How To Change The Way You Eat – The End Of Dieting

All diets work. Temporarily! They aren’t fun. They aren’t sustainable. And in the end they just make you fatter.

I recently began watching British self-improvement guru Paul McKenna on The Learning Channel’s show "I Can Make You Thin!" He presented his views on how we should change the way we eat in order to lose weight. He does not believe in dieting. He made some interesting points, some of which you’ll love!

1. Eat when you are hungry. Yes, do eat. Don’t starve yourself. When you do starve yourself and / or go on a diet, you tell your body that food is scarce and it reacts by slowing down your metabolism and holding on to the weight you are trying to lose. You have heard it often enough – eat 5 smaller meals a day. When you follow all his suggestions, I believe this will become a natural byproduct. My body has been working like this for a long time now. I can never eat all that much during any given meal, but I will get hungry again 2 – 3 hours later. This will help speed up your metabolism and also keep your blood sugar stable throughout the day and thereby avoids energy highs and lows as well as cravings and binge eating.
2. Eat what you want. This has got to be your favorite! Right? You read this correctly, though. Paul wants you to be inspired by the foods you eat. He says, don’t eat what you think you are supposed to eat, but eat the things you like to eat. This point by itself doesn’t seem to fit in with what you’ve learned in the past nor your idea of weight loss. And I do have to warn you – this point too only works in conjunction with the other three points. This is very important to remember!
3. Eat consciously. This, I believe, is the most important point, and the point that is most different from the way you have been eating. We hardly ever taste the food we eat because we eat it too fast and are often distracted when we do eat. Paul says, overweight people think about food all the time, except when they are eating. That doesn’t make any sense, does it? We just don’t pay attention to the food we eat. The result is that we don’t really taste what we eat, we don’t chew it thoroughly, and we eat too much because we don’t feel when we are full. So start eating your food consciously. Chew it slowly. Put down your fork between every bite! A great experiment would also be to eat a meal blindfolded. Try it and see how much less you eat because you actually begin to feel full sooner. You might not be trained in listening to your body well enough to recognize the feeling of fullness yet. So, if you even think you are full, stop eating! Once you actually start tasting the foods you have been eating, your taste might actually change and you will automatically choose healthier foods.
4. Stop when you are full. As I mentioned above, you will have to learn to listen to your body and the signal it sends you when your stomach is full. And why wouldn’t you stop when you are full, now that you know you can eat again when you want and what you want.

The idea is to make food and eating an enjoyable event. It is freeing to know you don’t have to diet. Following these recommendations will result in you eating less food, more often, thereby increasing your metabolism and helping you lose weight. It will break a lot of your bad habits surrounding food.

So go ahead! Give it a try! And let me hear about your experience. How do you feel? Have you lost weight? (Remember to never weigh yourself more often than once a week. Weight fluctuates constantly.)

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