Is Beyond Chocolate Intuitive Eating?

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!

Is Weight Watchers a diet?

Weight Watchers are very keen to distance themselves from diets. As Audrey in wrote last week’s post, they are keen for women (and sadly more and more men ) to see what they offer as a lifestyle choice, as a healthy way of living for good. They are inviting us to play Weight Watchers these days. Yes, play, they suggest, as if counting points, controlling portions and limiting food choices or running around the block to make up for transgressions from the rules (have you heard the ad on the radio?) is just a bit of fun really. In my experience there is nothing fun about being overweight and miserable about it. There is nothing fun about feeling out of control around food, not knowing how to resist the temptation of chocolate and cake and the endless foods that appear on the diet's forbidden food lists. Struggling with eating and body size is not a game, it saps energy and destroys lives.

• Weight Watchers is a diet because it has a clear set of rules and guidelines which anyone on the plan has to follow.
• Weight Watchers is a diet because it defines for you the foods that are ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
• Weight Watchers is a diet because 99% (if not 100%) of the focus is on weight loss, not on developing a healthy relationship with food and your body.
• Weight Watchers is a diet because you are either on it and doing it, or off it and not doing it.
  
• Weight Watchers is a diet because food is translated into points that you have to count and measure.
• Weight Watchers is a diet because it measures success by the number on the scales.

Whatever they say, however then market it, Weight Watchers is a diet. There are no two ways about it. And diets don't work. In fact diets are pretty much guaranteed to make you fatter in the long term than when you started. How many of us started off wanting to lose half a stone and find ourselves with far more than that to lose a few years down the line? We yo-yo up and down time and time again, gaining a few extra pounds each time. We have to keep going back to places like Weight Watchers and do the diet again and again, and every time we go back we are a few pounds heavier than we started.

Beyond Chocolate is not a diet. Weight loss is not the primary goal. Our aims are to empower women to know and trust their bodies, to feel relaxed and in control around food. To feel good about the way they eat and the way they look (whatever their size). And there is always a danger that if you have been dieting for many years and you’re new to Beyond Chocolate, you will make this into a diet too.

It’s tempting to turn the principles into rules or guidelines. Either unconsciously, out of habit or because we feel lost without a sense of structure, without someone telling us what to do. Taking responsibility for ourselves can be challenging.

It’s easy to fall into the all or nothing, doing it/not doing it, diet mentality. After so many years of dieting, being our own Gurus does not come easy to many of us.

So, here are some suggestions for avoiding the diet trap:

If you like structure and you know it works for you, create one of your own. There’s nothing wrong with having a plan or a framework if you know that it supports you.

Give yourself a weight loss holiday - how long would you be willing to experiment with Beyond Chocolate without thinking about whether or not you’re losing weight? Put your bathroom scales away, out of sight, just for a while.

Choose one principle at a time to focus on.

Take action.

Be willing to make mistakes. If you do all the principles properly, all the time, you will learn nothing and nothing will change.

Support yourself along the way with like minded people (the Beyond Chocolate Forum is a great place for that).

Wherever you start be gentle with yourself, cultivate a spirit of curiosity and kindness, take yourself gently by the hand and take action.

Weight Watchers admits that dieting doesn't work

A few weeks ago I attended the DitchDieting protest with the lovely ladies from AnyBody, Adios Barbie and the inspirational Susie Orbach (author of Fat Is A Feminist Issue) amongst others. After standing in front of parliament chanting out our anti-diet slogans we went inside to hear a panel of industry representatives give evidence to the Parliamentary Body Image  Enquiry. The panel included Susie herself (representing the no-diet/intuitive eating approach), and spokespersons from Weight Watchers, Slimming World and Holland & Barrett. The enquiry was chaired by Jo Swinson and Caroline Nokes, two pretty clued up MPs who gave the WW and SW people quite a grilling (frankly I'm not sure what the Holland & Barett guy was there for - and it didn't look like he did either!).   


It was fascinating to listen to. Fascinating to witness the tactics the diet industry giants are adopting first hand. I could write thousands of words, ranting and raving and tearing my hair out about what was said (and, just as importantly, what wasn't) but I'll keep my observations brief...and as objective as possible!


When asked about the negative impact of dieting on body image, the Weight Watchers and Slimming World spokeswomen went to great pains to distance themselves from the diet industry. They kept on insisting that they were not the same as all the other dieting outfits out there and that it was important to understand that they were offering something quite different. They kept talking about 'healthy' lifestyle changes and a 'responsible approach to weight loss'. What they were effectively saying was that dieting doesn't work. Have a look on the Slimming World website to see how they do this for yourself. One article says: "In stark contrast to these restrictive, quick-fix diets, at Slimming World we provide our members with a healthy eating plan that's flexible, generous and sustainable so it’s a new way of eating that they can enjoy for the rest of their lives."


Of course, nobody is disputing the fact that crazy fad diets and quick weight loss schemes are dangerous and guaranteed to fail and that WW and SW are selling their customers more reasonable eating plans. But they're still eating plans - and that's just another word for diet isn't it?  The definition of dieting is: "to restrict oneself to small amounts or special kind of foods in order to lose weight" (Oxford Dictionary) and whether you're subsisting entirely on acai berries, calculating ProPoints or Syns - it's a diet. What's interesting here is that by focusing repeatedly on something as indisputable as the idea that fad dieting is dangerous and ineffective, they distracted the panel's attention from talking about the real issue: that dieting and restricted eating - in any shape or form - doesn't ever work in the long term. 


However, Jo Swinson and Caroline Nokes are smart women and they refused to be distracted by this mutton dressing itself up as lamb. So they changed tack and grilled them about their members, asking how many of them were repeat customers. Interestingly, the Weight Watchers lady, who until then had had no trouble reciting figures to back up her claims about the number of members and target weights reached and percentages of body weight lost thanks to the WW programme, suddenly got a bit tongue tied and mumbled something about it being difficult to know exactly how many members were not first timers. She knew her numbers back to front for everything, except for this. Mmmmmh. The MP expressed surprise at this and grilled her a little more on the subject: she was concerned, she said, that the diet industry was roping people into a vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting.


This was when the Weight Watchers representative dropped her bombshell. She said: "Well we know that being overweight is a chronic condition" and went on to explain that weight regain was an inevitable part of dieting and that it was a fact that most dieters put any weight they lose back on eventually. She then went on to say that Weight Watchers' aim was to support women to lose weight when they needed it, even if that was several times over, or something to that effect. 


[Edit: what she actually said was " "People have to get over the idea that you just diet once and that is it. It is a life-long commitment." Many thanks to Ninabeenaribeena for providing the exact words in her comment below]


Extraordinary! I had just heard the Weight Watchers official spokesperson explicitly admit that dieting doesn't work, for the second time in an hour!


Sadly the meagre hour dedicated to the enquiry was soon over and I returned home feeling both hopeful and despondent. Hopeful because there are women out there like Caroline Nokes and Jo Swinson who are willing to challenge the status quo and take on corporations like Weight Watchers and Slimming World. Despondent because these corporations have huge financial resources and smart people working for them which means they can continuously shift the goal posts and adapt their marketing to get desperate people to buy their products. Despondent because I see hundreds of women each year who have spent years trapped in an endless cycle of weight loss and weight gain and wasted time and money on diet club memberships. Despondent because these women feel like failures and hate their bodies. Dieting doesn't work because it teaches women not to trust themselves. It doesn't work because it reinforces the fallacy that overweight = unhealthy and that thin = happy. It does't work because it doesn't address the real reasons why women overeat and offers no viable solutions for having a balanced relationship with food.


Have your say. The Body Image Enquiry is inviting people to take part and give evidence by completing a questionnaire about the causes and consequences of body image anxiety in the UK and what practical steps can be taken to address this. Lets give women like Jo Swinson and Caroline Nokes who have the power to bring about change some ammunition. The more we speak up about our experience of dieting, the more we have a chance of seeing something change.

Slave to food or slave to viewer ratings?

I don’t watch a lot of live television apart from films, cookery shows and classic British comedy and yesterday I was reminded of one of the reasons why I avoid it. I was pootling about in the kitchen and J was cruising with the remote when he called out to me that there was something I might be interested in. That something was called “Clare: Slave to Food” and it was about to air on Living TV. The trailer was showing a curvy, pretty blond woman eating a piece of cake while the voice over said in dramatic tones: “Join us as we follow former Steps star Claire Richards as she attempts to uncover the real reason why she has such an unhealthy attitude to food and the effect her yo-yo dieting is having on her body.” I settled down to watch it, very curious to see how they would deal with the subject, very Beyond Chocolate, right?

Wrong.

What followed was an hour of frankly depressing trash television. Claire was mostly shamed into making “changes” (I use inverted commas because I am skeptical of just how many changes she made and just how long lasting they will be) with the “help” of an extreme therapist (whatever that is) who looked like a former boy band star himself - sunglasses and all. 

Over the next 60 minutes, he underlined just how unhealthy her diet was by going through her kitchen cupboards and eating dog food because, supposedly, it was the healthiest thing there. He then made her walk up to strangers in the road, pretending to recognise them in an attempt to boost her self esteem. The idea was that if she made herself ridiculous she’d feel better about not being perfect. After that, she was taken to a child obesity camp and made to play rugby with the inmates (my word) and then had to sit on a stage and give them a pep talk. She met up with girl band producer to be told that she would never be selected for a band at the size she was and finally, most cringe inducing of all, she was forced to sing and dance to an old Steps hit in a ridiculous weighted, ‘fat’ costume of the type they put on Total Wipeout contestants.

To be fair, Claire did seem to have some “ah-ha!” moments and reported feeling much better about herself at the end of the show. The again, wouldn’t she have to?

We have been approached several times over the last 10 years by producers who are keen to take Beyond Chocolate to the small screen. We have spent many hours talking with them about how to make our approach “exciting to the viewer” and what type of “visual reveal” would work at the end of each episode and none of these projects have ever come to anything. Can you guess why?

The sad truth is that Beyond Chocolate is based on compassion and kindness and small - very small - long lasting changes. There’s no shock factor in the way we support women to radically change their relationship with food. We don’t eat dog food, we don’t shame them in public (or in private!) and we don’t “push” them to make extreme changes. 

So, Claire, if you ever want to truly taste the freedom, to know what it’s like to feel comfortable around food and in your body for good, to find a community of women who will support you with encouragement and respect, we will be here waiting. 

Ooo I get soooo cross sometimes!

Gretel Hallet, is a Trained Chocolate Fairy and is running the Getting Started half day workshop in Norwich - perfect for beginners to experience the core principles of Beyond Chocolate and equally great as a refresher for any Beyond Chocolater. If you live in East Anglia and want to know more about Beyond Chocolate or her workshops, get in touch with Gretel.

Ooo I got cross today! It doesn’t often happen, but there are only so many times I can hear my chronically misguided workmate (let’s call her Vee) say things like, ‘I don’t have any self-control’, ‘If I had those biscuits on my desk, I’d just eat them all,’ ‘I can’t eat that because I’m being good’, ‘I eat too much because I like food, there’s no other reason’...
I got cross and pointed out that self-control is nothing to do with it – she’s over-eating not just because she ‘likes the taste of food’ but because it’s doing something for her, because it helps her in some way. Vee denied this and repeated that she just likes the taste of food. I asked how many of the biscuits in the jar on my desk she would actually taste if she really did sit down to eat them all? Vee laughed and repeated that she would definitely be able to eat them all. I said it would probably be only the first few she would actually enjoy, because after that, the taste would be gone, along with the enjoyment. Vee doubted it and seemed stuck on the idea that she overeats because she enjoys food.

I feel so cross that so many women are so stuck in the diet/fail/self-blame/diet/fail cycle. Vee has been dieting since she was 12 years old, she informed us today. She has lost and gained weight over and over and over again. From some of the things she’s said, I can tell that somewhere she knows that dieting doesn’t, work because if it did, she wouldn’t have gained the weight back again so many times. Unfortunately she hasn’t got that far in her reasoning. Vee thinks that she gains weight because she has no will-power. She has now embarked on a self-punishing diet of undressed salad with cooked chicken or ham, low fat yogurts and cereals without milk and lots of fruit, in her latest attempt to lose weight. When I brought a salad in for my lunch she praised me for being so ‘good’. I said "It’s salad weather and I like eating salad at this time of year". Vee replied that it was never salad weather for her. SO WHY IS SHE EATING SALAD?!?!? Oh, she has to because she’s got to lose weight and she has no will-power around food, so she has to surround herself with diet food and avoid all other ‘bad’ foods ....
As you may have gathered, Vee is a VERY strong minded woman. She lives by certainties and one of her certainties is that she overeats and that she has no self-control around food. Vee is not open to considering her eating habits in any different way, nor does she seem open to any point of view that doesn’t chime in with her own.

This has been compounded recently when one of our colleagues (Bea) was told by a health care professional that she has to lose weight for the sake of her health. Vee pounced eagerly, instantly trotting out all the diet clichés you can imagine. ‘You’ll have to be good now,’ ‘You’ll have to eat low-fat foods now,’ etc. She watches everything Bea eats and comments on whether it’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and even asks Bea what she ate at home last night and for breakfast in the morning.

Vee and another colleague (Jay) recently had a conversation that showed very clearly that both of them know that diets don’t work. They did a duet about how ‘being good’ leads to bingeing and failure and how they would then try to ‘be good’ again, even though they know that as soon as a cream cake leapt out at them, they would fall victim to its evil charms and ‘fail’ all over again. THEY KNOW THIS BUT THEY KEEP DOING IT!!

Oooo, I feel so cross! I usually keep quiet when I hear these conversations around me because attempting to reason with Vee or Jay results in them asserting very powerfully their own ‘truths’ and not wanting to engage with my suggestions that it could be different. But today I did challenge Vee to eat all the biscuits in my jar ... she hasn’t done so, yet– but then that’s because she has ‘no will-power’ not because she physically couldn’t, didn’t want to or agreed with me that it wouldn’t be enjoyable. Grrrrr!