Are you totally confused about how to eat healthy?  I am frustrated with the surplus of mixed messages about how to eat.  It took awhile for me to figure out what behaviors were really important.

I want to get the message out about how to eat.  Something clear, concise and easy to understand and implement.  I have written extensively on my main website for having a healthy lifestyle.  I decided that people need more.  Some kind of a program with support and formal lessons, etc. because simply reading posts doesn’t produce results.

The result I am talking about here is a healthy relationship with food. I don’t want you to have to think about food, weight, or your body anymore.  I want it to be easy and come naturally.  You eat when you are hungry, you eat what you want, and you stop when you are full.  Your body remains steady at its own set point weight.

I’ve been on both sides of the relationship with food.  Healthy eating is not what you’ve been made to believe.  Weight doesn’t have to be ‘controlled’.  Trust me and I will show you how to trust your body.  You probably haven’t done that in years–how is that working out for you?  There is a better way.

In the past, I believed that managing weight was a very difficult combination of restricting fat grams and exercising like crazy.  I admired those who “could eat whatever they wanted without worrying about weight”. 

Learning the Secret of Eating Right

It seemed like there must be some secret to weight regulation that I didn’t know, but I really wanted to learn.  This rather superficial reason led me to study nutrition in college.  Upon graduation, I was involved in interning at a facility which provided information on a non-diet approach to weight management.  I connected with this philosophy immediately.

Because I was already disheartened to know that most people who diet ultimately regain their weight, I was very interested in a different mentality.  I was certain that I did not want to place people on diets, as it seems unethical to know ahead of time they will fail.

I now know there is an easier way to be a normal, natural eater.  This type of eating promotes a person being at their body’s set-point weight (where their body naturally wants to be), without the use of dieting and excessive exercise. 

There are millions of people in this country and around the world who are struggling with their weight.  They, too, are beginning to see after many diets, that dieting is not the answer.  So that begs the question:  What is the answer?

What I have learned about normalizing the relationship with food is this:  it is not so much about what you eat, as it is about why you eat.

I want to help others improve their relationships with food.  I now feel that I am the kind of person who can eat whatever I want—and I have seen that anyone can have that freedom if they are willing to follow this approach.

The Lies We Buy about Healthy Eating

It seems like everywhere you turn there is someone telling you how to eat, what to look like, and what to do.  Family members (with their best intentions) affect your food behaviors in profound ways.  From the first time you are offered a cookie when you are crying (and not from hunger), you begin to make some unfortunate associations. 

As you grow older, your friends go on diets, complain about their bodies, etc, until you become increasingly uncomfortable with your own appearance.  Media comes in with unrealistic representations of what people should look like.  ‘Lose 5 pounds in 5 minutes’ is plastered on every magazine you pass while trying to buy groceries (hence the second-guessing of your choices). 
• The Lie we are fed:  “I (your name here) will be perfect/happy/etc…when I weigh_______ or am a size_______.  In fact, my biggest problem is that I am fat or am getting fatter every minute.”

• The Solution we are told:  Dieting is the path to this life of bliss you are seeking.  All of your dreams will come true from the moment you cross below the threshold of _____lbs.     Fireworks will shoot across the sky,
Angels will sing….

The Endless Cycle of Self-Destruction

So you begin the famine/feast cycle of dieting/not dieting.  This wreaks havoc on your biology as well as your psychology of eating. 

There are more diets available than ever, yet obesity is at an all-time high.  Still, people are praised for eating ‘good’ and criticized for eating ‘bad’. 

Your thoughts become progressively more obsessed with your eating patterns.  You get distracted from what you are doing because you are thinking about what you should eat vs. what you want to eat.  Of course, you feel perpetual guilt about the amount of exercise you aren’t getting.
Disordered eating is basically a focus on eating and body size that is negatively impacting a person’s quality of life. 

Nutritionist Debra Waterhouse defines it as, “any [person] who has some form of an unhealthy relationship with food and [his/her] body is a disordered eater.  [S/he] may be caught in the diet—binge cycle, restricting ‘forbidden’ foods, feeling guilty after eating or in a semi starvation state from chronic under eating, fasting, skipping meals, or over exercising.”

If you can’t go to a party or holiday gathering without anxiety about your eating, this is a problem.  If you feel guilt or remorse for what you’ve eaten, your quality of life is being affected.  Chronic dieting is essentially a socially accepted form of disordered eating.

THE PROBLEM:

 These behaviors ultimately impact your relationship with food and your body.  The side effect of this problem is your weight change.  Did you hear that?

WEIGHT CHANGE IS A SIDE EFFECT

THE PROBLEM IS:
YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD

I emphasize this because throughout the course of this process (yes, it is continual, but gets easier over time), you may falter.  If the focus shifts to the weight, the relationship with food becomes more distorted.

You may get distracted by sudden urges to ‘drop 5 pounds in 5 minutes’, despite the knowledge that you have tried that a gazillion times before—only to gain more weight back than was lost.  You will think all this food relationship mumbo jumbo is not quick enough.  Well, tell this to your inner hare:

• One year after people lose weight from dieting, 95% will have regained the weight. 

• After a few years, this number jumps to 98%.

• And it may be possible the other 2% are lying.

Your inner tortoise, who is willing to do
the work to improve quality of life
 by normalizing the relationship with food,
 wins this race.

Causes of Overeating:

1. Physical Overeating:  becoming too hungry between meals (ie. going too long without eating), which causes a biological reaction of overeating.  The body seeks high carbohydrate and high fat foods in an effort to stock up for future famines. 

This site will contain information on how to avoid overeating for physical reasons.  This includes concepts like timing of meals, combining at meals, etc. 

Some people will resist implementing new habits, because they will rationalize them as being ‘rules’ about eating—and this process is here to reject rules.  I do so hate to provide specific instructions because I know that your body knows best. 

However, I also know that many people embark on this journey after long abusing their bodies.  I want to help your body use food efficiently and minimize overeating for physical reasons. 

So many people come to me feeling they eat ‘out of control’ and once they implement these techniques, they find it was not a will-power issue at all.  Just simple biology.

2. Non-hunger Overeating (Emotional):  this is eating for reasons other than hunger.  Eating because it looks good, because of boredom, stress, etc.

This part of the process is much more involved.  But the work done in these areas will set you free for the rest of your life.  You will begin to understand why you eat the way you do.  You will actually begin to understand yourself much better—who doesn’t need that?

Imagine your very favorite food.  Bring to mind the way it smells and tastes and feels in your mouth. Now imagine I told you it was totally off limits–you could never have it again.  How would that make you feel about this food?  How would it make you feel in general?

Now imagine the same scenario, only this time I told you this food was available to you as often as you’d like.  You could have it everyday for the rest of your life if you wanted.  It was yours for the enjoying, and no one would ever take it away from you.  How do you feel now?

In my work with clients, there is extensive emphasis on something called legalization.  This means seeing all foods as equal.  The reasons we do this are 1) all foods have some nutritional value, and 2) it decreases the risk of binging ‘off-limits’ foods.  If you have foods on a bad list, you have to admit those are the ones you overeat.

It has been amazing to see the way food has lost its hold on my clients.  Some clients have reported important realizations since legalizing.  Some of the foods they binged in the past don’t even appeal to them anymore.  When you legalize foods, you get to determine if you even like them.  You don’t just binge them because they are ‘bad’.

When we take a look at the good food list and compare it with the bad food list, we see some interesting things.  I find that things like fruit, brown rice and sweet potatoes are on the good food list. Then I see that white bread, pasta, and cookies are on the bad food list.  It occurs to me that very obviously these items all share one important nutrient.

Carbohydrates.  While much is made of types of carbohydrates, the fact is they are all broken down into the same chemical structure.  Just like a molecule of water is H2O everywhere it exists, carbohydrate is identical when it is broken down.  Dare I say what that molecule is called?  Glucose–that’s right, sugar.  It is the all important fuel for blood sugar in the body.

The reason people make a fuss over different types of carbs is because of how they affect the blood sugar.  Ideally we want a nice, gradual rise and fall of blood glucose.  The fiber in fruits or brown rice helps that more than in bread.  But the newsflash is, most carbohydrates are eaten within the context of a meal anyways.  You will already be combining it with protein and/or fat, which will slow the digestion of the carbohydrate just like fiber.

This is why dietitians in general pay no mind to glycemic index or glycemic load.  We get that most people aren’t munching on single slices of white bread alone.  If you have a cookie for a snack, you are already getting the benefit of the fat in it to slow the digestion–problem solved!

Now I am sure I will receive a number of comments blasting me for being a nutritional heretic.  I used to be just like those people, pouring over calorie counter books and discovering the latest phytochemicals.  I used to think that was what was important for health and weight control.  Now I am clear on the real issues with eating:  an abnormal relationship with food.

One of the major reasons people are not comfortable with food is because they give it moral meaning and attach guilt to it.  This causes people to actually eat much more (rather than help them ‘control themselves’).  There is no reason for it.  Supplying people with a bunch of lists of foods to avoid has only resulted in rising numbers of people struggling with their weight.  So picture your favorite food one more time…now go have it, and enjoy every bite!