EXPERT BLOG: Two sure-fire contributions to looking older than your years are stress and poor diet. But what constitutes a good diet has become so confused that eating itself becomes a major source of stress for many. Today newspapers are reporting on a study suggesting that a high protein diet is bad for health. Recent weeks have seen high levels of reporting of the dangers of eating too much sugar. This has re-ignited the debate around the relative dangers of fats and sugars.
Navigating through the often contradictory advice is confusing and stressful. We end up obsessed with what we should be eating There are two problems when we do this: First we lose sight of whether we are actually hungry when we eat. Second we focus on what types of foods we “should” be eating without reference to what our bodies are hungry for (have an appetite for) right now. Is there another way to eat for health and healthy weight? Most certainly! You can improve your diet and reduce your stress around eating if you re-learn to tune in to your body’s natural signals regarding hunger and fullness.
Once you start to do this, you only start to eat when you are definitely hungry and stop eating when you are just full. Then your meal sizes are determined for you by your own gut, not someone else’s calorie calculations. If you haven’t been doing this for a while, it may feel uneasy or anxiety provoking to try, but help is available for this anxiety in the free download at www.positivelyhungry.com . When you wait to eat until you are hungry, food tastes fantastic, because your taste buds are naturally at their most sensitive. You don’t have to eat special food; just eat the food you already like.
So which foods can you eat and should you avoid? There is a growing body of opinion that excluding particular food groups or particular foods tends to backfire. It puts you under psychological or physiological pressure around eating. And when you’re under pressure around food it is more difficult to eat in tune with what your body wants. But once you start eating in tune with your body’s natural hunger and fullness, you can start to discern the other signals the body naturally produces. These are more subtle than overall hunger and fullness and they tell you what you fancy eating.
As long ago as 1973 Pearson & Pearson published “The Psychologist’s Eat Anything Diet”. This revolutionary book was fortunately read and talked about by Geneen Roth, one of the leading proponents of abandoning diets and listening to your body, which is how I came across it. The book was reprinted in 2009 so it’s easy to get hold of again. Pearson and Pearson strongly advocate learning to listen to what your body wants to eat by discriminating between foods that “hum” and those that “beckon”. Foods that hum to you are those that you really desire and love, regardless of whether they are immediately available. Foods that beckon to you are those that you had not been desiring, but that is available now and that looks or smells good. They explain that when a food hums to you, you yearn for it.
When a food beckons, it calls out to you. The food that hums will really satisfy your appetite, the food that beckons probably won’t. When you eat what doesn’t really satisfy your appetite, you may find yourself wandering on to eating other foods as you are still in search of what you desire, only that if you have already eaten something, it will be harder to discern what that is. Reduce stress Listen to your gut to tell you when to eat.
A simple scale for measuring your hunger and fullness levels is free to download at http://www.positively-hungry.co.uk/the-programme/positive-hunger-scale/
Increase the pleasure you get from food. Listen to your gut to tell you what to eat.
Dr Helen McCarthy is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society with 25 years of experience working as a Clinical Psychologist. Her academic training began at the University of Durham where she gained a B.Sc. Honours degree in Experimental Psychology after which she obtained a Doctorate in the Psychology of eating disorders from the University of Oxford. After leaving Oxford Dr McCarthy trained as a Clinical Psychologist within the British National Health Service. Since then she has worked as a Clinical Psychologist initially in the NHS and more recently in private practice.
On moving in to private practice Dr McCarthy found that patients were increasingly seeking help with weight loss after failed diets. Dr McCarthy explains how the Positively Hungry programme came about: “In 2011 a client came for help with bulimia nervosa which had been triggered by following a Very Low Calorie meal replacement programme. I was able to treat the bulimia using conventional cognitive behavioural therapy and the client returned to eating normally, but commented as she left her final session, “I just wish I could lose another stone in weight”. It struck me that despite decades of progress in the improvement of mental health using psychological therapies, normal weight loss was still beyond most people, including myself at the time. I started work on developing an alternative to dieting using myself as my first guinea pig.
My guiding principle was to make the weight loss easily sustainable by eating delicious food and minimising any sense of deprivation. I soon realised that the key was to work with, not against, the bodily systems which have evolved to govern appetite and eating. I have developed the approach I used on myself to offer other people the benefits of Positively Hungry to offer a genuine alternative to dieting”.