Going on an intuitive eating diet
1 February 2008 by livingrainbowcolor
I’m a normal eater. I’m clearly losing weight, and able to maintain my intuitive eating abilities, even when I don’t stand on a scale every day. Compulsive eating is no longer a disorder that controls my life. This is amazing progress, and I’m very proud of these achievements.
There’s more I want, though. More fitness, more weight loss. It would be great if I didn’t encounter social issues due to my size every day. You can read this as: I want to lose weight faster.
With weight loss, or with learning intuitive eating, there are three characteristics you can control:
- How fast
- How easy
- How permanent
Unfortunately, you can’t make big strides in all three at once. At best you can improve two at once, even though more often you can only improve one at a time.
Til now, I’ve been focusing on easy and permanent. It wasn’t all that easy to learn intuitive eating, but it has proven to be permanent. Now I’m ready to work on fast, and fast weight loss is my goal.
By fast, I only mean faster than my current progress. I’m not setting any tight goals on weight loss, since I can only control behaviors, not my body physics.
My plan: do a stomach hunger and lower calorie diet. All foods are still allowed, I’m just going to pay attention to eating less and getting fewer calories overall. Exercise is for fitness, not weight loss. I’ll weigh in once a month and see how it goes.
First marker: I weighed in at 313 pounds today. Over 50 pounds gone since I started intuitive eating. Let’s see how it goes.
Wish me luck. If I find that the ED returns, or binging, or whatever, I’ll back off, but otherwise, I’m giving it a shot. Intuitively.
Hi, good blog, so far. I’m also trying to lose weight similarly to you, by eating what I want, but with a gentle nudge toward healthier and less often. I don’t binge much anymore, and to tell you honestly, I think I binged because
a: I starved myself
b: I had strange ideas of what was healthy (no fat) which would cause me to NEVER be satisfied.
Now I eat a fair (not outrageous) amount of fat, and protein, and I’m much healthier and happier. But if I’m not so hungry at dinnertime, I’ll often eat a salad, or peanut butter on a cracker, and I’m happy with it. I’m losing some weight, not too quickly, but it is what it is. It’s not easy, but I’d like it to be permanent. I weigh every day.
Anyway, my point being, I understand what you’re doing, and wish you well, I think it’s the right approach.