About Natural Eating

If you’re like me, you’ve had a life-long struggle with your weight. You’ve probably tried most of the popular diets. They worked for a while, then sooner or later the results tapered off and soon you were back to your old eating habits. It took me most of my adult life to figure out why. It’s because dieting is about what you eat, but losing weight is about what you think about eating.

No matter what any of the diet gurus tell you, there’s only one way to lose weight: Burn more calories than you consume. That’s it. That’s all. It doesn’t matter what you eat as long as you don’t eat more of it than you can burn off.

Natural Eating can help you to change your relationship with food so you can change how you think about eating…naturally.

Of course that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t eat plenty of fruits and vegetables and try to have a healthy diet. What it does mean is that an occasional piece of chocolate or ice cream isn’t going to kill you. The key to eating whatever you want and still being able to maintain or lose weight is to remember the ONE RULE of weight loss: Burn more than you consume.

This means that as long as you keep the chocolate or the ice cream below your required daily calorie intake, you can still enjoy your favorite indulgences. One way to master this is to ask yourself, “Is one piece of chocolate more or less delicious than the entire box of chocolates?” In other words, it all tastes equally delicious. So do you really need to eat the whole box when one piece is going to satisfy you?

 

Key Concepts of Natural Eating

What makes it so difficult to lose weight and keep it off? The answer is that diets don’t teach us to change our relationship to food. So unless we can also change the way we think about food, diets are destined to fail. That’s why Natural Eating isn’t a diet program. Instead, it’s a program about changing your relationship with eating. Natural Eating is based on two key concepts: Intuitive Eating and Mindfulness.

Intuitive eating is a non-diet approach to your relationship with food. It works by  helping you to become aware of how your body and mind respond to food.

Intuitive Eating was created by two registered dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, in 1995. It is a behavior-focused program that emphasizes what you think about food instead of on restrictive dieting rules. Intuitive eaters learn to listen to their bodies, which helps them to eat when they are hungry and to stop when they are full.

Mindfulness is simply paying attention to the present moment, with intention. Regarding eating, mindfulness is a way to get the most enjoyment out of every morsel, and a way to become more attuned to your body’s signals so that you can distinguish hunger from appetite, practice intuitive eating, and learn to distinguish when you are full.

Natural Eating utilizes the principles of intuitive eating and mindfulness in a comprehensive plan that will help you to lose weight the natural way, with the 7Cs of natural eating.

The book includes several worksheets for you to complete during the course of the program.