Dieting leads to deprivation, deprivation leads to craving, and craving can lead to out of control behaviour. I eat whatever I want when I’m hungry and find that I’m more easily able to stop when I’m full. When I feel satisfied with what I eat, I eat less. I’m learning to cope with my emotions without using food. Ask yourself what you really want to eat. You don’t need to eat a healthy dinner before eating the dessert you’re really craving.

What I love about this book is that it gives you an opportunity to explore why you were interested in dieting, to begin with. Not having the best body image is why most of us got started with restrictive dieting. But as we know now, diets offer tantalizing promises that are just never fulfilled…or never last. This book offers help with body acceptance and is a great read to have along with the original IE book above. It also bothered me that they lump crazy fad diets together with weight loss strategies that a doctor would recommend. Everyone knows fad diets are bad, but telling people to go against their doctor's advice? You better really lay out the evidence. Anecdotes are not enough. Without either of us knowing it, we were enacting a central tenet (and strategy) of this book. It is the authors' basic premise that our bodies can be trusted to know what they need and when they are hungry, if we can strip away the unhealthy conditioning we've taken in and stop second-guessing our bodies. For many of us, and for the authors' primary target audience, this means thoroughly understanding and letting go of the diet mentality in all its guises, and nurturing healthy, positive, productive self-talk. The key is completely removing ourselves from rules, which create forbidden actions and foods. These taboos can trigger a starvation response in us... which is surprisingly rampant in our culture of food abundance. By encouraging ourselves to know on a deep level that we can eat what we want and that we will not deprive our bodies, we free ourselves of primal triggers that have us battling scarcity thinking. By removing rules we have imposed on ourselves from the outside - from innumerable sources, many of them well-meaning - we can remove obstacles to hearing our own intuitive interactions with food. This is a fundamental trust in the wisdom of our bodies, something I deeply value.

There are a few Intuitive Eating books that just aren’t my vibe. If they’re helpful for you – I’m happy for you, but I did want to explain why I don’t recommend these two books. Don’t fear negative feelings. Accept that negative emotions like stress, anger, and boredom will come and go. Learn to cope with these feelings without using food: talk to a friend, go for a walk, take a shower, pray, or meditate.

They found that this method was incredibly successful and led to long term health benefits, while their previous methods were unsustainable and ineffective for their clients. Proceed at a comfortable pace. It takes time to build up trust in yourself. Before you proceed, please be sure that you are consistently honouring your hunger. A ravenous person os bound to overeat regardless of his or her intention.

Probably my favorite parts of the book were reading the science cited by the authors of why dieting both biologically and psychologically DOES NOT WORK for 90-95% of people. Yet people blame themselves rather than the process of dieting, leading to depression, anxiety, and an obsession with food. Not only does dieting reduce your metabolism, but calorie-deprivation leads to periods of overeating. I read on one of the author’s blogs this morning that a review of 31 long-term studies on dieting by UCLA scientists found that dieting is a consistent predictor of weight gain: http://nutrition-info-411.evelyntribo.... With dichotomous (B&W) thinking, go for the grey where unrestrictive eating supports your choices. With absolutist “if then” thinking, replace “should” with permissive statements like can, is okay, may. With catastrophic thinking, treat yourself to hopeful coping statements that confirm your current and future happiness. With pessimistic thinking, make the cup half full. With linear thinking, switch to process thinking, which focuses on continual change and learning rather than just the end result. At the end of the day, Intuitive Eating is an individualistic approach to a systemic problem. It’s useful for counseling, but it’s not going to effect large-scale change and produce a society with healthier-sized bodies. There are undercurrents of evangelism in the Intuitive Eating approach in the sense that Tribole & Resch assert that their philosophy is the ideal philosophy. In other words, Intuitive Eating claims to be a one-size-fits-all approach, which disregards the fact that different approaches work better for different people. Tribole & Resch also condemn the diet industry for being profiteering. Well, I daresay the developers of Intuitive Eating have very much financially benefitted from their “new” philosophy. They are both in private practice in California, their book has sold over half a million copies, and they doubtless rake in hefty speaker fees for their work at conferences and panels. I came across a mention of this book on a blog and thought it sounded interesting. It's about losing the diet mentality and having a healthy relationship with food and our bodies. The book is geared toward chronic dieters, which I am not. I don't think I've ever seriously dieted. Sometimes I'll focus on smaller portions or eating healthier, but I'm not about denying myself foods or counting calories. If I'm hungry I eat. Even though it's not written with me in mind so much, I got some useful and interesting things out of it. While reading it I was more aware of my eating habits and learned interesting things about myself that I hadn't realized. I noticed it's not hard for me to wait until I'm hungry to eat unless I am stressed out. Then I just want to eat. I realized if I take smaller amounts and really think about if I'm satisfied before getting more, I usually am and don't need more. I learned that I have a tendency to want to eat food just because it's available and yummy, whether I'm hungry or not, like at a buffet. I don't like letting food go to waste and tend to clean my plate. I liked the author's comment that it's not going to waste, it's going to waist. The book helped me shake off some of those behaviors, at least while reading it. Since I finished it over a month ago, I've become somewhat less conscious again.