Heather, my nutritionist, and I met on Monday. We've been meeting every two to three weeks all semester talking about what I'm eating, why I'm eating, when I'm eating, and how I feel when I eat.
Well there's been a lot of talk about calorie counting, what works and what doesn't, what foods make me insane and what foods are 'safe' (meaning they don't trigger overeating). Calorie counting is the bread and butter of diets (pun intended).
Well, Heather looks harmless but she's a radical. At least with the truly radical hippies you can tell by their hair and their smell. With little doe-eyed brunettes like Heather you cannot tell just from the visual that she's secretly harboring progressive thoughts that challenge every other idea you've ever had.
Here's what she told me: eat when you're hungry.
She may have just as well told me that the moon was really the light source and sun merely reflected the moon's radiance, rather than the other way around.
Eat when I'm hungry? Who does that???
She gave me a sheet of paper with a scale on it. 1 is dizzy, shaky hunger. 3 is hunger. 5 is "hey, yeah, I could eat." 10 is the equivalent of a post-Thanksgiving turkey dinner stuffed (with pie, I think 9 would be Thanksgiving without dessert).
Well, I've been doing it since Monday morning. It requires constant self-evaluation. When I feel pangs of hunger I say "is that a four or a three?" If it's a four I try to wait until I feel like it's a three then I eat.
I do believe that I'm eating less, but I'm not calorie counting, so I'm not entirely sure. Heather wants me to walk away from calorie counting as much as possible. In the world of losing weight this is revolutionary talk, and if this was 18th century France I'd call her actions traitorous.
I'm not sure I trust this new methodology. If I only ate when I was really hungry, I wouldn't be fat, right?
Well, I will update everyone on this new way of considering food. Maybe it will work. Maybe I'll gnaw off my own knees. Not sure yet.
1 comment:
I would be interested in hearing your conclusions after some time has passed.
I realize that I am in a different boat than you but since I got pregnant I have really tried to focus on being aware of when I am hungry. I don't want to fall into the trap of letting pregnancy being an excuse to overeat. So far (for me) I think it is an effective strategy.
Good luck with this new way of thinking about eating!
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