Big Fat Friday: Intuitive eating and the right to have whatever relationship you want with your food

In Thailand I lived in a situation where my household consisted of a Thai woman and her husband, myself and an elderly gentleman. The Thai woman was fat. While living with me she gained a considerable amount of weight. One evening, while sitting on our patio looking over the Andaman Sea, she sat down with a sandwich. Inside: butter, mayonnaise and chili sauce. We often teased each other about what the other ate. Fish heads, vs solidified moldy milk. When it came to this particular conversation though, I received an insight to poverty and one woman’s defiance of body ideology for pure pleasure. Bae, my friend, grew up in a small village in northern Thailand. She told me stories about how her family would suck on soil at a certain part of the year because they had no food. She lifted her sandwich and ate it happily saying, I don’t care if my husband leaves me because I am too fat. I am going to enjoy my food.

I had a similar reaction when when spending time with a parent I know. She feeds her children well, but eats a maximum of two meals a day and considers a cup of yogurt a meal. I consider a cup of yogurt a meal, when it has fruit and granola in it. One of the presumptions about being fat that offends me is the thought that I consume more than I should. “Should” being a relative term to the proportion of my ass to waist ratio. I recently realized I, in fact, do eat more than many of my thin friends. It is what I eat, though, that is not suspect. But is that wrong? In evaluating this, I also thought that most of my peers strive to live a healthy lifestyle. It is that our definitions of health that very. For many of my peers, thin= healthy. They chose their food through these glasses. For me health is not being obsessed with food choices, eating what my body needs and trying to be clear about the difference between needs and wants. This is called intuitive eating.

Now, as a quick disclaimer, when I lived in Thailand I worked out for about an hour and a half, six days a week. I ate less than I do here, but I drank a lot more. Oh, and I went dancing almost every night of the week. It was during the end of my stay that I started eating western food again, and also started on Dr. prescribed weight loss drugs. During those years I lost 100 pounds. My back went out for the first time, and I had uncontrolled uterine bleeding for a year. Since I left I have gained it all back, plus the 25% more that they say yo-yo dieters always do, and I have had only a handful of back flair ups since. I know I can be thinner but I chose not to pursue that path. Instead, I strive for my own definition of health and part of that is a friendship with food that defys my culture, my family, and most of my peers.

These are the principles of intuitive eating written by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD and Elyse Resch, MS, RD, FADA.:

10 Principles of Intuitive Eating

1. Reject the Diet Mentality Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.

2. Honor Your Hunger Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for re-building trust with yourself and food.

3. Make Peace with Food Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can't or shouldn't have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing When you finally “give-in” to your forbidden food, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating, and overwhelming guilt.

4. Challenge the Food Police .Scream a loud "NO" to thoughts in your head that declare you're "good" for eating under 1000 calories or "bad" because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The Food Police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created . The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.

5. Respect Your Fullness Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you're comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or food and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level?

6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor The Japanese have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence--the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less food to decide you've had "enough".

7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food Find ways to comfort , nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won't fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a food hangover. But food won't solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You'll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.

8. Respect Your Body Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It's hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.

9. Exercise--Feel the Difference Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm. If when you wake up, your only goal is to lose weight, it's usually not a motivating factor in that moment of time.

10 Honor Your Health--Gentle Nutrition Make food choices that honor your health and tastebuds while making you feel well. Remember that you don't have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It's what you eat consistently over time that matters, progress not perfection is what counts.