Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight (9 page)

 
Another part of the deal is that we’re physically hungrier due to rising setpoints, the result of changing lifestyle choices. How we live our lives and what we eat
do
matter. Those are weighty topics that deserve their own chapters.
 
What Drives Your Hunger?
 
Have you ever thought about
why
you eat? Sure, sure, part of the reason is because your stomach is growling and that steaming bowl of pasta with marinara sauce is making your mouth water.
 
Imagine traveling back many millions of years to pose this question to Nate the Neanderthal.
 
“Why eat? I eat to survive, dummy. Now pass me that bison leg and quit bothering me with such silly questions.”
 
Without the distractions of modern life, Nate is able to home in on the simple but profound answer to our question, an answer that often eludes us post-Neanderthals. The most basic reason we eat is to provide fuel for our bodies. Without food, obviously, we’d die.
 
In fact, hunger is at the foundation of our biological programming that ensures our survival as a species. Every cell in our bodies is so invested in making sure we eat and provide fuel, that not only are our bodies designed to make us feel miserable when we’re hungry (lightheaded, irritable, headachy, weak, etc.), but they are also designed to reward us when we
do
eat, triggering pleasure centers in our brains that make the act of eating so much more appealing than simply stuffing our mouths. This pleasure is our reward for listening to our bodies’ signals and it plays an important role in the setpoint mechanism.
 
If only hunger and eating remained that simple! Today, few of us view food as a means of fueling our bodies. Nor is it a source of true pleasure for many of us. In fact, the pleasure we get from eating is too often viewed as indulgent or sinful, rather than as valuable support for nourishing ourselves. We’ve learned to deny or control our hunger, rather than honor and celebrate it.
 
As you already know from the first chapter, denying your hunger doesn’t lead to weight loss or better health. And eating when you’re hungry won’t make you fat. In fact, the opposite is true: eating when you’re hungry helps maintain your setpoint and keep you at the weight that’s right for you, and denying your hunger leads to compensatory mechanisms that trigger fat storage and weight gain.
 
Yet today there’s simply too much noise around the issues of food, hunger, and eating for us to listen to our own bodies. We live in a world that’s decided to define food as “good” or “bad,” a world that encourages us to ignore our hunger and fullness signals in favor of continually seeking out that Holy Grail of thinness, or to use food to fill needs that have nothing to do with sustenance.
 
 
The Pleasure Principle
 
An interesting cross-cultural survey of food attitudes in the United States, France, Belgium, and Japan found that Americans associated food with pleasure the least and health the most.
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When asked what came to mind upon hearing the words “chocolate cake,” Americans were most likely to say “guilt” while the French connected it with “celebration.” Overall, the researchers found, we derive less pleasure from eating than others.
 
What a shame. Even though we are biologically wired to find pleasure in food, we’ve become so obsessed with the hidden meanings of food in this country that we’ve forgotten what it is supposed to do. Nourish us. Provide pleasure. The French haven’t; nor have the Italians, the founders of the so-called “Slow Food” movement. These cultures (and many others) honor food, savor it, spend hours preparing and enjoying a meal, rather than grabbing a burger at a drive-through and scarfing it down in the car as ketchup drips onto their laps.
 
Another study asked 282 people from France and the United States how they decided it was time to stop eating after a meal.
25
The French reported that they stopped when they were full. The Americans? They stopped when their plates were empty. Also interesting, the heavier the person was, regardless of whether they were French or American, the more likely they were to rely on external cues, like a clean plate, as opposed to how they felt.
 
For years we’ve automatically assumed that the reason the French weigh less and have a lower incidence of heart disease is because of the types of foods they eat and the red wine they drink. Maybe it’s how they eat that really makes the difference.
 
 
 
If you don’t trust and respond to hunger, after a while the self-regulatory setpoint mechanism that controls your fat stores breaks down. You weaken your innate ability to hear your hunger and fullness signals. When this happens, you start to gain weight. No ideas you (or anyone else) may have about how to maintain a healthy and appropriate weight can be as effective as listening to your body. Losing weight is not about finding the perfect proportions of carbohydrates, protein, and fat or tricking yourself into feeling satisfied. Rather, maintaining the right weight for you is about respecting your hunger and trusting your body to guide you in doing what’s best. And that’s hard to do if you’re
regularly
eating for reasons other than hunger and making choices that don’t give you pleasure.
 
As you continue reading, you’ll come to understand how we often try to nourish ourselves emotionally with food. See if you recognize yourself in these pages. Perhaps it can help you become more conscious about why you crave donuts.
 
I Hurt, Therefore I Eat: The Truth Behind Emotional Eating
 
We live in a culture in which food has become inextricably bound up with emotion and situation. We eat because we’re bored, because we’re sad, because we’re happy. When we want to celebrate, we go out to eat. When we’re grieving over a romantic breakup, we drown our feelings in ice cream. When someone is sick or someone dies, food becomes the way in which we show our sorrow and support—great amounts of casseroles and cakes and salads.
 
I’m not saying this is all bad. While food has inherent limitations in meeting our emotional needs, an emotional connection with food
is
part of a normal and healthy relationship with food. Food can and should bring us pleasure and comfort. Just think of the associations certain foods and aromas stir up for you: the sense of “home” you feel when you smell cinnamon and vanilla; the sense of safety a meatloaf and mashed potato dinner can provide; the sense of longing you get when your sister makes your grandmother’s famous broccoli casserole at Thanksgiving. On rainy Sundays, a cup of hot cocoa is a wonderful accompaniment to reading the paper, while the ritual of a celebratory cake adds meaning to birthdays.
 
But too many of us have come to view food as a blanket for our emotions, numbing them as we turn to food to provide the love and comfort we crave. Food is reward, friend, love, and support. We eat not because we’re hungry, but because we’re sad, guilty, bored, frustrated, lonely, or angry. In doing so, we’re ignoring those internal hard-wired hunger and fullness signals. And because there’s no way that food can really address our emotions, we eat and eat and eat, but never feel satisfied.
 
Unfortunately, at this point most of us get stuck. We recognize the short-term comfort or pleasure we get from food, and without other skills to take care of ourselves, we come to depend on it for an instant feel-better fix. Then we get stuck in a downward spiral: Eating to feel better doesn’t help us feel better in the long run; instead it adds guilt and anger about our eating habits and their ramifications on our weight. In fact, studies show that although you might receive immediate emotional comfort from eating, the associated guilt overpowers any emotional support you receive .
26, 27
 
What too few of us understand is that food doesn’t fix feelings. It may comfort us in the short term, or distract us from our pain, but in the long term it only makes our problems worse and keeps us from making substantive changes that could lead to greater fulfillment and a healthier life.
 
What this means is that if you feel driven to eat for emotional reasons, you don’t have an eating problem. Nope. You have a
caretaking
problem. You’re not taking proper care of yourself. I know this to be true because I was once an emotional eater. I ate because there was something I wanted, but that something wasn’t food. Eating kept me from feeling lonely, got me through tough times, and, unlike people, was always there for me.
 
But then my obsession with weight surfaced. And suddenly food didn’t do the trick anymore. Instead of long-term comfort, I would get a short-term fix followed by a more intense and longer lasting guilt. The more weight I gained, the more evidence I saw of my failings. The more I felt like a failure, the more I ate. And so on and so on.
 
Where did this thinking all come from? From the way we were raised.
 
I remember soon after my son was born. When he was hungry, he cried. He nursed until he was full, then dropped off to sleep, sated. Only when his stomach emptied again—typically in a couple of hours—did he cry again for food. He was in perfect touch with his hunger/satiety signals.
 
But as he got older and moved on to solid food, things changed. Not in how he approached food, but in how we (well, my mother, for one) taught him to view food. I remember one time when Isaac was a year old and my mother was feeding him strained carrots. He happily ate a few spoonfuls, then stopped opening his mouth. The message was clear: “No more!”
 
But my mom ignored the message. “Come on, Isaac,” she crooned, “just a few more bites.” She held the spoon temptingly in front of his mouth. When that didn’t work, she pushed it against his lips. Still no luck. So she got more creative. “Here comes the airplane, into the hangar,” she said, playfully waving the fork near his mouth, attempting to capitalize on his fascination with planes. “Open the hangar, Isaac.”
 
He would have none of it. Isaac was full and no longer interested in food. He was a smart kid and knew what he needed. My mom was essentially telling him that he wasn’t a trustworthy judge—that she, not he, knew how to manage his food intake. It was then that I understood where it all began for me!
 
But I don’t blame my mom. My mother wasn’t trying to do this on purpose; she was just unconsciously transmitting eating attitudes entrenched in our culture. If Isaac (and I) didn’t get them from her, we’d certainly get them from somewhere else.
 
Our culture teaches us that there are appropriate times and places for food that, more often than not, have nothing to do with feelings of hunger and satiety within our bodies. Think of the messages we get: “I went to all that trouble to cook, and you’re not even going to eat?” “You can’t be hungry. You just ate dinner!” “It’s not time to eat.” “Clean your plate, children are starving in India.” “You got an A? Let’s bake some cookies to celebrate.” “Poor thing, you fell off your bike? Will some ice cream help make it better?”
 
These external cues, then, dictate our eating for much of our lives. As a result, we stop listening to our internal cues about hunger and fullness. Instead, we eat because we think we should; to stuff feelings we don’t want to have; to mark important moments in our lives; to fill a void we can’t even clarify.
 
After years of turning to food for nonphysical reasons, our ability to perceive those internal signals has weakened, like the leg muscles in someone bedridden. Then, when we find we’re gaining weight, we try to impose our own will to eat less over our appetite.
 
Scientists have a term for this. “Restrained eaters” are people who regulate their eating through external cues, often in an effort to manage their weight. Conversely, “unrestrained eaters” are those who still rely on internal body cues to determine when and how much to eat.
 
Extensive research suggests that restrained eaters are much less sensitive to hunger and satiety than unrestrained eaters.
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In other words, it takes more food deprivation to get them to feel hungry and greater quantities of food to get them to feel full, compared to unrestrained eaters.
 
Are You a Restrained Eater?
 
So what kind of eater are you? Restrained or unrestrained? To find out, indicate how strongly you agree with each of the following statements by putting a number after each statement in the “Response” column. Leave the “Score” column blank for now.
 
1. : Strongly disagree
2. : Somewhat disagree
3. : Neutral
4. : Somewhat agree
5. : Strongly agree
 
Intuitive Eating Scale
Response
Score
1. Without really trying, I naturally select the right types and amounts of food to be healthy.
2. I generally count calories before deciding if something is OK to eat.
3. One of my main reasons for exercising is to manage my weight.
4. I seldom eat unless I notice that I am physically hungry.
5. I am hopeful that I will someday find a new diet that will actually work for me.
6. The health and strength of my body is more important to me than how much I weigh.
7. I often turn to food when I feel sad, anxious, lonely, or stressed out.
8. There are certain foods that I really like, but I try to avoid them so that I won’t gain weight.
9. I am often frustrated with my body size and wish that I could control it better.
10. I consciously try to eat whatever kind of food I think will satisfy my hunger the best.
11. I am afraid to be around some foods because I don’t want to be tempted to indulge myself.
12. I am happy with my body even if it isn’t very good-looking.
13. I normally eat slowly and pay attention to how physically satisfying my food is.
14. I am often either on a diet or seriously considering going on a diet.
15. I usually feel like a failure when I eat more than I should.
16. After eating, I often realize that I am fuller than I would like to be.
17. I often feel physically weak and hungry because I am dieting to control my weight.
18. I often put off buying clothes, participating in fun activities, or going on vacations (hoping I can get thinner first).
19. When I feel especially good or happy, I like to celebrate by eating.
20. I often find myself looking for something to eat or making plans to eat—even when I’m not really hungry.
21. I feel pressure from those around me to control my weight or to watch what I eat.
22. I worry more about how fattening a food might be, rather than how nutritious it might be.
23. It’s hard to resist eating something good if it is around me, even if I’m not very hungry.
24. On social occasions, I feel pressure to eat the way those around me are eating—even if I’m not hungry.
25. I honestly don’t care how much I weigh as long as I’m physically fit, healthy, and can do the things I want.
26. I feel safest if I have a diet plan, or diet menu, to guide my eating.
27. I mostly exercise because of how good it makes me feel physically.
 

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