Beyond Diet: Your Body as the Best Source of Natural Non-Diet Weight Management - Part 2 of 3

If you are a woman who has spent some time dieting or watching your weight, you know that managing your hunger is probably the most difficult challenge you face. It’s those cravings that get you and carry you through your nose that will get you every time.

You have not failed the diet, the diet has failed you!

It’s probably no secret to you that diets don’t work. In April 2007, a research study was conducted at UCLA, combining 31 individual test studies of people who had lost weight on diets. Its progress has been followed for almost 5 years. After analyzing the results of the findings, it was found that up to 98% of all the people who lost weight on the diets regained everything they had lost in 2-5 years.

The study’s lead author, Traci Mann, Ph.D concluded that diets are not the best way to lose weight and that, in the long term, they would likely fail. She suggested that the reason for this failure was as follows:

Diets don’t address the emotions that push you to eat when you’re not hungry.

Because diets keep you focused on all the wrong things, they keep you thinking like a fat person, constantly focusing on your weight, obsessing over everything that goes into your mouth, how much food, how many grams of fat, how many calories and all the other details that prevent you from having a healthy, happy and balanced relationship with food. Because diets keep you thinking like a fat person, you never learn to master food in order to feel safe with it. And the more you think that certain foods are restricted because they are fattening or unhealthy, the more you want them, and when you give in to these cravings, you feel ashamed and guilty. Dieting is really just a binge waiting to happen.

You are not a bottomless pit of hunger, greedy or a pig

No matter how much you eat, if you don’t think you have the right to eat what you want, you may feel like you can never get enough. This is the attraction of the forbidden fruit. Despite what you’ve been told, this isn’t because you’re a bottomless pit of hunger, greedy, or a pig. It is simply an effect of not being able to tune in and decipher the subtle signals in your body that indicate that you are hungry or satisfied. As a dieter, you have never been taught to master your relationship with food. You have been led to believe that food is your master and you are its slave. In order for you to break out of that distorted dynamic and get back in the driver’s seat, you must begin to level the playing field and learn to feel safe with food, all foods. This is accomplished by reconnecting and learning to respond to your body’s natural hunger signals.

Biological hunger is your body’s way of letting you know that your energy stores are running low and need to be replenished. But if you’ve been dieting or watching your weight for a while, you’ve learned to ignore your body’s hunger signals. Instead of eating when your body indicates that it is hungry, you have conditioned yourself to eat according to the rules of the diet. (Is it time to eat? Do I have the right to eat? Should I skip lunch because I have already eaten too much for breakfast, etc.)? As a result of that, your body thinks that it is starving. You don’t know there is a Burger King or Dunkin ‘Donuts on almost every corner.

Are you starving?

In their book, “Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works,” co-authors Evelyn Tribole, MSRD and Elyse Resch, MSRDFADA, say, “A dieting body is a starving body.” This is because when you are on a diet, your body does not know that food is abundant. You fool yourself into thinking you are in the midst of a famine and your body responds accordingly by adapting and changing the way it works, conserving energy to make up for the lack of fuel. Do you struggle with these challenges?

• Do you often feel sluggish and tired all the time?

• Can’t stop thinking about food? Did the cravings grab you by the nose?

• Do you take large bites of food, often swallow without chewing, or hold food for hours?

• Do you find yourself choking and overeating many times during the day?

• Do you often exercise more so you can eat more?

• Are you often in a bad mood, depressed, irritable, moody, or angry?

If you answered “yes” to most of these questions, chances are you are walking hungry too often without even knowing it. The result of all this focused emphasis on all that is outside of your body closes your awareness of what is really going on internally. With all those screaming in your head, it’s hard to hear the soft whispers of your body until your hunger becomes so voracious that you end up eating everything that isn’t nailed down.

To avoid this situation, you must restore confidence in your body so that it stops reacting as if it were starving. You need to biologically recondition your body so that it can function in a healthy way again. Your first step in doing this is becoming aware of the different signals your body uses to indicate that it is hungry.

How biological hunger manifests itself in your body

Tune your body Pay attention to how you often feel. Every time you eat, ask yourself, “Am I hungry? What is my hunger level? Remember a time when you felt hungry once. Think about how your mouth felt, how your stomach felt? If you can’t pin those details, then the following list shows some general guidelines for body signals that indicate hunger.

I have listed them in order of intensity from mild to severe as follows:

• slight gurgling or gnawing of the stomach
• grunting noises
• daze
• difficult to focus
• uncomfortable stomach pain
• irritability
• headache
• feeling faint

These physical reminder sensations occur when you haven’t eaten a meal for 5 to 9 hours. That simply means that the body’s energy stores are depleted and you need to eat to ease uncomfortable feelings.

Other types of hunger that push you to eat when you are not very hungry

When you eat and experience intense or conflicting emotions, something other than your body pushes you to eat. This is because instead of being driven to eat by your body’s physiological needs, you are driven by your urge to eat whenever you are under stress. This is called emotional eating. In addition to emotional eating, there are several other types of hunger that we all experience to one degree or another. If you are an emotional eater, you will feel especially vulnerable and pressured to eat in these situations:

Taste hunger – When you eat because it tastes great or because you are in a position to be sociable – Many people feel like they should eat cake at a birthday party, eat a hot dog at the ball game, popcorn while watching a movie or whenever occasion demands eating. People often eat whether they are hungry or not. Think of the bride who eats her wedding cake despite being hungry, she is perfectly fine and understandable. Everyone eats to be sociable and sometimes they get carried away.

Practical hunger – When you are eating according to the clock. For example, you look at your watch and say, “Oh, it’s 12:00, it must be lunchtime.” How hungry you are depends entirely on when you last ate and how large the food was. Your stomach has an internal clock that is very different from the clock on your wrist. By eating on automatic, you are not listening to your body’s signals. To determine if you are really hungry, ask yourself, “When was the last time I ate and how does my body feel?

If you want to sync your stomach hunger with your social plans, eat smaller meals throughout the day. I like to call this “eating to fill a corner, rather than a cave.”

Emotional hunger – This is eating to squash the volume of overwhelming and uncomfortable emotions ranging from sadness to joy. The only way to deal with this kind of hunger is rain coat with the stress in your life and legalize all foods so that they are not such a deep emotional burden for you.

When were the foods you love banned?

Maybe when you were a kid, they told you that you couldn’t trust yourself with food. Maybe, like me, people would stand on his shoulder and count his M & Ms , ration his chips or cookies, and finally put him on his first diet, forcing him to walk to his Nana’s house at the time. lunchtime and had salad and steamed broccoli while everything else the kids stayed behind at school swapping Hostess Snowball Cupcakes, Hawaiian Punch and Drake’s Chocolate Chip Cookies for lunch. You probably know what it’s like to feel so deprived when food is restricted.

It doesn’t matter how it started. What you need to know is that somewhere along the way you crossed the wires and began to think of food as more than just a means of filling a hungry stomach. That really played with the energy balance in your body, causing you tons of stress. Suddenly, food began to bear so many unnecessary burdens because it was no longer only associated with pleasure, but now it was also being associated with pain.

Instead of just eating enough potato chips to satisfy your body’s physical hunger, there is now an emotional and moral burden weighing heavily on your mind telling you, “You shouldn’t eat those potato chips.” “To hell with this,” you say, as you defiantly scrape the last salty bits from the bottom of the bag, noticing that queasy feeling in your stomach once more.

If you can relate to that scenario and others like it where you find yourself overeating, know that that is not an indication that you are undisciplined, lack of willpower, or anything else like that. It is a cry from your body that something is wrong.

“Overeating temporarily masks the food addict’s anxiety, which is actually caused by an imbalance in the body’s electrical system.”

-Dr. Roger Callahan, Ph.D, creator of Thought Field Therapy

The real cause of overeating is an imbalance in your body’s energy system. Suffice it to say that it is your wayward emotions that keep you in patterns of feeling miserable and that lead to overeating. Since everything is made up of energy, when your body is under stress, it will manifest as negative emotions. If you eat stress, then you will find yourself eating out of control.

To override the food = comfort connection in your brain, you must neutralize the imbalance that is occurring in your body. To do that you must …

Cope with your stress Because it works, I myself use the Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT, and that is what I teach all of my clients. It is a simple tapping process derived from the ancient science of acupuncture that works on the basis of clearing the energy blocks in your body that arouse your negative emotions. I also recommend using The Hunger Scale, which can be found in Part 3 of this article series. This is a numbered scale that measures different levels of hunger by defining what is happening in the body. Remember to learn to master food and feel safe with what you now consider “temptation” to be a process. It is also a wonderful opportunity to learn a lot about yourself. In my way of thinking, self-acceptance begins with making peace with food.

In your quest to learn to eat intuitively, I urge you not to make the same mistake as me. If you consistently can’t stop eating, heed your body’s warning and see what’s behind your hunger. If you are eating and thinking about food more often than every 5 to 9 hours, it is not your body that is hungry, it is your heart. To heal your hungry heart, you have to deal with those things in your life that make your body cry out for help. The way to make peace with food and friendship with your body is yours. All you have to do is be kind to yourself and deal with problems that bother you along the way. Take good care of yourself and know that I am here for you.

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