Intuitive eating means listening to your body’s hunger/satiety cues and following them. The idea is to create a healthy approach to food while eating intuitive, without unnecessary restrictions. This approach sounds simple, but can actually be quite demanding. It takes a bit of practice to become aware and conscious of your body’s signals. To start with, many of us simply don’t recognize the feeling of hunger. We might be snacking so often that we don’t really remember how it feels to be hungry, or the feeling might be hidden behind a craving for sugar or salt or an urge to put something into our mouths. This happens most often in the afternoon or in the evening, when we are most likely to binge eat or consume unhealthy food. If we would notice being hungry, we could stop simply start preparing a proper meal instead of snacking.
So, how to diet by eating only when hungry? You have to start with learning or remembering again how it feels to be hungry. Trust your body. It knows how much food it needs. Listen to it and start making a difference between being hungry and being satisfied. Maintaining a regular eating routine helps achieving this. Eat small meals three to five times a day depending on your preferences and see how you feel.
Here are four tips to keep the hidden hunger away:
1. Eat enough every day. If you eat less than 1500 kilocalories a day, you are entering the danger zone. If you consume less than 1000 kilocalories a day for a longer period, you will start feeling extremely hungry and experience very strong urges to eat certain foods. Eating gets out of your control. So, if you decide to follow the short diets with very little calories in them, be prepared to fight these feelings for the duration of the diet. One easy way to stay on top of your calorie intake is to count your daily calorie requirement and follow your daily calorie consumption with an online calorie calculator. Also remember to take a multivitamin pill a day.
2. Eat enough during the day. If you don’t eat about half of the day’s kilocalories by the afternoon, you will feel hungrier during the evening and eat more. Eating doesn’t seem to help and you will become more prone to snacking or eating sugar. If you eat enough during the day, you will feel less hungry in the evening, and therefore eat less. This is another thing you are able to monitor with a calorie calculator.
3. Eat less carbs and more fats. The way our body digests carbohydrates creates easily a vicious circle, where we end up eating way more than we need because of the fast blood sugar changes and insulin. Fats are good for keeping the feeling of hunger away. Read the weight loss tips page to learn more about this.
4. Let yourself eat. If you are trying to control your eating habits too strictly and try to stay away from all the foods you love, you will start dreaming of all the delicious foods and end up binge eating.These eating outbursts are the main reason for weight gaining. It is better to enjoy your favorite foods every now and then, but listen carefully what your body says about the quantities. Following the intuitive eating scheme should take care of this.
Eating intuitive, in other words eating when hungry and only when hungry will help you sustain a healthy diet. If you are successful in intuitive eating, weight loss is a likely outcome. If you are trying to figure out how to diet and these tips on how to lose weight didn’t make a difference in your eating habits, you might suffer from emotional eating. Emotional eating is the practice of consuming large quantities of food in response to feelings instead of hunger. Read further to know more about the problem.
Related posts:
