intuitive eating pt.4

Body Scan & Hunger Awareness

  • Body Scan:
    • Close eyes or soft gaze to focus.
    • Deep breaths to regulate the central nervous system and relax.
    • Imagine a hoop of light scanning from head to toes.
    • Notice physical feelings: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
    • Note the last time you ate or had water.
  • Scanning Process:
    • Scan from the top of the head, noting pain, discomfort, or tension.
    • Check for headaches or tension in the eyes and jaw.
    • Notice salivation (a sign of appetite, not necessarily hunger).
    • Scan the neck for tension.
    • Become aware of your chest and breath (slow/deep or short/shallow).
    • Feel your heartbeat.
    • Focus on your abdomen; a fist below the breastbone approximates the stomach's location.
    • Note if your stomach feels empty or full and if it's gurgling.
    • Check for pain/discomfort in the abdomen and back.
    • Scan down to legs and feet, noting pain, discomfort, or soreness.
  • Hunger and Fullness Scale (1-10):
    • 1: Ravenous.
    • 5: Unsatisfied.
    • 10: Stuffed.
    • 0: Painfully empty.

Voices of Hunger

  • Taste Hunger:
    • Driven by occasion, time of year, or tradition.
    • Example: Oktoberfest (German food, beer).
    • Holidays: Thanksgiving and Christmas (turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, pumpkin pie).
    • Pumpkin spice lattes in the fall.
    • Family traditions with specific foods.
  • Practical Hunger:
    • Eating based on a schedule or anticipated lack of time.
    • Example: Eating a snack before a series of meetings when a proper meal isn't feasible.
  • Emotional Hunger:
    • Eating in response to emotions (boredom, excitement, stress).
    • Teenage brother example: Repeatedly checking cabinets out of boredom.
    • High-energy emotions: Stress, excitement, anxiety.
    • Low-energy emotions: Boredom, depression, tiredness.
    • Stress-related food preferences: Crunchy or sweet foods (pretzels, candy).

Making Peace with Food

  • Principle 3: Making Peace with Food:
    • Counteracts deprivation backlash.
    • Deprivation backlash: Restriction leads to overeating.
  • Deprivation Backlash:
    • Analogy: Pulling a rubber band; more restriction leads to a greater rebound.
  • Last Supper Eating:
    • Eating large amounts of "forbidden" foods before starting a diet.
    • Examples: December before a January 1 diet, Fat Tuesday before Lent.
  • Rebound Eating:
    • Occurs in big families or groups where food is consumed quickly.
    • Driven by fear of not getting enough food.
    • Eating fast without paying attention to hunger cues.
    • Analogy: Competition for resources.
    • Restaurant example: Splitting a dessert, unconsciously mirroring the other person's eating speed.
  • Returning Home Syndrome:
    • Craving specific "real" meals or snacks after a period of restricted food choices (e.g., camping).
    • Example: Going home for break and wanting specific homemade meals and snacks.
  • Empty Cupboard Example:
    • Experiencing a lack of preferred foods due to infrequent grocery shopping.
    • Leads to overeating when desired foods become available again.
    • Not necessarily related to poverty or food deserts.
  • Captivity Behavior:
    • Tendency to overeat when food is available due to past deprivation (e.g., prisoner of war, abused child).
  • Depression Era:
    • Limited resources and food scarcity lead to resourceful eating habits.
    • Example: Eating all parts of an animal or using unconventional food sources like dandelions.
  • Lifetime/One Last Shot:
    • Eating as much as possible of a special dish in a rare or unique situation.
    • Driven by the belief that the opportunity won't arise again.
    • Example: Dining at an exclusive restaurant with a long reservation wait.

How Dieters Adapt

  • Restraint Eating:
    • Dieters suppress their hunger cues.
    • Art to stop listening to the body.
    • They change their mindset
    • They change responsiveness to body cues
    • They psychological restricting
    • They change their psychological response
    • They eat other things instead of what they want for example carrots.
  • Northwestern University Study:
    • Examined eating behavior of restrained eaters.
    • 57 female college students participated.
    • Participants were given a 10-question test to identify restrained eaters.
    • Subjects were given a pre-load of milkshakes (0, 1, or 2 milkshakes).
    • Participants then tasted and rated three flavored ice creams in private.
    • Results: Non-dieters regulated their eating, eating less ice cream if they had more milkshakes.
  • Dieters, however, ate more ice cream if they had more milkshakes.
    *They were forcing dieters to break rules.
    *They were for forcing the dieters to overeat or blow their diet.
    *Diet mentality: Thinking it's all or none.
  • What the Hell Effect:
    • Breaking a diet rule leads to overeating.
    • Restricting psychologically until a rule is broken.
    • Breaking a rule can cause overeating.

Seesaw Syndrome

  • Seesaw Syndrome:
    • Deprivation vs. guilt related to "forbidden" foods.
    • Eating the food leads to guilt; not eating it leads to deprivation.
    • The longer foods are prohibited, the more desirable they become.
    • Body craves high-fat, high-calorie foods, especially carbohydrates.
  • Unconditional Permission to Eat:
    • Giving yourself permission to eat can be very scary if you're a chronic dieter with a history of dieting.
    • Challenging for individuals with a history of dieting.
    • Start with neutral foods.
  • Black-and-White Thinking:
    *Foods are classified as good or bad.
    *On/off diet.
    *Perfect/horrible failure.
  • The objective is to eat what you really want.
  • Satisfaction:
    • Eating what you want satisfies you, so the assumption is that in the long run you wind up eating less.
  • Obligatory Penance:
    • Compensatory behaviors, such as exercising more or restricting food intake after eating a "forbidden" food.
  • SNAP story:
    • Older lady buys Lay's potato chips every month when her SNAP money comes in
    • She eats the whole bag, which is her ritual.
    • But once our body knows that there's not gonna be any deprivation, you're gonna have those chips all the time.
    • Your body doesn't you don't you don't desire, that is, it's no longer a big deal to have it.
  • Traps:
    • There are instances when it is claimed that dieting has co-opted intuitive eating.
    • Another claim is that when people try the method they won't eat healthily.
  • Lack of Self Trust:
    • A client was freaking out after noticing her child was eating enough for her husband, but it ended up being a growth spurt. Remember situations are temporary, don't need to impose what we think are normal values for someone with a different body.