The basics of weight loss for life

The basics to weight loss and weight management are really very simple:

You get hungry

You decide what you’d really like to eat

You enjoy your food, savouring every mouthful

You stop eating when you are no longer hungry

Repeat until death

But somehow we seem to have made this incredible simple process very difficult.  Over the years we are told what to eat, when to eat, where to eat, until you eat when you are told, not when you are hungry, you eat what is prescribed or ‘allowed’ not what you’d really like to, and as for stopping?  Isn’t is when the plate is empty?  Or when the serving bowl is empty?  Or worst of all, when the fridge is empty of all its temptations….?

Hmmm, there were many years when I actually thought I had been born without the stop button.

Listening to what we are told, rather than our bodies, means that we over-ride our natural mechanisms for hunger and satiety.  We no longer recognize when we need to eat (or when we don’t) and we no longer recognize when we should stop eating.  This means we eat long past the point of fullness.  It means we eat when our bodies are not hungry or ready for food.  It means we eat when we already have sufficient energy to live so it means what we eat is laid down as fat.

Eating in tune with your body is a very satisfying thing.  Your body does not want to be overweight, or heavy.  It wants to be lean and energetic.  This is how it was made to be.  But years of over-feeding, starving, fast food, Christmas and Thanksgiving and diets have beaten it into submission.  Now it just opens its mouth and digests whatever you next put into it.

But if you start listening to it again, it will actually talk to you.  It will tell you when it is hungry and when it is not.  It will tell you when it needs some red meat for iron or when it craves the vitamin C in citrus.