Can I trust my hunger?

What is normal eating?

Before I knew I had an eating disorder (orthorexia nervosa), I played a lot of games with food. But they weren’t fun games — but there were rules.

If I ate x, then I could eat y, if I didn’t eat z, I could eat w, if I only ate at certain times, only certain food groups… The rules never stayed the same for long. I would read something or see something and decide the rules must be changed. I had a constant dialogue in my head about good and bad food, how good or bad I was, how, if I could just control myself better… blah, blah, blah.

This may be familiar to you as well. The thing I finally realized was that the rules were arbitrary, none were based on my personal health and well-being. And on top of that, the research I thought they were based on was a farce. All paid by pharmaceutical companies or diet companies, or just poor studies. After decades of trying so to be good, it was like a slap in the face.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer games to be fun. So much of my time was wasted on figuring out what I should or shouldn’t eat. That was stressful! 

Things came to a head while I was caring for my father before he died. It was making me crazy and adding to the immense stress I was under. But how to stop?

I didn’t even know if it was possible to stop or what it would look like to eat without constant guilt, grief, obsession or fear. I remember a time that I just ate when I was hungry and stopped when I was full. The girl I was had enjoyed cake at a birthday party and pie at Thanksgiving — without guilt or overeating. What happened?

Most humans do it, why couldn’t I? I thought I was fundamentally broken and depraved. But was I? Absolutely not. We are born knowing that we need to eat, and it’s not a big hassle. These thoughts were the beginning of a journey to recovery.

But what is normal eating? It’s just what I did as a kid. I ate, enjoyed it, and without overthinking it! If I was a normal eater, I knew I could be again.

The short definition of normal is eating when hungry, stopping when full, making exceptions when it makes sense (like family gatherings). Here’s the full explanation, if you like. The definition comes from Ellyn Satter, who has been teaching people to eat and to feed their kids for decades.

This is a large topic. But for me, it was a glimmer of hope. I’m not bad, I was just taught, like many, to ignore my body’s signals and listen to arbitrary rules made be well-meaning people that didn’t have the whole picture.

Intuitive eating, and learning to trust my body, was the next step in the journey to eating normally for me. My life is so much less stressful and full now. 

I had to put everything back on the table. Everything. I had been eating stevia instead of sugar for twenty years. I was all about the whole foods, without gluten, carbs, preservatives and artificial everything. I had lived this way for a long time. Part of me thought I would die if I drank tap water. 

After reading about how resilient the human race is, and looking back at what I’d been through in my life, I decided to try refeeding for a while. I could always go back to my old way of eating. I was terrified of gaining weight, but I was more terrified of not living life. 

I went through a donut phase, a croissant phase, an ice cream phase. The only rules were to eat what I wanted, when I wanted it. Dietitians promised that it wouldn’t last forever. If I tuned into my body, I would stop wanting to eat all the things I had denied myself for so long. One day, I craved a salad, then I noticed that the decadent chocolate ice cream had been in the freezer for two months, I had to throw away goodies I was no longer interested in eating.

It feels like a miracle. Now, when I crave chocolate, I eat chocolate. Sometimes I will eat a lot, but usually my body just wants a taste. If it knows I can have whatever I want, whenever I want, it trusts me to give it what it needs. And I trust my body to let me know if I need more protein today, or some beta-carotene (carrots and other orange and red foods). Sometimes I need something rich and creamy, sometimes I need something crunchy and full of fiber. 

The thing I learned is that all those years of a “healthy lifestyle” (dieting or trying to be smaller) just made my body think that there was a famine. It can’t tell the difference between a low calorie diet and me starving to death. My body was trying to rest and lower my metabolism so that I wouldn’t die. It was just doing its job. Now, I do my job and listen to it.