practice intuitive eating

..after my New Year’s Day hangover-induced stodge-fest, yesterday all I felt like eating was light and veggie-rich foods. I slept late, then had a lunch of red lentil and vegetable stew with a scoop of cottage cheese (Longley Farm, the only cottage cheese worth eating). After that I was fine till early evening, when I really fancied soup and a cheese scone. So I cooked up this cabbage soup which was astonishingly delicious, and made up a batch of cheese-jalapeño-olive cheese scones. I baked two, gave one to HA, and flash-froze the rest. Later on, HA was eating some B+J chocolate ice cream, and I ate one perfect spoonful – it was all I needed. I went to bed feeling light and nourished.

Wow, this is amazing.

I pulled my scale out of storage and I’ve been weighing myself almost every day. (I even made a chart in Excel so I could see how much weight I’m really gaining.) I guess I just wanted to have information about my weight so I could adapt if necessary, if I was gaining too much weight too soon.

But reading my old entry about my reasoning for putting the scale away makes me wonder if this is really reasonable, or helpful.

I would say my pregnancy has amped up my anxiety about eating, which has resulted in WORSE eating than before. Eating for two: not really necessary when one of you only has a microscopic little stomach. They say you’re actually only supposed to eat an extra 200-300 calories a day in pregnancy.

On top of the pregnancy, there is my newly-adopted vegan diet, and my discovery that my body feels better when I don’t eat wheat. This really pushes my food scarcity buttons, since there is so much around me at work that I will probably be sorry if I eat… and so little healthy wheatfree vegan food available downtown Minneapolis. I really have to plan ahead. When I fail to plan, I sometimes freak out and eat everything in sight.

Next time I am faced with a giant platter of (glutinous, nonvegan) glazed donuts, I’m going to try a different, less angst-ridden, more intuitive response.

I’m off out in a couple of hours, to a gathering chez Paperfaerie. There will be drinking and merriment, but not much food – chips ‘n’ dips. Paper said to eat before I come over.

But I’m not hungry! Not even remotely hungry. OK, there’s the vaguest fluttering of peckishness edging around the peripherals of my tummy, but it’s the kind that means I’ll be hungry enough to eat a meal in about four hours.

What do I do? Do I take some food with me to eat when I do get hungry? Is that too socially weird? Do I eat before I am hungry to head it off at the pass? Fear and anxiety of being hungry have always been a big eating trigger for me, and I don’t really want to play into their hands and feed (no pun intended) those fears any more. It’s fine to be hungry, I won’t keel over if I don’t eat. Hm. I think I need to do some research and have a think. Hopefully I’ll get hungry enough to eat something before it’s time to leave.

Some interesting stuff here copied (probably illegally) from Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating by Geneen Roth.

Actually, one really weird thing I’ve noticed the last few days – to go along with my longstanding fear of hunger, the last few days I’ve regularly found myself panicking at the idea of not getting hungry enough to eat and therefore “missing out” on food that some part of me feels is my birthright to eat. Also, there’s a weird kind of social brainwashing that says “three meals a day – you must eat breakfast, lunch and dinner”. If I don’t feel hungry enough to eat dinner, I feel all at sea – the evening feels like a sentence without a full stop. I’m aware that eating is a social lucricant and a temporal marker. I hope that eventually I will learn enough about my body’s needs that I can naturally regulate the amount I eat to be hungry at the “right” times.

It’s 2pm and I’m only just starting to get hungry in the tummy – I’ve been peckish for about an hour, and I’ve just had the first vague rumble. I ate my dinner very very late last night (at about 11.30pm) because I didn’t get even remotely hungry till then – probably related to the nocturnal timetable I adopt whenever I’m not at work.

I had a small bowl of leftover veg and bean curry (homemade), with a spoonful of plain yogurt and two hard-boiled eggs – exactly what my body told me to. Ordinarily I would have automatically added some rice or at least popped a pitta bread in the toaster, but I asked my body what it wanted, and it didn’t say anything about that kind of thing, so I didn’t eat it. Other than that, yesterday I ate some banana bread with butter at about 1pm, and a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich at about 5pm. HA ate some ice cream at about 1am, but I really didn’t fancy it (!) so I didn’t eat any even though he brought me a spoon and everything.

So I haven’t eaten for 15 hours. Interestingly, when I was at my slimmest, I didn’t used to get hungry for breakfast till about 10.30am, after dinner at about 8pm the night before. That’s about the same time difference. The fact that I’m hungry now lets me know that I probably ate about the right amount at dinner last night. Thinking about what I want to eat right now, I am pretty sure it’s a halloumi sandwich. Good choice!

Last year my friend bought me Beyond Chocolate. I half finished it then, and it made some sense to me, but I was put off by the way it’s aimed at women who’ve spent their lives on diets – something I emphatically haven’t done. I wasn’t quite sure how to make the principles apply to me. I didn’t need convincing of the madness of the on-off nature of dieting (including “healthy eating plans” and any external structure for feeding yourself), I believed in the idea of IE in theory – in fact, the only time I have ever lost weight and kept it off for any length of time was when I was applying IE rules, but as a happy accident rather than on purpose. How to apply the rules on purpose without feeling like I’m on a diet and causing the inevitable backlash? I felt disillusioned and not a little scared at the prospect of doing without my favourite drug.

But this time around something seems to have clicked, and I can see a lot more ways that I might be able to make it work for me. I have been digging around IE material, new stuff and stuff I’ve dabbled in in the past, and having lightbulb moments left, right and centre.

I haven’t done nearly as much emotional eating lately as I used to. I’m feeling stronger, happier, more valued and more me than I was this time last year, for certain, so maybe I’m readier to relinquish overeating as a coping strategy than I have been in the past. There have been a few incidents of secret eating but… aha!... of foods that I consider treaty, comforting, or highly prized, like hummus or cheese and crackers. Huh. Perhaps I have more of a dieting mentality than I think I do, seeing as I’m raising certain foods above others. Another article had me pegged more as an habitual eater with a strong streak of emotional eater, which makes a lot of sense when I think about my patterns of eating when I feel strong emotions, but then consistently eating meals as usual, as if I hadn’t already eaten. Sometimes I do this to cover up my earlier food consumption. Either way, I eat regardless of whether I’m hungry or not, and I usually clean my plate, regardless of how full I get. It being Christmas I’ve had plenty of opportunities to experience extreme fullness, and when I think about it objectively, it’s not pleasant. Sitting around feeling all hefty and heavy in the stomach isn’t actually nice. It’s uncomfortable. There’s nothing intrinsically comforting about it, and it’s only because of the associations I have with it that it has the illusions of comfort. It makes more sense that to maximise feelings of comfort and pleasure you should stop when you’re satisfied, surely?

So the last couple of days I’ve been experimenting with that – only eating when I’m hungry, eating what my body wants, and stopping when I’m full. I confess that I have been cheating a little bit by serving myself smaller portions to get around the “clean plate” problem, but I’m amazed by how little I actually need to satisfy me. Yesterday at lunchtime, not having eaten yet, I made myself a bowl of pasta and tomato sauce – 50g (dry) of wholewheat pasta and just a little pot of tomato sauce, yet I could only eat 3/4 of it before getting my body’s signal that I had had enough. Weird. And scary – how come I am scared to eat that little if it’s what my body needs? I am aware that my size keeps me safe in some ways. OK, old ground… Fact is, if my body needs that little food, and I am consistently overfeeding it, it will continue to grow, and I am doing myself no favours. Despite it feeling strange, it’s quite exciting, fun and empowering to be listening out for my body’s signals and learning to obey them. Kind of like getting to know a new person. I have struggled a litle bit with stopping when I’ve had enough, and also with eating consciously – when I eat alone I have a tendency to read or watch something. Not eating a meal when I’m not hungry for one is counterintuitive, although I know it’s only because I’m used to eating dinner and it feels like deprivation if I don’t get it. But to eat a meal that my body doesn’t want or need is to deprive myself of much more.

Anyway. More thoughts to come.

Had string cheese around dinner time today and then didn’t eat dinner cuz I wasn’t hungry. Last night I ate cheese and crackers at dinner time while working, so no real dinner. When I woke up in the middle of the night I was hungry so I had a banana. Now I’m not hungry but a candy bar sounds good and I don’t eat much sweets anymore so I’m gonna go ahead and have a candy bar :)

Ok maybe I haven’t been eating quite enough. I’ll work on that a little better tomorrow.

It’s hard to do this in my house because my husband really values making dinner for everyone. But he is willing to deal with it because he values me not having an eating disorder even more. Eventually I hope to get to point where we can have normal dinners but I’m still doing intutive eating.

This is not a huge goal for me right now. Most of my other goals are more important, but it’s still nice to do good on this one too.

I read the book a few years ago and it worked great. At some point along the way, I fell off the wagon now I need to re-read and start living it again.