Healthy Diet Listening to the Body - How Does Intuitive Eating Work?

Expert advises food to feel
The sports scientist Prof. dr. Ingo Froböse advises to eat intuitively. That is, to eat what one requires to eat, when one is hungry and stops when one is full.

Anyone who radically changes their diet to low calories knows cravings. You pay close attention to low fat, sugar or carbohydrates, and the urge for chips, kebab or hamburger is getting bigger, until you run to the snack and beats his stomach.

Does intuitive eating help against cravings? (Image: JenkoAtaman / fotolia.com)

The feeling lost
Overweight people would have lost their healthy sense of the amount of food that the body needs. This knowledge is intuitively available. Babies cry when they are hungry and calm down when they are full.

About stimuli
In Western societies, we are constantly surrounded by food and food advertising. Through this constant stimulus, we confuse Apettit with hunger.

Consciously eat
To eat intuitively means to eat consciously. For example, with each snack and takeover, you can think twice: Do I really need that? Do I really want that??

Prohibitions do not bring anything
Medical myths circulate about countless ways to become slim. However, most diets fail in the long run because they are based on prohibitions. Those affected force themselves to abide by these rules and eventually eat again as before.

Stuff yourself?
Intuitive eating does not mean stuffing yourself, but eating the meals that one can taste and eat when hungry.

Works intuitively?
It's not that easy with the intuitive food. Obese usually have a genetic attachment to more appetite. They only feel full after large quantities or not at all. People who are prone to such an appetite must actively counteract this. The new habits of not having to accept them first have to be trained.

Natural intuition?
Intuitive eating assumes that the body automatically tells us what it needs. This is not wrong, but we are evolutionarily responding to foods that make us fat in excess.

Sugar and fat
For the early hunter-gatherers, fats and carbohydrates were as valuable as they were rare. Only fruits and honey provided sources of sugar, and the wildlife and fatty plants offered far fewer fats than the inexhaustible supply in the supermarket.

Natural greed for junk food
Our natural intuition would be consistent with a hamburger with French fries with a sundae and cream for dessert.

Disconnect needs from over-stimulation
Our ancestors were rarely exposed to oversupply of food, fat and sugar. Therefore, we can not simply rely on our "intuition", but must first separate the signals of the body, which suggests hunger or requires specific foods, from the equally "natural" urge for sugar and fats.

Reflected intuition
So it's not about accessing when the "body says it", but about reflecting the need the body expresses.

Intuition and "life wisdom"
When we understand intuition as spontaneous thinking, there are also dangers in it - in every other area of ​​life as well as in eating. Brain research shows: memory, associative thinking, patterns of life stored in the synapses are by no means an objective reality. If, for example, a grilled chicken with fried potatoes and bacon inspires a sense of well-being in us, because we spend beautiful childhood experiences with it, it does not do any good to our bodies.

count calories
We can only rely on our intuition if we have previously adopted a healthy eating habits. The hard truth is that if we stay below our precisely calculable calorie limit, we decrease, as we exceed it, we increase. In order to reduce obesity, it is therefore important to eat more targeted and less. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)