Re: Principle 2 - Honor Your Hunger

August 21, 2008

-First THANKS to Arnie for being our leader as we review the IE

Principles

Honoring my (body) hunger remains one of my biggest challenges of IE

in my life. I find it easy to honor craves which are not body hunger

much more easily!! I am happy that I am slowly but surely finding the

underlying drives to eat for comfort, boredom or other than physical

body needs and dealing with those instead of resorting to eating.

It seems to me that I have too long forced myself to eat for other,

externally oriented reasons, and my rebellion now is to eat in

defiance of those. Again, that has lessened in time too. But the main

hurdle I have for myself is that I so want for my true, body hunger

signals to be automatic and taking no conscious thought on my part. In

light of how I've previously ignored or overridden these, consciously

too in the past, reversing that process now will take awareness and

mindful effort on my part too. Its just that some days I am so tired

of all the 'work' of this! Then I remind myself that I am worth the

effort and up to the challenge too.

Thanks one and all for being here for me too.

ehugs, Katcha

IEing since March 2007

August 21, 2008

" Honor Your Hunger " ...that phrase holds alot of different meanings for

me and caused me to question the many ways I didn't honor my hunger

and the many ways that I could. After reflecting on the fact that I

ignored/suppressed my hunger, didn't allow myself to get hungry

(non-hunger eating), and did not even appreciate the basic importance

and guidance of hunger signals...I know that honoring my hunger has

made an enormous difference in improving the quality of my

relationship with my body and my life.

When I started working with IE, I really questioned how did I know

when I was hungry? I couldn't answer this question and most people I

know couldn't answer that question either. Over the past several

months of experimenting and tracking myself...the answer to this

question has become much more clear. I just " know " ...and this for me

is the process of developing the " intuitive " eating. I've noticed that

my body provided signals that I ignored...like a gnawing sensation,

warmth in my abdomen and also more obvious signals like growls and

gurgles. And as the this chapter indicated, developing this knowledge

of my true biological hunger has helped me tell the difference between

it and emotional and taste hunger. There are many different hungers.

The book also shared how dieters hover in a zone called " biological

indifference: " In the zone of biological indifference, there is no

clear hunger or satiety cue. This zone is so wide for the chronic

dieter that instead of eating based on internal eating cues--food

thoughts and judgments prevail and tell the dieter what to do. " p. 68

I'm very familiar with this zone. In this zone, it is/was very easy

for me to eat for emotional reasons, to keep eating past full, or to

continue to eat foods that affect me in adverse ways or that I didn't

want. The ongoing thoughts I had about how much I didn't like

eating....how much I didn't like food, etc. reinforced habits that

kept me out of balance and prevented me from hearing and honoring my

own internal cues. Wow...I still can't believe that it took me this

long to find IE and recognize a better way of being with myself.

" Honor Your Hunger " is it's own mantra and it's own journey.

Latoya

Working with IE since Jan '08.

August 22, 2008

I was nursing my baby as I read this, and it iccurred to me how I

always honor his hunger. Sometimes I am shocked by how lonh or short an

interval it is between feedings, but I always feed him I would never

let him just be hungry and ignore his need to eat.

Then I started tinking about my 2.5 year old and if we honor her hunger

and what messages we're sending her. The truth is we MOSTLY honor her

hunger, but sometimes we tell her she needs to eat when she says she

doesn't want to (like if we need to leave to be somewhere), and if it's

right before she is supposed to go to sleep, we say no (but she still

drinks as much milk as she wants right before bed). Toddlers are

supposed to eat intuitively, and I don;t want to squelch her intuitive

eater based on my own beliefs about hunger/food.

Annyway, I'm hoping to hold my son as an example and treat my and my

daughter's hunger as I do his.

August 22, 2008

This is a hard one for me - primarily because I have a hard time

differentiating between true hunger and cravings. As I'm still in the

honeymoon phase, guess which one gets the most attention!

I too tend to eat because it's " time " if I'm hungry or not. How can we

not - growing up with scheduled lunch periods during school! This

morning I tried to start taking steps to correct that. I didn't eat

breakfast because I was not hungry. I took it with me and ate it at

work when I was started to feel like I was. This afternoon I fell back

into the trap. I'm going to do some running around after work and

started to eat lunch even though I wasn't hungry at all because of

the " what if " . As if getting hungry in Target would be a huge

emergency. I managed to stop halfway through because I realized I

wasn't enjoying what I'd brought - and in fact I wasn't even tasting

it. I have to decide that it's ok to be a little hungry while running

errands. I know that stopping when satisfied will be the biggest

challenge for me. I'm looking forward to that discussion.

August 22, 2008

I'm doing pretty well with knowing when I'm hungry, however, still

working on when I'm satisfied as I still go over. I don't like that

overfull feeling at all anymore but like Katcha said I'm working on a

new skill. Phrases that stick in my mind are; honour your hunger,

last bite threshold and the satisfaction factor.

J.

>

> Hi All,

>

> This message is continuing with our weekly theme of starting a

thread

> of messages focusing on one of the ten principles outlined in the

> book Intuitive Eating by Tribole and Resch. Please post and let us

> know what you think about this week's topic. Perhaps you could

quote

> a small section that meant something special to you. If you haven't

> read the book for a while, you might want to re-read this section.

> Something new might jump out at you that you would like to share

> about. If you don't have the book that's okay too, just post on the

> topic or other peoples comments about the topic.

>

> If you are new to the group and would like to read and post about

> last week's theme, that's okay too. Principle 1 - " Rejecting the

Diet

> mentality " started with Message number 16826. You can go directly

to

> that message and then scroll down to the bottom of the page to see

> many of the posts in that thread.

>

> -------------------

>

> I love principle 2, " Honor Your Hunger. " Having spent so many years

> either starving or gorging it's a relief to just eat when I'm

hungry

> and not have to worry about if it's time to eat, or how many

calories

> I've already consumed today, or get depressed because I'm starving

> and can't eat.

>

> I thought the section in the book on " Hunger Silence " was

interesting

> because I did that a lot, using diet sodas and caffeine to try and

> turn off the hunger, or skipping breakfast.

>

> For my first few days of IE I had a hard time figuring out if I was

> hungry or not. But now, only two or three weeks later, most of the

> time now I know when I'm hungry. Although sometimes I still overeat

> when I'm hungry for reasons other than a biological hunger.

Sometimes

> I just eat recreationally. Like last night when I was at the fair,

> stuff just looked so good. I gave myself permission to eat past the

> point of not being hungry any more. I knew I wasn't really hungry,

> but I didn't want to walk away feeling deprived. But at least today

> I'm aware of what I'm doing.

>

> I'm enjoying eating when I'm hungry. At first I would always look

at

> the clock to see if it was " time to eat " or not. Lately those

> thoughts aren't even coming to mind. It's so freeing and really

> reduces my anxiety level around food to just know that the next

time

> I'm hungry I can eat.

>

> Arnie

>

August 22, 2008

I'm reading this book called Breaking Free From Emotional Eating and

thinking she's writing about me. I was just sitting thinking about

eating for hunger but I don't feel I truly honour my hunger although

I know when I'm hungry and when I'm not hungry but eat anyway for

other reasons. Sometimes at work I know I'm hungry at 10am (my work

day starts at 4am as I get up, get showered and drive over an hour

one way to get to work for 7am)but I'm embarrassed as what will my

partner think me wanting and eating a sandwich at 10am so I hold off

until it looks better say 11:30am, then the tones go off and I have a

minute to get out the door, then I don't get anything to eat until

2pm and by then I'm am way past my hunger, tired, dopey and shaky.

Is that still the diet mentality?

J.

>

> Hi All,

>

> This message is continuing with our weekly theme of starting a

thread

> of messages focusing on one of the ten principles outlined in the

> book Intuitive Eating by Tribole and Resch. Please post and let us

> know what you think about this week's topic. Perhaps you could

quote

> a small section that meant something special to you. If you haven't

> read the book for a while, you might want to re-read this section.

> Something new might jump out at you that you would like to share

> about. If you don't have the book that's okay too, just post on the

> topic or other peoples comments about the topic.

>

> If you are new to the group and would like to read and post about

> last week's theme, that's okay too. Principle 1 - " Rejecting the

Diet

> mentality " started with Message number 16826. You can go directly

to

> that message and then scroll down to the bottom of the page to see

> many of the posts in that thread.

>

> -------------------

>

> I love principle 2, " Honor Your Hunger. " Having spent so many years

> either starving or gorging it's a relief to just eat when I'm

hungry

> and not have to worry about if it's time to eat, or how many

calories

> I've already consumed today, or get depressed because I'm starving

> and can't eat.

>

> I thought the section in the book on " Hunger Silence " was

interesting

> because I did that a lot, using diet sodas and caffeine to try and

> turn off the hunger, or skipping breakfast.

>

> For my first few days of IE I had a hard time figuring out if I was

> hungry or not. But now, only two or three weeks later, most of the

> time now I know when I'm hungry. Although sometimes I still overeat

> when I'm hungry for reasons other than a biological hunger.

Sometimes

> I just eat recreationally. Like last night when I was at the fair,

> stuff just looked so good. I gave myself permission to eat past the

> point of not being hungry any more. I knew I wasn't really hungry,

> but I didn't want to walk away feeling deprived. But at least today

> I'm aware of what I'm doing.

>

> I'm enjoying eating when I'm hungry. At first I would always look

at

> the clock to see if it was " time to eat " or not. Lately those

> thoughts aren't even coming to mind. It's so freeing and really

> reduces my anxiety level around food to just know that the next

time

> I'm hungry I can eat.

>

> Arnie

>

August 22, 2008

I have been thinking about this too. I watch my 4 year old granddaughter turning away her very favorite foods at times with a " no, thank you " because she isn't hungry! Like she turns down chocolate and orange slices! Can you even imagine? I have learned much from observing her!

But what I have been most struck by is the thought that when she says she is hungry and asks for something to eat, I honor that. I would never ever consider telling her no, if she was hungry. But then, why do I do that to myself? I try to remind myself of this when I first start experiencing hunger and my first thought is to wait...would I make that 4 year old girl wait? NO!

It goes along with taking care of that child within....