Intuitive Eating — Teves — Principle #5 Respect Your Fullness — Olam Yehudi December 2017

In her witty handbook “When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair” Geneen Roth depicts the incredulousness chronic dieters display when they are given the advice to eat what they want when hungry and stop when they are full:

I can’t believe you’re saying I can eat what I want. You don’t know me. If I ate what I wanted, I’d eat three dozen doughnuts, a gallon of ice cream, and a pizza — and that would be the appetizer.
How many of us feel this way?

The “Feel Your Fullness” principle may be the toughest principle of Intuitive Eating to incorporate into our lives. It requires, in the very moment of eating something delicious, the heroic ability to tune out of the food itself and into our bodies to ask am I still truly hungry?

Like the dieters Roth chronicles, we feel that due to our endless appetites, bottomless stomachs, or some sort of overarching food addiction, we do not have the natural ability to put our forks down when we are satisfied. But the attunement to our hunger and satiety cues is inborn, and we lose it only when we try to control our diets through external manipulation of food intake (i.e. dieting).

Dieting Masks Fullness Cues

Think about yourself or someone you know who finds it difficult to stop eating when full. She may likely chew gum or drink inordinate amounts of coffee to keep her mouth busy, refuse to bring tempting foods into her house, and fear overeating at Shabbos or Thanksgiving dinners. The overwhelming odds are that this person has been restricting her food intake for a long time.

In contrast, consider children and adults who can be surrounded by food (any amounts and kinds of it!) and magically stop when they have had enough. These lucky humans have somehow remained unscathed by popular dieting rhetoric and consequently have no problem heeding their fullness signals.

Overeating, bingeing, and food addiction are learned behaviors that can be reversed not through more restriction but through relearning natural hunger/satiety cues.

Why It’s So Hard to Stop

There are factors that can cloud our intuitive judgement of satiety. Which ones apply to you?

1. Membership in the Clean-Your-Plate-Club. This common entreaty from parents and grandparents teaches children to ignore their intuitive hunger/satiety cues in lieu of eating everything on their plate, regardless of what their body tells them. Many who have grown up being urged to clean their plate have trouble relearning to eat according to internal signals.

2. Distraction. Have you ever eaten a meal while watching an engrossing movie? Chances are, you finished it and wanted seconds, and thirds, and a post-meal snack, and possibly, a very rich dessert. Eating, especially when you are relearning your hunger/satiety cues, requires you to be fully present to feel physically and emotionally satisfied with your meal. Your body’s subtle messages will not be heard if you eat while tuned into a book, television show, or even an overly emotional conversation.

3. Not Being Hungry Enough. Detecting fullness can happen only when you are actually hungry! As Geneen Roth writes, eating when you are not hungry is “like pouring water into an already full glass. There’s no space for the food to fill.”

4. Chronic Dieting. Imagine you are on Weight Watchers, and subsisted on a bare-bones diet all week so you can “splurge” your remaining points on a fancy restaurant dinner. If you are full by the time you are halfway done with your fettuccine alfredo, you better believe it will be hard to stop! After all, you are “entitled” to more food. The restriction that is attached to dieting can cause entanglement of emotional and physical feelings about food as well as dissociation from your body’s cues.

5. Being Too Hungry. Beginning a meal in a ravenous stats can lead you to feel confused about your body’s signals. Think of the experience of breaking a fast; it can take a while to play catch-up with a body that is starving, and it is easy to overeat without realizing it. This is the most common issue Rena sees with her clients; if you don’t eat consistently throughout the day, come evening and your body will be begging to be fed and have a hard time feeling satiated.

Teves Tune-Up

Did you know that this season is the most popular time for growth and development courses? People tend to be more introspective during the short shivery days of winter. Let’s use this opportunity to begin discovering what satiety feels like in our bodies.

Feeling our fullness is not easy; by being gentle with ourselves, understanding how tough it is, and attempting to get back in touch with our inner intuitive eater, we can slowly work toward it. Simply having the awareness of the internal struggle that can happen when we are full, even if we decide to continue eating, is a victory in itself. In the long-term, we can look forward to our fullness, trusting that the hunger will come again in good time.

About Us:

Rena Reiser is a certified Intuitive Eating Counselor. She has changed the lives of countless women all over the world who have tried dieting, and are “fed up”. She helps women come to peace with both food and life by discovering and satisfying our real hunger. Listen to a demo class atmindovermunchies.com or email rena@mindovermunchies.com.
Elisheva Blumberg is a freelance writer living in Edison, NJ. She has written the Frum Fashion Designer series for this publication. She can be reached at elishevablumberg@gmail.com.

What is Intuitive Eating?

It’s the anti-diet.
It’s the solution to the diet-binge cycle.
It’s a recovery.
Developed by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, Intuitive Eating (IE) is an evidence-based approach that relies on your body’s basic intuition to feed itself. While diets depend on external messages to determine our food intake, IE trusts in the body’s natural nutritional wisdom.
We are all born with the instinct to read our bodies’ signals. Just as our body will tell us when we need sleep, and how much of it we need, our body is programmed to tell us how to eat.
IE helps us reverse the damage the dieting culture has wreaked on our body’s natural wisdom. It leads us back to the basics. It may have been many years since you’ve lived fully in your body, but rest assured, you can return.

The Ten Principles of Intuitive Eating
Adapted from Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch

1. Reject the Diet Mentality
2. Honor your Hunger
3. Make Peace with Food
4. Challenge the Food Police
5. Respect your Fullness
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
7. Honor Your Feelings without Using Food
8. Respect your Body
9. Exercise – Feel the Difference
10. Honor your Health

Rena’s Tool of the Month

You may find that you can Feel Your Fullness, but then what? Transitioning from the act of eating to the absence of eating is so difficult that many people continue to eat despite knowing that their bodies have had enough.
Rena recommends pausing in middle of a meal for an internal check: Is the food still tasting good to me? How is my stomach feeling? The rest of my body?
With these frequent check-ins, you can anticipate fullness, and know what to do when the time comes for stopping.
Once you feel you are ready to transition away from eating, try doing something to reinforce that decision so as not to continue eating unmindfully.

• Put your fork and knife down and check in with yourself.
• Make yourself a tea or any other hot drink of choice. Sip it slowly and pay attention to the feelings in your body.
• If you are alone, try some deep breathing and positive self-talk. If you are with others, see if you can join a pleasant conversation and notice if your body feels pleasantly satisfied, or if you feel you need more food to feel your fullness.

(This article originally appeared in Olam Yehudi in Teves.)