Everyday Systems

Curious to know what/how everyone feels about intuitive eating vs No S. All thoughts and opinions are appreciated...

I've tried it but really struggled to lose weight and in fact my weight increased. However I think the years I spent reading about it and trying it have helped me with emotional and binge eating.

I just feel I need a little structure to my eating which nos gives me. I also found it difficult to recognise when I was really hungry.

Nos makes you sit with a hunger a little sometimes which I think is good for you.

My advice if you are considering the two and want to lose weight. Practice intuitive eating at the weekend fully and apply the principles of eating what you want to your three meals a day except for the sweet stuff in the week.

Jx

That’s great advice! For me intuitive eating only works after years on NoS even the habits are basically unconscious already. Otherwise and at this stage in my life the intuition would be to eat as much sugar as I can get as I am compensating for lack of sleep.

I gained 75 lbs on intuitive eating but it did help me overcome binge eating and fear of eating certain foods. Was it worth it? Idk.

You can eat intuitively on your plate though. Listen to your body about what kinds of foods it might like and notice when your full even if you choose to finish everything on your plate (which is fine).

Without the structure of No S I found IE too hard. If I wanted to eat 2 hours after a meal, was I really hungry? Too much mental struggle there. However, I do try to make sure I am good and hungry before a meal, and that I don't overeat (a work in progress). So the structure of No S comes first.

I am not sure how IE is supposed to work in the context of 24/7 availability of high reward highly processed food. I much prefer to not have such food readily available in my personal space, unless they are part S day treats.

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I think the two compliment each other really well, as other have said.

IE helped me recover from rigid disordered eating vs binging, but it left me thinking about food too much - am I hungry? How hungry? How full? Blah blah.

I now practice IE within NOS and this includes - sometimes - eating a small snack before I go to bed if I think hunger is going to effect my sleep. It means that I haven't lost weight on NOS but I have maintained and am really comfortable and happy with my relationship to food.

I'm full IE on the wknd and try eating little and often just to compare the two. Genuinely prefer the three meal structure.

I do not use individuals' habits to guide my eating. The IE pushers say, as far as I remember, to use one's own hunger to guide eating and not to be waylaid by trying to time your eating with others'. What a self-involved system that is! Their reasoning that the only reason people eat compulsively is that they've dieted can't be true, as there have been overeaters since societies cultivated food. Or that if you give yourself permission to eat anything, you will gravitate towards the right amount and items. This flies in the face of how hunger actually works for the majority of individuals when modern manufactured foods are figured into the equation. This is why thin people are a minority in this world of excess. They are anomalies! It is very hard to create anomalies. I would bet that there is just about as much failure of IE-ers as other diets. Ok, maybe a bit lower, but even a 10% success rate would be generous. I doubt there is any really good research on it, and certainly not for five years. Less than that and who knows what "works?"

The reason I committed to No S was because it matched pretty closely slim cultures' eating practices which kept most of the population slim. I guarantee none of those cultures depends on the individuals' eating right at the moment they are hungry and choosing the majority of the meal right when it's meal time. They have relatively set meal times and contents. They have certain items and amounts they eat at meals. A plate of nachos is not a meal.

I could go on and probably will another time, but it's midnight and I just lost a lot of text.

Contemporary portraits show that the British upper classes were becoming overweight by middle age by the 18th century. They had free access to food and no financial restrictions - was the idea of dieting even invented then?

The lesson I draw from this is that without cultural or financial or availability restrictions on food, we have to impose our own.

I still like to be hungry when I eat though - I just don't enjoy eating my usual plain food otherwise.

IE doesn't work for me. The rule is "eat when you're hungry." But "hunger" is so subjective that this means I eat all the time. It made me more obsessed about food than ever.

I prefer don't eat unless you are hungry, but in any case don't eat more than 3 times per day. Structure rules over trying to figure out whether I am hungry or not.

Joe Weider used to state that bodybuilders train "intuitively". Arthur Jones basically stated, and I paraphrase: What the #@!$.