Hungry all the time?

Here's reality: WHEN YOU EAT ON A SCHEDULE YOU GET HUNGRY ON A SCHEDULE.

Image: Tafelschikking en maaltijd tijdens diner te Falmouth, Jan Brandes, 1778, Rijksmuseum. Used with permission.

Hello good people! I am writing to you on my way to the Badlands, a stop on our great Oakland migration. When we reach the end of the line, in October, I'll be ready to open up Body of Knowledge Weekly to new participants. If you want mentoring + accountability + expertise + dependable partnership bursting with sanity and lovingkindness on your weight/eating journey, you can get the details here.

Now then. I hear it ALL THE TIME: "I'm HUNGRY ALL THE TIME."

This is extremely common for women trying to get off the diet / binge wheel and onto the Intuitive Eating train.

(You will hear me say it a lot: I don't think that's a shift easily made. Those two tracks don't intersect at very many points, and I only know of two people, IN MY LIFE, who've gone straight from disordered eating to "intuitive eating" in one move AND lost weight AND kept it off AND transformed their whole experience. TWO PEOPLE IN 35 YEARS. One of those was a mentor - thank you Risa! - and only one of those was a client.)

We can all make the shift from disordered eating and yo-yo dieting to feeding our true hunger in a healthy orderly way, but not in one move. And the main reason is that bingey eaters have messed-up hunger hormones. 

We think we're hungry all the damn time, so we keep trying to feed that hunger. But feeding hunger all the time creates more hunger* - especially if we're feeding it with "food" on the less nutritious end of the spectrum. 

*AND MORE WEIGHT GAIN. Ugh.

If you want to take control of your hunger, an effective way to do that is to stop feeding on demand. Feeding on demand might be good for infants - MIGHT be - but it is not great for adults with weight problems or nutrition deficiencies.

We could actually just stop treating hunger as an emergency demanding immediate action.It's not. We can start feeding ourselves regularly and predictably on adequate amounts of real food - not faking ourselves out with inadequate diet-y portions of low-calorie bullsh*t "food" or low-nutrition, high-calorie "food" that "our body is asking" for.

Here's reality: WHEN YOU EAT ON A SCHEDULE YOU GET HUNGRY ON A SCHEDULE.

When you wait until lunchtime to eat lunch, you will be hungry for lunch. When you wait until dinnertime to eat dinner, you will be hungry for dinner. (As a client reminds me, that's how it's supposed to be.)

And if you stack up a few days like that, your hunger hormones will get into a groove and start leaving you alone at 1:30, 2:30, 3 and 3:15. But you have to LET them settle down by not rushing in there with yet more food.

I get it. That is the OPPOSITE of what Intuitive Eating tells you to do. I am saying nope! IF YOU ARE HUNGRY ALL THE TIME, and weigh more than you want to, then do this:

1. Do NOT eat in response to hunger. Ignore that hunger, do something else - anything but feed it - and wait until a specified (by you, obviously) time to eat.

2. DO eat in response to your set schedule. Allow the hunger response to follow YOU.

THAT is the fastest way to get in touch with real hunger. It's also the most enjoyable. And it's ALSO the method least likely to put on an extra 50+ lbs.

Okay, that's the week! Reminder: Body of Knowledge Weekly will be open to new participants in early October. You can read about that here. Have a GLORIOUS week.