While I have to agree, the article is pretty common sense, add that to the typical western diet foods and it is what made me 351 pounds before I started LCing!

I did try to do just what the article prescribes, under the advice of a dietician, with the high grain/low fat food pyramid and my weight kept going up!

So, I think the article has some merit, especially when you apply the basic advice of eat when you are hungry, and only until you are no longer hungry to our LC WOE. I believe that is what Dr Atkins said in DANDR isn't it?

I also see this article as yet one more way to muddy the waters and slightly slash at LCing by saying eat whatever you want, as much as you want.

I mean really, if we all were able to do what the article aspouses, we would have in the first place, right?

Heh...

I think the article is right on target. But one needs to differentiate between emotions & intuition, and bear in mind that certain emotional responses are acquired, in contrast to the ones that are instinctive in us at birth. The former can be modified; the latter cannot be taught. It is precisely because there is no learning process involved, that when one loses touch with his/her intuitive ability, the task of modification seems nearly impossible. And no, I don't practice what I preach. For the time being, anyway…

Yes and no. You describe very well how some people fight their instincts. What I learn in general is how to discover and use my instincts to my well being and that of others. This works also on the food area.

Your brains gives you the possibility to learn and unlearn the liking of things. Your mind controls the body.
Now you have to learn to control your mind, and what I feel is that this is usually done in a schema of reaction vs. control, attack vs. defense, black vs. white, bulging vs. hungering.
- But this can also be done by going to another, more spiritual level:
The reshaping of your instincts. And for the theorists, if you define instinct as something unchangeable: Reshaping and growing your (unconscious) reactions on instinctual and external stimuli.

Here is a new article about the same subject:

Professor Loses Weight With No - Diet Diet

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 4, 2005
Filed at 8:43 p.m. ET

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- When Steven Hawks is tempted by ice cream bars, M&Ms and toffee-covered almonds at the grocery store, he doesn't pass them by. He fills up his shopping cart.

It's the no-diet diet, an approach the Brigham Young University health science professor used to lose 50 pounds and to keep it off for more than five years.

Hawks calls his plan ''intuitive eating'' and thinks the rest of the country would be better off if people stopped counting calories, started paying attention to hunger pangs and ate whatever they wanted.

As part of intuitive eating, Hawks surrounds himself with unhealthy foods he especially craves. He says having an overabundance of what's taboo helps him lose his desire to gorge.

There is a catch to this no-diet diet, however: Intuitive eaters only eat when they're hungry and stop when they're full.

That means not eating a box of chocolates when you're feeling blue or digging into a big plate of nachos just because everyone else at the table is.

The trade-off is the opportunity to eat whatever your heart desires when you are actually hungry.

''One of the advantages of intuitive eating is you're always eating things that are most appealing to you, not out of emotional reasons, not because it's there and tastes good,'' he said. ''Whenever you feel the physical urge to eat something, accept it and eat it. The cravings tend to subside. I don't have anywhere near the cravings I would as a 'restrained eater.'''

Hawks should know. In 1989, the Utah native had a job at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and wanted to return to his home state. But at 210 pounds, he didn't think a fat person could get a job teaching students how to be healthy, so his calorie-counting began.

He lost weight and got the job at Utah State University. But the pounds soon came back.

For several years his weight fluctuated, until he eventually gave up on being a restrained eater and the weight stayed on.

''You definitely lose weight on a diet, but resisting biological pressures is ultimately doomed,'' Hawks said.

Several years later and still overweight at a new job at BYU, Hawks decided it was time for a lifestyle change.

He stopped feeling guilty about eating salt-and-vinegar potato chips. He also stopped eating when he wasn't hungry.

Slowly and steadily his weight began to drop. Exercise helped.

His friends and co-workers soon took notice of the slimmer Hawks.

''It astonished me, actually,'' said his friend, Steven Peck. ''We were both very heavy. It was hard not to be struck.''

After watching Hawks lose and keep the weight off for a year and a half, Peck tried intuitive eating in January.

''I was pretty skeptical of the idea you could eat anything you wanted until you didn't feel like it. It struck me as odd,'' said Peck, who is an assistant professor at BYU.

But 11 months later, Peck sometimes eats mint chocolate chip ice cream for dinner, is 35 pounds lighter and a believer in intuitive eating.

''There are times when I overeat. I did at Thanksgiving,'' Peck said. ''That's one thing about Steve's ideas, they're sort of forgiving. On other diets if you slip up, you feel you've blown it and it takes a couple weeks get back into it. ... This sort of has this built-in forgiveness factor.''

The one thing all diets have in common is that they restrict food, said Michael Goran, an obesity expert at the University of Southern California. Ultimately, that's why they usually fail, he said.

''At some point you want what you can't have,'' Goran said. Still, he said intuitive eating makes sense as a concept ''if you know what you're doing.''

Intuitive eating alone won't give anyone six-pack abs, Hawks said, but it will lead to a healthier lifestyle. He still eats junk food and keeps a jar of honey in his office, but only indulges occasionally.

''My diet is actually quite healthy. ... I'm as likely to eat broccoli as eat a steak,'' he said. ''It's a misconception that all of a sudden a diet is going to become all junk food and high fat,'' he said.

In a small study published in the American Journal of Health Education, Hawks and a team of researchers examined a group of BYU students and found those who were intuitive eaters typically weighed less and had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than other students.

He said the study indicates intuitive eating is a viable approach to long-term weight management and he plans to do a larger study across different cultures. Ultimately, he'd like intuitive eating to catch on as a way for people to normalize their relationship with food and fight eating disorders.

''Most of what the government is telling us is, we need to count calories, restrict fat grams, etc. I feel like that's a harmful message,'' he said. ''I think encouraging dietary restraint creates more problems. I hope intuitive eating will be adopted at a national level.''

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/nat...ive-Eating.html

I read about this in the papers as wel... I felt that the basic idea is that we can eat everything we want as long as we eat in moderation... or "when you feel full".

But seriously, how many of us have that kind of will power?

It's just common sense!!

It's a nice-sounding theory, though the study sounds dubious in terms of scientific value - an Intuitive Eating Scale?

I disagree with it in practice, mainly because unfortunately our environments are not conducive to it. In this world, one cannot afford to eat blindly, without checking labels and making a deliberate effort at good nutrition. All foods are not created equal; not even close. Indeed, there are a great number of products out there that are simply not fit for human consumption at all, even if they may taste pretty good.

I would dearly love to have this kind of relationship with food. My mother always said " Some people eat to live.. others live to eat" The people who see food as a mechanism to survival already stop when they're full, and rarely have weight issues to start with . (I'm married to an like that ! dang him ! lol ) .

This article is not only about that tho, it did not address the emotional eating side of food. or did it ? If you want comforting mashed potatoes and meatloaf then eat it .. but only until you are full .

I do recall one article I read. Mother had a toddler that she kept to a very strict natural foods diet . Child obtained a pack of oreo cookies and mother (with horror in her eyes ) allowed the child total freedom. The child played with them, built roads then ate them etc for 2 days... then took mommy out into the garden and gorged on fresh green beans and tomatoes. The rest of the cookies were discarded as they were a well explored novelty that no longer appealed to her.

Anyway ... this article scares me. I know well the compulsive nature I have that makes one carby fatty junk food dish scream for companions until I weigh nearly 300 lbs again.
I would love to think it could succeed. Perhaps with hypnosis to tell me you will stop when you are no longer hungry it just might.

I think for most of us, controlling what we eat is a quick fix to a much bigger and harder issue to fix. I don't know if it really can be fixed at all actually. The man who made this diet likely wasn't severely addicted to food like I and others are. Nor did he eat his way into metabolic disease like I and others have. Even if we assume my endocrine system wasn't messed up from how I ate and how fat I was for years and years, it's likely that my level of food addiction is such that I really can't unlearn it.

It's like if someone who had a weekend drinking problem wrote a self help book on getting over alcoholism. A case like mine is more like someone who's life was destroyed by alcohol addiction - whereas he had a tiny problem that otherwise didn't compromise his quality of life (implying he had a great deal of control over it, and his pathology was not as severe as mine yet). I think it is a little naive to say that ANYONE can learn to eat normally and therefore diets (which do little to change the underlying abnormal eating and just try to control the damage from the impulse) have no place.

Like to put this in another perspective - people with restrictive eating disorders, the inverse of ours, also have eating plans because their natural inclination with food results in harmful behavior. It would be novel to say a severe anorexic should give up her food plan and instead teach herself to "eat intuitively" but that is more than unrealistic.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, while I think learning intuitive eating and undoing our addictions is something we should all strive to do, we shouold also be realistic and respect our limits. Someone like the author of that book has absolutely no idea what is in my head when I get in a binge mode. I have absolutely no idea what is in the head of the woman who has even less control and binges virtually every day and as a result is physically imobile. I need an eating plan of some kind. I do not think I can undo the relationship with food I have to the point where I can eat totally free of any structure (even IF we assume I didn't have a sensitivity to carbohydrate which necessitates special dietary restrictions).

Wooo, after reading your posts I believe I'm finally getting your message, that someone who has not been extremely overweight for a long period of time is a different animal than someone who has been. At least I think that is what your message is. One of your many messages.

I'd guess there are different levels of damage to one's metabolism, that it may not just be a smooth curve if you plotted it out. There may be important thresholds you cross as you get worse, some of them being irreversible. It may be more than behavioral or psychological barriers but actual physical or hormonal barriers. And if that is where you are, you can't overeat non-carb foods, it just doesn't work for you.

If true, I'm glad I'm not there.

But getting back to the intuitive eating argument, if you ate intuitively, and had a normal metabolism (like we all had at one point), maybe you would never get in trouble if your diet contained only natural foods. I believe the food industry has modified foods in a way that bypasses our inborn abilities to be able to say, "That's enough."

If I ate M&Ms every time I was truly hungry, I'd be hungry every 2 hours and much fatter! I don't think this would work for carb-sensitive people.

What I DO find, iff I stick to LC, is that I tend to eat more "normally/intuitively" - eating when I am hungry & stopping when I am full. But if I eat sugar or starch, my "intuition" is overwhelmed by carb cravings.

After trying to reprogram my eating impulses and doing things like waiting for hunger, I think I would have success with intuitive eating, as long as it doesn't involve foods that trigger me into binges. I could probably do just fine even eating things like brown rice, whole potatoes along with my usual fair. They don't put me into a feeding frenzy. Even low-sugar, bittersweet chocolate doesn't. But the sweeter chocolate does.

I doubt that any one can. However, with the low carb lifestyle help, controling food intake is easy and can be done for life without pain.

You have put yourself in the best 25% of the population concerning weight. So doing some little work for life to maintain this great achievement is worth it to do. We all know that our health improve substantially with low carbing, so we must maintain this diet for life anyway.

My wife is one of life's fortunates who eats what she likes and remains, at 5'4" tall, a size 12 (UK). When her weight does increase (say by 7 lbs) she tweaks her diet just a little and the extra weight disappears fairly quickly.

In order to control my weight I purchased a BS meter to discover that my BS readings were mostly in the diabetic or prediabetic regions while my wife's BS level seemed to remain fairly static and within the normal range. From this I would presume that there are those, who like my wife, only needs to think 'slim' to get slim!

My wife's mother is 91 and she is fit and cares for herself and her house and enjoys the odd tipple, the occasional dance, trips to Canada yearly, and maintains a busy social life so, the question that arises is; is it our sugar balance that's the problem? Are we, who too readily gain weight, probably prediabetic?

Whenever I exclude sugar from my diet my body seems to become acidic (slightly different to ketosis) when I can be a tad tetchy. The awful taste in my mouth forces me to seek anything that will remove what is like a strong distracting coppery-taste. Carbohydrates do not solve this problem but a little sugar, such as in fruit, does, then I feel rather good. The discipline seems to be in controlling the sugar in-take. I have been experimenting for 14 months and, indeed, have reduced my weight, but, finding the right balance of sugar, protein, and carbs, has so far eluded me.

Mentioning sugar here is deliberated as I am beginning to notice that a little but only a little seems to produce benefit whereas carbohydrates from grains appear to be detrimental, but, having said this, I continue to be in the throes of experimenting, searching for that panacea to life's ailments.

I have pretty much decided that I am ok eating occassional portions of starches as long as they aren't grains (rice excepted and possibly corn excepted, still experimenting). And for me to not overindulge in them, they've got to be as close to how they're harvested as possible. So the more processed or refined, the more trouble I have controlling my portions.

This is one of my beliefs, yes. I think obesity is a disease, like diabetes. LC often stops obesity, and it may even reverse some of the weight, but you can't "undo" what was done from the over eating & carbohydrate abuse.
It is my suspicion that my body is permanently altered in a way that has the net effect of necessitating relatively more fat mass for "normal weight". It is also my suspicion that this is the reason virtually no morbidly obese person finds it possible to reach "normal weight" without consciously under eating.

Yep this is what I believe. There are different extents of damage - like someone who's "obesity" was actually just a 30 pound gain late in life it's likely they are still golden. But people who have been 100, 200, or more pounds overweight, their bodies are permanently changed by that, I'm convinced of it. I look at my body and I can tell with all the excess skin and fat at certain parts, then I look at the back of my neck (a normal fat concentration area) and the bones still stick out... it's pretty obvious that I am an "underweight fat person" even though my weight is "normal" by conventional standards. Before thanksgiving my weight was 117.5. I ate a bit excessively but not TOO bad for 3 days (I stayed mostly LC). Guess what my weight was after thanksgiving? 123. After the initial water bloat it went down to 121. My pants barely even fit . I have been dieting SINCE THEN and my weight is still not what it was. My thighs are for some reason disproportionately fatter after that - not in my head, either, clothes are fitting funny. My thighs are the most obvious example of my "excess fat cells" (the excess skin with fat hangs and drapes when I hold my leg up) so it makes sense if you think about it.
It is remarkable how much and how fast I can gain weight when I stop under eating. I do not think a non-dieted person at their "natural weight" (fat OR not) could gain that fast even if they ate as horribly as humanly possible. Their bodies just wouldn't have it - their fat cells are at a "comfortable place". Mine isn't. For me to gain like that all I have to do is let go of the restriction just a lil bit and over eat calories and carbs without compensation.

Let me try to explain this another way...
A person who has a relatively normal weight has a fat organ that resembles a house with say, 5 children (these represent "fat storage cells"). A person who has reached the tremendous weights of morbid obesity has a house that is as many as 15 children. The person with 5 kids only needs 20 pounds of food to keep them fed, and thus, avoid sickness and complaint (i.e. conservation symptoms & optimal health). If the person who has 15 kids tries to get by on that same 20 pounds of food, you can imagine what would happen. They actually need 60 pounds of food to achieve the same happy home .

Now say you took some poor person who has 15 kids, and has been manipulating the food rations so that they have been making do with 20 pounds of food around at any given time just to be fashionably correct in the neighborhood.
Naturally these are some unhappy, starving kids in your house - they've got access to just 1/3 what they actually need. Let's assume for a second one day the kids are screaming SO MUCH that you break down and let them have access to a lot of food for a day or two holiday. They will eat as much as they can, and still want more (retain fat). If they were well fed they wouldn't do that (gain fat super easy).

Stupid analogy, I know.

Totally, I completely agree.
In fact, when I was a little girl - then only chubby - I was put on an ad lib reduced carb diet by a cousin. This was not atkins - she merely cut out garbage starch, sugar, and I could eat freely of everything else. I didn't even know it was a diet - I hated pasta and was so glad I didn't have to eat it naked anymore (mom read 80s prevention BS about low fat, low meat). I loved the chicken in the sauce and was permitted to help myself to extra. I thinned immediately. If I continued to eat this way, it is likely I would have remained thin/healthy weight and never would have developed the eating problems and obesity I have today.

Again to compare the obesity disease to diabetes... they're very similar. You get both when you combine a certain predisposition with a certain environment. You can prevent both if the environment is such that it does not allow for the development of the predisposition (low carbs a given, but also a culture that has more "normal" eating patterns -- those american restaurant portions are almost worse than the quality of the food (high in garbage starch)).

What is done is done. If I want to control my obesity, and stay slender, it means under eating to my natural inclinations.