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...