This week, I want to draw your attention to your gift of intuition and instinct, or the sixth sense. This is perhaps the most important of the senses when dealing with weight problems. You have no doubt heard of the terms ‘compulsive over eating’ and ‘emotional eating- these terms describe eating without consideration to your body’s actual needs and refer to ‘head’ hunger rather than stomach hunger. Applying our sixth sense to food choices is known as ‘intuitive eating’.
When you eat intuitively, you ‘listen’ to your body. You know when you are hungry and when you are satisfied. When you eat intuitively you never over eat. The next time you find yourself standing in the kitchen looking for food, ask yourself some basic questions before touching a bite:
1) Am I really hungry for food? -and if you are,
2) What do I actually want to eat? -This may take longer than you think to determine. However, when you have decided, eat that food. Do not substitute another food that you think you ought to eat because the chances are, in the end, you will eat the substitute and the food you really want. It is much more likely that you will feel satisfied when you eat food that you really enjoy.
3) After eating the food I actually wanted, am I satisfied?- If you are aware of your stomach starting to feel full, stop eating! Your food hunger has been satisfied!
It is very easy to override our natural cues for hunger and satiety because we have been conditioned from an early age to eat by the clock and to finish what is on our plate. Babies who are allowed to feed on instinct, never get fat. Children and adults need to get back to basics and actually listen to their gut feelings on food choice. Let your mind be free to choose, and listen to it when it lets you know that you have had enough. Reflect on this for a while.
This week I want to to raise awareness of two more of our senses – taste and smell. I have put these together under ‘taste’ because they are very closely connected to one another. Often, we smell something in order to determine whether we will like it or not, whether the food is fresh, going off, or rotten. Babies are able to detect the presence of harmful chemicals in their mothers’ breast milk via the odour. A baby will delay feeding when a high alcohol content is detected in the breast milk, for example. Our taste is dulled by the absence of our ability to smell- as experienced when we suffer with a bad cold or blocked nose.
In short, our senses of smell and taste are natural first line defenses that help protect us against harmful food pathogens and poisonous chemicals. Our primitive ancestors used their sense of taste to help them to survive as hunters and gatherers. Bitter tastes were warning signs of poisons, while sweet tastes were nourishing. As babies, our first taste is sweet(breast milk) but then we are gradually weaned onto a variety of other flavours. This variety is important because the nutrition provided by sweet foods alone is not sufficient for our bodies once we are developed enough to walk on our own.
Look at your diet and note the proportion of taste that is sweet, salty, sour or bitter. Do you cook a wonderful meal only to overwhelm the taste of the meal with added salt, ketchup, gravy (more salt), or hot chilli pepper? Do you prepare a creatively colourful salad only to mask the taste with salad dressing? Are many of your main meals heavy on the taste of one ingredient thereby preventing you from being able to distinguish one type of food from another? What about your drinks? Are they mainly sweet tasting?
In order to balance your meals effectively, ensure that you can taste or smell individual food items within the meal. Do not overcook food as this destroys some of its taste (as well as important vitamins). Do the blindfold test. Close your eyes and try to determine what your dish consists of. If you are only able to detect one taste, you are not getting the best out of your food selection!
Last week, I explained that The Arc Plan Lifestyle was about using our senses to balance our meals. I explained that food needs to be balanced visually. This week, I want to talk about balancing meals using your sense of touch.
Raw food has a different texture from cooked food and different food items have a variety of what I refer to as ‘mouth feel’. If you were to close your eyes when eating, you should be able to detect these differences without much of a problem.
The Arc Plan encourages a mixture of textures. Food generally falls into one of five categories – crunchy, soft, chewy, smooth, and liquidy. For example, raw carrots and nuts are crunchy foods; fish and avocados are soft foods; beef and baguettes are chewy foods; cheese and chocolate are smooth foods; while soup and yoghurt are liquidy foods. A reliance on only one texture in a meal will reduce the variety of nutrients in the diet and will also disrupt the healthy functioning of the digestive tract.
To add a further dimension to your sense of touch, you can experiment by making your meals a mixture of raw and cooked foods and by serving hot and cold dishes. A rough guide to textures in your diet would be to look at what eating utensils you use at the table. A spoon and a cup would suggest liquids, a fork would suggest soft, a knife and fork would suggest chewy, and fingers would suggest crunchy. When you include at least two different contrasts in mouth feel at each meal, you stimulate your metabolic system more intensely, forcing it to burn up more calories!
The Arc Plan Lifestyle is uncomplicated and makes choosing a balanced meal easy for you and your family. Use your senses to guide you. The first one is to use your sense of sight. Meals should be full of colour. ‘Natural’ food comes in five main colours – white, brown, green, red and orange.
Make sure that you have at least three of these colours in each meal and then look at the proportion of each in your meal. Try to even up the amounts of the ‘vibrant’ colours (red, orange, green) against the more ‘calm’ ones ( brown and white).
Remember that a meal can be made up of one, two, or three courses. It is the over all ‘visual’ that you need to look at, not necessarily individual courses. I have found that this approach works very well with children and they enjoy making up their colour palate.
P.S. I don’t want to hear that you are colour blind!
06 May 2010 at 16:40
uzoma
Weight Control
4 Comments
When I heard about the latest diet to hit Hollywood, I could not believe it! The ‘Baby Food’ diet.
Not only is it an insult to any intelligent adult to suggest that we eat food that babies require ( because they have no teeth to chew food), but to try to label the food as ‘cleansing ‘ is a misleading claim. There is nothing unique about pureed vegetables. Just heat it up and call it soup!
Of course Jennifer Aniston lost 7lbs in her first week on this ‘diet’. Which 41 year old wouldn’t lose weight if they had the discipline to stick to the calories prescribed for a 6 month old baby?
This ‘diet’ takes me back to when I used to work in an Eating Disorders clinic in England and some of the anorexic women had regressed so much that they were only eating baby food from the jar.
I wonder how following a weaning diet can be explained to young children by their baby food diet following mothers. Surely, the self esteem of women has not dropped to that degree…Or has it??
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