Any of these apply to you?

  • Maybe you wish to shed a couple of extra pounds but what ever you try seems to blow back into your face
  • Or maybe you sometimes eat beyond your comfort levels
  • Or feel out of control around some foods or in some eating situations
  • Or use food to cope with difficult emotions and other difficulties in life...

How about a 10 weeks Intuitive Eating Challenge?

I have been dieting my whole adult life. Maybe I didn't call it dieting - but one way or another, I used external measurements and rules to choose the kinds and quantities of food I was eating. I was even quite successful in it - I managed to lose 25% of my body weight and to keep it off for two years.

But what I eventually realized is that diets simply don't work. They are a temporary change of our behavior, and lead to deprivation. Once we reach a certain point when we had enough of deprivation, we fall back to our old habits. This leads to regain of any lost weight, and often, we even end up gaining extra pounds. This is because every time we diet, we teach our selves that some foods are bad, and off the table for us, and that we reaffirm to our selves that we are convicted to life of awful self deprivation. And this is at the core of binging (because every time you do allow your self to eat a certain food, or to let go of counting, or limits, you try to make the most of it and end up binging).

Even with the exceptional success with weight loss, I still can identify with most of the points from the beginning of this post. 

So, is there alternative to using these external measurements, to this continuous self management? I've been searching for one for a couple of years now. I think I found what I was looking for. I stumbled upon this great book called Intuitive Eating. It’s about re-learning how to eat in a natural and intuitive way by getting in touch with your hunger body signals that we became numbed for by dieting. The book is based on ten different complementary principles than one is to follow in order to re-learn intuitive eating (http://www.intuitiveeating.org/10_Intuitive_Eating_Princip.php).

This approach is liberating, and life changing. It boils down to a couple of quite simple principles - but simple doesn't mean easy. I strongly believe in the importance of practice, patience and focus on the learning process in this. 

And this is exactly what I propose. Starting from next week, we take one week per principle, reflect on it, discuss it, practice it, and try to adopt it. Practically, I will start every week with a new post. You can join the discussion by posting your self, or by commenting. The idea is that we reflect on the principle, and try different things to adopt it. 

Let me know if you're up for it.  Just email me at beegmahn on Google's email address: gmail.com, and I'll keep you up to date. Or simply come back here next week.