It can be convenient and tempting to define and categorise Beyond Chocolate as intuitive eating and, in reality, I have often struggled with the term itself and with the idea of labelling what we do as intuitive eating. I think the term is too simplistic and doesn't acknowledge the complexities and complications that many of us experience with our relationship with food.
The idea that the answer is to rely on our intuition (whatever that means you to) and that we need to respond to our intuitive desire to eat and stop eating and all will be well, seems far to simplistic to me.
I have no beef or problem at all with the Intuitive Eating movement, it's just that it's not for me and it's not Beyond Chocolate.
Yes, Beyond Chocolate is about listening to our bodies AND it is also about noticing how our minds sabotage our bodies' signals and cues, how years of dieting muddles our intuition to such a huge degree that recognising and responding to our hunger is far, far more complex that it sounds.
Eat when you are hungry - at first glance this could be interpreted as intuitive eating and yet, truly exploring this principle means that it is so much more than that. How do you know when you are hungry? Really, how do you know? If you simply rely on your body's physical signals, you may confuse anxiety for hunger, you might confuse thirst for hunger, you might think you are hungry all the time... or very little, then what? If you don't pay attention to your thoughts, you might find that you tell yourself you are hungry when in fact, what you are responding to and confusing for hunger are age old habits and beliefs about when you should eat and when you shouldn't. Sometimes the sensations and thoughts that accompany anxiety or tiredness can get muddled and we interpret them as hunger... It's not as straightforward as the concept of intuitive eating would suggest. Tuning-in and really getting to know what drives your eating is something that takes time and curiosity and a lot of practice. How come some days I feel hungry and some days I don't? How does the kind of food I eat impact how hungry I feel? How do I untangle my beliefs and my emotions from my eating? Not just from what we think of as overeating but from the every day, ordinary eating we do to keep ourselves alive. My intuition is a fickle and subtle creature and I have had to do one hell of a lot of tuning-in to answer all those questions. For example, for a long time I thought I was hungry when I felt that familiar pulling sensation in my belly and then, when I observed more closely, I realised that I live with a low level of anxiety which sometimes feels more intense and can feel a lot like my hunger. It's very helpful to recognise the difference.
Thinking that we have to eat intuitively is also a royal pain in the ****! If I can only eat when I'm hungry then quite frankly my life is unmanageable. If I live by that concept as a rule, a rigid ideal, the perfect solution, then when do I get to eat cake? And what happens if my job or my daily activities mean that following my unpredictable stomach hunger makes meals impossible to plan or predict?
Beyond Chocolate is not about complicating things and making our lives revolve around food. It's fine to plan. It's fine to choose to eat breakfast before I leave the house, hungry or not, because it fits into my day. It's fine to have a piece of cake with my tea just because it tastes gorgeous. That is not intuitive eating. That's being my own guru. That is taking all the Beyond Chocolate principles and fitting them into my life rather than fitting myself into any kind of system or programme. Even one that calls itself intuitive eating.
Above all else Beyond Chocolate is about tuning-in and being your own Guru. The more you tune-in, the more you find out about yourself and your eating, the more choice you have and making those choices is how we step into being our own Guru. Yes, we can always go back to a programme or a diet or a system that suggests we eat at certain times or that we cut out certain foods or that we listen to our bodies and respond to our intuitive needs (whatever the plausible reasons for these suggestions) and at the end of the day we will be squeezing ourselves into someone else's idea of what works. The challenge of Beyond Chocolate is to find out what works for you, not what system works but what feels good and manageable and ticks all the boxes you want to tick.
When we can put weight loss on hold for long enough to tune-in and really discover what our eating is all about and to experiment with different ways of meeting all our needs, for food and for nourishment of all kinds, then we can truly taste the freedom of a way of eating which works on every level. And that's the key: TO PUT WEIGHT LOSS ON HOLD. It's not what many of us want to hear and the truth of it stares me in the face every single day. The more we focus on weight loss, the more we go round in circles. Losing it, yes, and then putting it back on, endlessly. If you are here, reading about Beyond Chocolate, then the diets have failed you at least once. Focusing on weight loss is 100% guaranteed to see you yo-yoing for ever. After 12 years of working with women on their relationship with food and 14 years of working on my own, it's the one thing I can state with absolute certainty and confidence. It can take years to really become our own Gurus, god knows I'm still walking that path... and it is the most satisfying, empowering, enjoyable, moving and liberating path I have ever walked. Weight loss will come, if that's what we want. It's just the the way there doesn't look like we thought it would and it takes far, far longer than most of us would like and far longer than the diets promise.
Beyond Chocolate and Intuitive Eating are not, never were and never will be the same thing. Putting the two in bed together muddles and confuses things.
Beyond Chocolate is nothing other than the clever marketing name of our company and the philosophy at the heart of our organisation is YOU. You, unique, intelligent, knowledgeable, curious, powerful and free. YOU and whatever matters to you. And because as humans we achieve things so much more quickly and easily with support, that's what Beyond Chocolate is here to provide and enable.
So, I invite you to tune-in, be curious, to ask far more questions than you think you need to, to question anything that you think of as your intuition and find out it more about it and to be open to the unexpected, the uncomfortable and the unfamiliar... Prepare to turn your intuition on its head and discover what really makes you tick, and eat!
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An interesting post but on your website under success stories one of the profiles mentions intuitive eating and that they had lost 5 stone using this. The story seems to use BC and IE interchangably when it talks about the person weightloss. I thought that the guiding priciples of BC were in line with IE?
ReplyDeleteHi Anonymous. Yes, I think the the guiding principles of BC are inline with IE but that's different to saying that they are the same. We share some principles with Paul McKenna but I would not say that we are the same. Does that make sense? What I was exploring in my post is that some people see BC as IE whereas for me it is different and I was aiming to explore what those differences are.
ReplyDeleteThis is one of the most helpful blog posts I've read. And it frees me to become my own guru in a way that I now realise I wasn't being.
ReplyDeleteSuch a helpful post and I think it will help many others. Thank you. x
You're very welcome Karen :)
ReplyDeleteThis is really helpful. I have been thinking of BC as IE and when you boil it down it is so much more than that. I have been doing this for nearly 3 years and still struggle to intuit when I am properly hungry!
ReplyDeleteThank you Sophie.
Oh yes - put weight loss on hold. The key to everything else. Yet I'm so attached to my weight gain or weight loss, it still affects me most days, despite walking the IE and now BC life... Yes thank you Sophie. I can see that there IS a difference. And being your own guru is the other key to everything else. And yes it does take years. A lifetime, most probably. I've just come back from a holiday in a country where people are slimmer and more health conscious than in the UK. It's made me even more conscious of my weight. Back to square 1 for a few days. It makes me so sad that even after all these years of trying to be my own guru, I can still be influenced by what other people do and think...
ReplyDeleteThanks so much Sophie - something clicked for me too. I felt so much that I can't do this food thing myself, that I need something: Overeaters Anonymous, WW, BC, to Do It For Me (It being: make me lose weight, sort out my life, get me a loving relationship etc etc). And here it is. Being you OWN Guru is the key. My stomach, my anxiety, my metabolism, my sensitivities, my tastebuds, my working day, my forms of exercise, my life. Wow. Simple and true. Brilliant.
ReplyDeleteSophie, I think you portray very limited and inaccurate idea of what Intuitive Eating actually is (particularly as you seem to associate it with a program as limited and simplistic as Paul McKenna's). All those questions and concepts mentioned in the long second paragraph of this post, which you claim as Beyond Chocolate concepts, are EXACTLY what the Intuitive Eating movement is about - and has been about for many years before your organisation came into being. I'm rather disappointed that you don't give credit to the pioneers in this field (Hirschmann, Munter, Tribole, Resch, et al) whose work is the foundation underpinning what Beyond Chocolate does.
ReplyDeleteWow!! what a wonderful post Sophie! So very helpful. When I try to stick to the principles I find that I sometimes need to eat breakfast before work, eating what I usually enjoy for breakfast isnt always easy sat at my desk and when I feel like cake its usually because I really fancy the yummy taste rather than wanting it instead of my lunch then I go back to "diet mode" and feel Ive blown it when I dont need to feel like this! thanks again, you've given me lots to think about :-)
ReplyDeleteHello SG. Thank you for your comments. I am sorry that you feel that I don't credit women like Hirshmannc and Munter, whom I have always admired, who inspired Audrey's and my work hugely and who we have refereed to and credited unwaveringly in our books and on our website. My comments about IE are not about any one person or organisation and are simply a response to questions and confusion expressed by many of our clients and participants over the years. I do not for a moment suggest that IE and Paul McKenna are similar, my intention is to be clear that similarities between BC and any other approach does not mean that we are one and the same, as I sometimes hear women referring to BC as IE - using both terms interchangeably. I appreciate that my comments about IE being simplistic may well sound dismissive and that is not my intention. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the simplistic way in which the concept of eating intuitively is sometimes portrayed, interpreted or understood seems to be unhelpful to many of our participants. Audrey and I haven never claimed to have invented anything new, we have always said that we have drawn on the all the work done in this area by the women you mention as well as many others (Orbach, Roth and more) and have put our own stamp and experience on it. After twelve years of working passionately and incessantly in this area, I realise that the most unhelpful thing is for women to feel that we, whoever we are, are the experts and that we have the solution. My desire not to be associated with IE is in large part about encouraging women to stop looking to any method, approach or solution to provide the answers they are looking for and therefore reminding them that BC is not a way of eating or a method or a system. Sadly I don't know who you are, and, your comments are very welcome here. Anyone offering women real support in this area is doing something of huge value and it is not my intention to compete or criticise, I apologise if in my zeal I came across that way.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for this, Sophie. It is one area I have struggled with as eating is a social activity for me too, and I have been aware of sitting down to a family meal, or dinner with friends when I was not really hungry. A very helpful post, and one I'll come back to.
ReplyDeleteI think people need to be aware that for plenty of us, this is NOT helpful, and in fact can be profoundly harmful, both in destabilizing a person's eating behaviors and therefore their health, and also in resulting in confusion and distress over one's eating that can be difficult to break, causing gradual weight increase over they years that can't be stopped. That has been my experience. Telling people who have no idea how hungry they are (and may not be used to eating until overly hungry or starving, because that's what we got used to on diets) and then telling us to keep some forbidden food in the house can result in undereating/bingeing,that can be very hard to ever recover from.
ReplyDeleteI now agree with Ellyn Satter, RD: eat at regular meal times (much easier for most people), set all the food groups on the table, and eat as much of each of them as you feel hungry for. By eating 3 regularly scheduled meals (not totally rigid in timing, but pretty consistent each day), allows someone to fill up regularly, trust when their next meal will come, and over a few days to a week, they will start adjusting how much they eat to how hungry they've gotten in 3 hours since the last meal. It teaches a person to pace themselves.
Hi anonymous. Thanks for your thoughts. However helpful the idea of 3 meals a day may be, for the vast majority of Beyond Chocolaters who overeat and use food a a comfort, a treat, a way of managing emotions and much more, telling them to just eat 3 meals a day is not very helpful. However much they may want to they don't know how to control their desire to overeat and so, even if they agree and even if the advice makes sense they can't do it, feel like failures and then overeat more. Women are not ignorant or stupid. We know that eating 3 balanced meals a day is about right for most of us, most days (though by no means for everyone all the time) but telling people what to do without recognising how difficult that can be for so many just doesn't help them. I am also a bit confused Anonymous because you say that 'this' isn't helpful but I am not sure what 'this' is. Do you mean IE or my post? I don't believe that telling people just to eat to their hunger gives them enough information, which is why we have written a another book, to go into this more in dept and why I wrote this post, to explore some of the challenges. And, however tricky it may be for women who have spent years dieting to eat when they are hungry and to rely on those signals, it is still far better than being on a diet or struggling to keep to a plan without support.
ReplyDelete