Hunger Directed Eating: Deja Vu or Deja Woo-hoo?

I apologise for the appalling title.  It is Friday and it is the end of the week and I am ready for the weekend.  A four day weekend, no less, since we have tacked an extra leave day on after the Bank Holiday.  We are off to London, but not to see the Queen - to see my brother, D2, my sister in law and my gorgeous nephew and nieces.  So, much to look forward to.

In the meantime, Hunger Directed Eating, or HDE, has been popping up a lot as a tag on my Instagram feed recently so obviously I clicked on it for a nosy around.  I might be missing something, but it seems to be VERY similar to the kind of thing that Paul McKenna was pushing years ago with his "I Can Make You Slim" programme, minus the slightly spooky hypnosis CD.

The gist is that if you eat like a slim person, you will get slim.  Which makes sense to a certain extent.  You have to listen to your body, eat what you want, when you want and stop when you are satisfied.  For dieters, this sounds like the Holy Grail - no restrictions, no counting, no nothing.

I must admit, while I think it sounds pretty great, I am slightly sceptical.

One: learning to eat instinctively is a VERY GOOD THING.  If someone is suffering from a binge eating disorder then reprogramming yourself that you no longer categorise food as "good" and "bad" is excellent.  And if you can crack it, it's the most natural way to maintain weight loss in the world.  But...

Two:  if you have a significant amount of weight to lose, I am unconvinced that you will manage to do it with a programme that sells itself on the notion that there is no restriction whatsoever.  I am no biologist, but I am fairly sure that the human body is instinctively (key word here) more likely to want to maintain the status quo (including fat stores which are a useful defence against future famine) than it is to get smaller.  Obviously, if you go from bingeing seven days a week to eating a normal diet, you will create an initial calorie deficit and you will lose some weight.  But to lose four stone (say) you would have to create an overall calorie deficit of (roughly) 196,000 calories.  Over the course of a year, to do this you would need to instinctively undereat by 536 calories a day.  For a woman that's a quarter of their daily maintenance requirements.

Three:  again, if you are someone with a significant amount of weight to lose, you have likely been ignoring your instincts and your body for a very long time.  You are likely to be very, very good at it.  So to expect to completely reprogramme yourself and lose weight at the same time seems a tough ask.  It's a bit like...well, say you are a really terrible driver and you take a driving test and end up mounting the pavement and ploughing into a load of pedestrians before ending up in a duck pond.  You have utterly failed at something which is a very natural and instinctive skill for other people.  HDE strikes me a bit like you've climbed out of the pond and are wondering what to do next and the driving instructor hands you the keys, rips up the L plates and says, "Yep, you've proved to be really bad at this driving but the instincts are probably there somewhere so just trust yourself in the future and you'll be fine."  It just doesn't make logical sense.

Four: almost without fail, every photograph I saw with an HDE tag was of high calorie, high fat food.  Now, it might well be that the user is eating a Full English for breakfast and then is so full afterwards that they pick on fruit and carrot sticks for the rest of the day.  That's kind of the point.  But when you see pictures like that, all captioned: "I can eat this and still lose weight!" you being to wonder if we've got a bit of a case of the Emperor's New Diet here. 

Anyway, I would love to be proved wrong here - so if anyone has come across a genuine, long-term success story then please share.  I'm going to see if I've still got that Paul McKenna book kicking around somewhere; aside from anything else, that CD was one of the best insomnia aids that I have ever yet encountered for all that it didn't help to make me thin...

The elephant in the room [apart from me]

It occurs to me that this blog hasn't really been much about Weight Watchers lately.  This is probably because I have not counted a point since the beginning of December.  I initially thought about writing some sort of apologia, but then thought better of it.  The truth is, I just haven't been in the right place and if your head isn't in the right place then it doesn't work.

It's not a question of making excuses (they're boring to both write and read), it's just a question of not being there and I think anyone who has ever successfully lost weight - actually, ever successfully achieved anything worth achieving - will understand what I mean. 

Do I still want to lose weight?  Most days, yes.  Most days, I am vain enough to care that I would look prettier if I was a few stone lighter.  Most days, I am concerned enough for my (generally good) physical health that I think I need to make more of an effort.  But some days I am happy - or, at the very least, content.  And contentment is fine - contentment is good but the danger is it leads to complacency and I am not yet close enough to goal to be complacent.

There is a delightful freedom to not worrying about points.  As may be clear from this blog, I love cooking, and the ability to not have to measure every ingredient that goes into a dish is rather liberating.  To not have to plan my day's food to within an inch of its life is...well, it's nice.  The break has been nice.

It is temporary.  And when normal services resumes you will be the first to know.

Edited to add: This is my 500th post!  Goodness.  Not what I would have chosen but there you go...probably sums up the contrary nature of my writing here over the past few years.  As ever, beloved readers, thank you for popping by and maybe by the end of the next 500 rambles I'll be sylph like and sorted!!

Happiness Delivery System

Interesting article in The Guardian this Saturday (you can read it here) about women, many of them highly intelligent, successful, slim individuals who regard themselves as feminists and yet hate their bodies and spend vast amounts of mental energy on monitoring their food intake.

My first reaction was "Thank God it's not just me!"

My second was that in writing a blog which is (in part) about, er, monitoring one's food intake, I'm just helping to propagate this completely anti feminist stance that to be valid as a woman you have to meet twenty first century society's rather limited definition of beauty.  Which can't be good.

I suppose the big difference between me and the women in the article is that I need to lose weight in order not to be beautiful (although I would be lying if I said that physical appearance wasn't a motivating factor) but to be healthy by NHS standards.  I have never had any major (physical) health issues weight related or otherwise, and I would like to keep it that way for as long as possible.

And, really, when I sat and thought about it, I realised that the beauty side of things is not the driver for me now, at 33, that it was ten years ago.  Actually, ten years ago, I was pretty slim.  I also was extremely strict about what I ate and took very little pleasure in food a lot of the time.  I think now the goalposts have changed - health is first and foremost and, as part of that, having a relaxed relationship with food.  I love food - I mean, really love it, but I don't want it to take up every waking second.  There are other things to do and other things to be.

Wonderful blog post about said article here as well - in particular, I love the quote:

 I recognise my body for what it is: a magnificent delivery system for all sorts of happiness, big and small.

And as I sit here, with a purry cat nuzzling at me, and a hot cup of Yorkshire tea to hand, I feel profoundly grateful for the small happinesses that make up every day life and that, sometimes, we are in danger of missing while in pursuit of that elusive perfect.