasons why hunger is something you might be reluctant to feel.
Knowing those reasons clears the way for you to use your hunger to guide your eating.