I can't get no satisfaction.

Why is it that I can consume such large quantities of food some times? It seems that I have lost the cues from my body which tell me when I am full. This is especially true when I am eating mindlessly – while reading, watching TV, on the run, in the car, or while on the computer (not a great idea by the way, due to crumbs in the keyboard and occasional spillage!).

On the weekend we decided to watch a movie after the kids were in bed. When Mike went out to rent the movie I asked if he could bring me back just one chocolate bar. Knowing that I would want to eat something during the show, I figured that would fulfil my craving but not be a huge caloric consumption. But he also bought a bag of Twizzlers, presumably for himself. And between the two of us we ate the whole bag. Sigh.

Have you ever read the “nutritional panel” on Twizzlers? Seems funny to call it the “nutritional panel” when there is clearly not much “nutrition.” Well, it doesn’t contain much except carbohydrates in the form of sugar (don’t get me started on the ridiculous trend to avoid carbs in any form). And who would have guessed that they contain over 200 grams of salt! Of course that is for the recommended serving size of 4 Twizzlers. Four Twizzlers! Can anyone sit down and only eat four? Well, maybe I could if I just sat down, and paid attention to eating them. Do they even taste good when you pay attention to what you are eating? I’ll have to give that a try.

I need to remember that over-eating is a normal response to under-eating. In the “starvation study” the men lost control of their appetites and couldn’t find a point of satiation – some “ate more or less continuously.” After 5 months of “re-feeding”, the majority returned to their normal eating patterns, and after 8 months most had, although some continued to eat more than they had before the experiment began.

So many people that I know, and have worked with, especially women, are in a constant state of “semi-starvation” as they diet. There is a lot of evidence that habitual dieters have the same “overcompensation” in eating behavior as the men in the study, and people with eating disorders. Ellyn Sater refers to this as “dis-inhibition” – we lose our inhibitions with respect to food. And our internal regulators are not helping us control our eating.

I also see this in children who are overweight and obese. Because the doctors have told the parents that their overweight child needs to lose weight, or the parents themselves are concerned, the parents start controlling and restricting their child’s food intake. With the result that whenever these children have access to unlimited amounts of food (like a birthday party, buffet, etc.) they gorge themselves and can’t seem to stop. Some parents I have worked with have had their child tested for Prader-Willi disease, a condition where children can’t stop themselves from eating. This is a rare condition, and they inevitably find out that this is not the explanation for their child’s behaviour. The explanation lies in the body’s lack of trust that it will get fed. The parent needs to get-it-together and feed their child in a predictable fashion. The bodies of cave-men children must have been the same: “Hey, we finally have food so I better eat while the eatin’s good! Never know when our next meal will be!”

So the plan is to get-it-together and feed myself in a predictable fashion and re-teach my body to trust that I will feed it on a regular basis. To do this requires eating at appropriate intervals (even if I am not getting the signal for hunger), eating reasonable portion sizes (even if I don’t feel satisfied at the end), and knowing that it can take months of this “normalized” food intake to re-establish those internal regulators. And then I need to trust that eventually my body will tell me when it is hungry and when it is satisfied – not full, not stuffed, but satisfied.