The overfed Head by Rob Stevens 

What others are saying about The Overfed Head:

I feel honored to review this great book. As someone who has
brought "thintuition" into my life after dieting on and off for
the last fifteen years, I have a great perspective. The honesty
and candor of Rob Stevens in this book is refreshing. The
thintuition approach will bring back the power and freedom
in your life that has been lost around being overweight.
His concepts of getting in touch with or reconnecting to
our bodies, honoring our needs, and being good to ourselves
are so much more empowering than the limitations and
restrictions set up by diets. It does require a change in thinking
and a willingness to let go of some previous beliefs . . . but
why not? If you're reading this, you, too, have probably been
dieting for a while, and have not been as successful as you
would have liked--or not successful at all.
I love thintuition, not only because I have lost twenty-five
pounds and kept it off, but because I have lost my
cynicism and resignation about weight loss as well. I have
also lost more weight more easily than I ever thought possible. I love the freedom and confidence I have in my
relationship to eating and in knowing my body. The power in
that is amazing--the power that's missing in diet after diet.

As an obstetrician/gynecologist, I deal with the concerns
about weight from a medical, as well as from an emotional
and psychological standpoint. I have already recommended
thintuition to many of my patients. Having women become
empowered in their access to weight loss will lead to their success.

Leslie A. McCloskey, M.D. Obstetrician/Gynecologist
Northwestern Memorial Hospital

Over the weekend, I read a stimulating and insightful book,
titled The Overfed Head by Rob Stevens. The book describes
Mr. Stevens' battle with morbid obesity, as he gained a variety
of insights into his condition and, especially, began to realize
the present lack of solutions to successful weight maintenance.
Through what we'll call a "controlled clinical trial of
one," Mr. Stevens listened to the "wee small voice within,"
stimulated substantially by prior insights gained from a
seminal book by Robert Schwartz titled, Diets Don't Work. Mr. Stevens subsequently came up with the concept and,
I believe, the reality of "thintuition."
The book documents the evolution of the process of
thintuition through the perspectives gained from one or
another of the author's unsuccessful attempts at weight loss.
The fact is that much of what we all have been taught about
weight loss actually results in increased weight. Over millions
of years, the body has been evolving ways to store, retain, and
then not lose weight and energy stores (fat). I fully agree with
Mr. Stevens that diets are unsatisfactory, and often unhealthy,
solutions to weight control!

The central concepts of thintuition are right on target!
"Naturally thin" people, as Mr. Stevens characterizes them,
and there are still some around (though increasingly few
as the food industry wreaks its havoc with our thintuition), simply eat when hungry, eat what they want and, most
importantly, stop eating when they're not hungry. These
concepts are simple, straightforward, and accurate!
In the end, this book is well-written and fun to read! The
examples given and the easy flow of the words and phrases
make it a quick read and enhance one's ability to conceptualize
the central themes of thintuition. I recommend that you
simply sit down and read it, whether you're overweight or not!

John N. Sheagren, M.D.
Chair, Department of Internal Medicine
Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center,
and Professor of Medicine
University of Illinois, College of Medicine

When I read The Overfed Head, I saw reflected in it many of
the challenges my patients routinely face in my internal medicine
practice, in which I specialize in weight management.
Many of my patients fit the model of successfully losing
weight, repeatedly on different diets, only to regain the
weight lost once they go off those diets.

I have always struggled with how to best help my patients
develop a healthy relationship with food and eating. I am
always encouraging my patients to commit to a lifestyle
change rather than to a temporary diet.

I routinely recommend many of the ideas Rob Stevens
presents in The Overfed Head. Readers will find useful tools
through which they can identify the reasons why they eat
that have nothing to do with hunger. Readers will also discover
a new way of thinking about food as fuel for their bodies,
not as something to satisfy emotional needs, and to approach
eating as a ceremonious and joyful occasion.

Coming from the perspective of one who has finally overcome
his struggles with weight, Rob Stevens gives hope to
those who are looking for a permanent solution. I believe that
with true commitment, anyone can find success through his
approach.


Laura L. Concannon, M.D.

Section Head, Department of Integrative Medicine

Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center,

and Assistant Professor of Medicine

University of Illinois, College of Medicine


? ? ?

I started reading The Overfed Head and couldn't put it down
until I'd finished. What a compelling, logical, straightforward,
enjoyable read! This book lays out an easy-to-follow,
easy-to-implement way of thinking about eating that leads to
effective weight loss. And I know it works, because it's worked
for me. Great job, Rob Stevens!




Jeffrey A. Miller, M.S.W.

Psychotherapist and

Author, The Anxious Organization

What if everything you know
about weight loss
is wrong?

by Rob Stevens
Founder of thintuition

First Edition
Published by:
thintuition™ publishing, inc.
P.O. Box 180182
Chicago, IL 60618
www.thintuition.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without written permission from the author,
except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

ISBN 0-9746542-0-5
Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN): 2004103918
First Printing 2004
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Cover design and illustrations by Dirk I. Tiede and Andy Crestodina

thintuition'
publishing, inc.
Chicago, Illinois
thintuition.com
Notice
The information contained in this book is general in
scope and is intended only to assist people in their personal
weight loss and weight management efforts. The information
provided in this book is not to be considered medical advice
and should not be interpreted as a substitute for a medical
consultation, evaluation, diagnosis or treatment by a physician.
All information contained in this book should be
viewed only as the opinion and belief of the author.
Before beginning this or any weight loss or weight
management program, or before undertaking any of the
recommendations provided in this book, you are urged to
seek the advice of a physician or health practitioner. Never
disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it
because of something you have read in this or any book.
Individuals with any health concerns are specifically warned
to seek professional medical advice prior to initiating any
form of weight loss or weight management program.
The author, publisher, and distributor disclaim any liability
or loss, personal or otherwise, resulting from anyone following
any of the recommendations in this book.

6
Chapter 1
Results Not Typical

This is probably not the first weight loss book
you've read that begins with a before-and-after
story. From the back cover photo you will have
already gathered that at one time I was obese,
and that now I'm not. You will have surmised that I'm going
to tell you how I lost the weight and how you, too, can
achieve the same happy result. If you are not skeptical at this
point, you ought to be. My success is no guarantee at all of
your success. My hope is that this book will disabuse you forever
of the notion that having lost a lot of weight makes
someone an expert on how you should lose weight. If you're
presently heavier than you want to be, chances are such
"experts" are a part of your problem.
Losing a lot of weight on a diet is not an unusual accomplishment.
You've probably done it yourself--perhaps many
times. What is unusual about me is that I stopped dieting in
1998, lost 140 pounds over the course of the following year
and a half, and have kept it off ever since. You're probably
assuming that instead of a diet, I made a permanent change
in my eating habits. And you're right. I started eating what I
actually wanted to eat. If you were to raid my refrigerator
right now, you'd find real butter, real mayonnaise, real
sugar--none of that reduced-fat, reduced-calorie gunk I used
to inflict on myself when I was heavy.
Yes, I know that sounds unbelievable. For twenty-five
years, I shared the belief that certain foods have the power to
make you fat or thin. It was my belief system about food--not the foods themselves--that kept me overweight. When I
changed my thinking, I was able to shed the weight and keep
it off, without a struggle.
The wealth of data we possess on diet, nutrition, and
weight control is astounding. More of it has been produced in
our lifetimes than was produced in the entire previous history
of human civilization. Walk into any bookstore and you'll
find a whole wall of the stuff. You can't channel surf for ten
minutes or glance at a newspaper without encountering some
new info on what you should and shouldn't be eating.
Legions of people now make their living as diet counselors,
nutritionists, and trainers--professions that scarcely existed a
generation ago. We also have a host of new food products
meant to keep us slim: low-fat, non-fat and artificially sweet.
And yet we're in the midst of an obesity epidemic. A majority
of Americans are overweight, and a great many of them are
dangerously so.
You might suppose that the problem of overweight is
driving the growth of the diet industry, that it has sprung up
to serve an obvious need. But what if the opposite is actually
the case? What if all this data, all these products and services,
are actually contributing to the problem? It's clear that the
more we've learned about fat, the fatter we've gotten. Might
that be because everything we think we've learned is actually
wrong? That is the hypothesis I'd like you to consider.
You won't find any testimonials in this book. Although I
know many others who have succeeded with the approach I'll
be describing, I won't be telling you their before-and-after
stories. The experiences of other people are really beside the
point. The essence of the approach I call "thintuition" is
learning to tune in to your own experience. If you come to
agree that what I'm saying makes sense, you will perhaps act
on the idea and discover for yourself whether it works for
you. Your own success story is the only one that matters. I
begin with my story mainly to describe the faulty assumptions
that guided all my previous attempts to lose weight, and
the repetitive failures that resulted.
I was about ten years old when I went on my first diet.
Although I wasn't yet seriously overweight, both my older
sister and father already had weight problems. My parents
must have figured that my childhood pudginess was a sign of
bigger trouble to come. Like so many well-meaning parents of
chubby kids, they set me on a course that pretty much guaranteed
a lifelong struggle with fat. I don't fault them for this.
They didn't know any better. Back then, nobody did.
My father was a holocaust survivor who had experienced
real anxiety about where the next meal was coming from.
This childhood experience of scarcity left a deep impression
that subsequent abundance could never entirely erase. Safe in
the Land of Plenty, my father continued to regard food as a
limited resource that must not be wasted. The unspoken but
clearly understood rule at our house was to finish everything
on our plates. My sister and I learned by example that leaving
food was simply not an option. Being full was no excuse for
throwing away good food. Curiously, my parents never made
the connection between my clean plate and my thickening
waistline. Instead, my mother stocked up on low-calorie
foods, and I went on dutifully consuming every last bite of
cottage cheese and carrots.
The food served officially at the family dinner table was
more than enough to satisfy my physical hunger, but not my
appetite for treats, so I supplemented (and subverted) the
healthy diet my mother had put me on out of my own pocket
money. Now it was "fun" food that was scarce, and I was still
very much my father's son. Fast food bargains attracted me
irresistibly. Four burgers for a dollar? That was an opportunity
not to be missed. With a familiar sense of duty, I'd wolf down
all four, hungry or not.
Although I overate throughout my teens, I continued to
think of myself as "husky" or "chunky" rather than fat.
Luckily, I wasn't heavy enough during my high school years
to be socially isolated by my weight. I was a pretty popular
kid, and nobody picked on me. But by the end of my first year
of college, I was undeniably fat, and unhappy about it. That
year, I experienced my first romantic rejection. In the depression
that followed, I turned to food for comfort. I found
myself in that conundrum so familiar to the overweight:
feeling that fat was the source of my unhappiness and that
food was the remedy.
From then on, dieting became a way of life for me. It
ruled my life and consumed my thoughts. Since my first diet
at the age of ten, I estimate that I went on an average of eight
diets a year and spent a cumulative total of thirteen years on
some diet or other. And the irony of it is, I'd have to say I was
a successful dieter: successful in the sense that I often met my
goal weight. Over the years, I lost, regained and lost again hundreds of pounds. Because I managed to reach my goal on
some diets--often losing sixty to seventy pounds at a time--
I continued to believe that, given the right circumstances,
dieting worked. Unconsciously, I believed (as many people
do) that all I had to do was to find the right diet: the miracle
diet to end all diets.
In search of that miracle, I embraced every new diet idea
that came along. From counting calories, I shifted to counting
fat grams and then to counting carbs. I could give you the full
nutritional rundown on every food item in the supermarket.
The Atkins Diet--like any approach that "allows" you to eat
unlimited quantities of a certain food group--had great
appeal for me. What's not to love about guilt-free bacon? At
some level, I believed that it probably wasn't healthy to shun
one food group while overindulging in another, but I wanted
to be thin more than I wanted to be healthy. It was short-term
discomfort--dehydration, lightheadedness, and a perpetual
case of constipation--rather than concern for the long-term
consequences that caused me to abandon the Atkins
approach.
Between serious commitments to diets named after doctors,
I had many fad diet flings. The most short-lived was one of
those miracle combination diets where you have to follow an
exact menu on day one, then a different menu on day two,
and so forth. On day three, I had to eat beets. No substitutions
were possible. The diet specifically indicated that beets eaten
on day three would cure my sluggish metabolism. I loathe
beets. The Cabbage Soup diet was another desperate measure I wasn't quite desperate enough to adopt for long. Still, I have
no doubt that, had I persisted with beets or cabbage soup, I'd
have lost weight. Even really stupid diets will prevent you
from overeating if you stick with them consistently.
Over the years, I came to acknowledge that there were
certain things I was never going to do consistently. You can
put up with just about anything if you know it's temporary,
but I could not resign myself to the idea of giving up foods I
love and filling up with foods I dislike for life. The reward for
every dieting success was being able to go off the diet. Again
and again I reached my goal weight--and maintained it for
about a day. I celebrated every diet success with festive
overindulgence in all the favorite foods I'd had to give up.
Not surprisingly, I soon gained back all the weight--and
then some.
The program that worked best for me was Weight
Watchers. Its balance appealed to my common sense, and its
flexibility worked well with my lifestyle. I managed to stick
with it for eight months and lost seventy pounds. Having
achieved my goal weight (185 pounds back then) by a
method I found relatively painless (relative to eating beets or
being constipated, at any rate), I felt like a Weight Watchers
success story. However, I went off the regime and within a few
weeks was already regaining the weight. A year later, I
weighed 270 pounds--fifteen pounds more than I'd weighed
when I began the program.
In the discouragement that followed every diet, I
sometimes toyed with giving up dieting for good. The "fat
acceptance" movement had some persuasive points to make
and accorded well with my natural tendency to look on the
bright side. The fact was that other people already did accept
me, fat or thin. When overweight, I fell comfortably into the
role of "the funny fat guy." Yet deep down I felt that to accept
my obesity was to settle for being less than my best self. I
knew that being fat was holding me back in many aspects of
my life. Never mind what other people thought--when I
looked in the mirror, / didn't like what I saw. Despite having
been overweight most of my life, this fat self didn't look or
feel to me like my real self, my natural self.
And that presented me with a dilemma, because the
relatively thin person I was at the end of each successful diet
didn't seem natural or real either. My pared-down shape felt
temporary somehow, overshadowed by my dread of getting
fat again. Regardless of whether I was binging or dieting, I
was obsessed with food. What I really wanted was to enjoy
my life--and my food--without having to think about it
constantly. Diets only work if you remain on a diet forever.
Nowadays this staying-on-a-diet-forever is referred to as a
"lifestyle change." Call it what you like: It is still a diet. Who
can be happy about being perpetually on a diet? How can we
think of that as natural?
Exasperated with dieting, I turned to exercise as a possible
solution. Maybe if I got my metabolism going and burned a
whole lot of calories, I'd be able to stay reasonably thin
without having to deprive myself constantly. I joined a gym
and signed up for a session with a personal trainer. After
weighing me, he refused to let me work out until I'd obtained
written permission from a physician. Not that I would have
succeeded anyhow. Having to run for an hour to burn off the
calories in one donut is not what I'd call an expedient
solution. Exercising to get strong and vigorous is a great idea,
and working out for this reason can be immensely pleasurable.
Compulsively exercising to get or stay thin, though, is just a
variation on compulsive dieting.

Diets only work if you remain on a diet forever.

The moment of truth
Many overweight people have what I call a "breakthrough
moment" when they realize that they simply can't
stand it any more, and they seriously resolve to change. For
some it might be a health scare such as a coronary episode.
For others it might be an embarrassing incident such as being
asked to purchase two seats on a flight.
My own breakthrough came when I realized that despite
my dramatic ups and downs, my overall trend had been to
gain an average of ten pounds a year. By then, I was at my all
time heaviest: over 300 pounds. Might have been as much as
315--I'm not sure, because past 300, I'd refused to get on a
scale. I did the math and realized where all this was leading.
Although I wasn't yet suffering any serious health consequences,
I was by now well into the morbidly obese range.
And at the rate of ten more pounds each year, I was on my
way to being just plain gross. I didn't want to be that
grotesquely fat guy. That wasn't me. I needed to change
immediately, and forever. I wasn't willing to put up with
another year of being obese, much less a lifetime of it.
At the same time, I realized that this annual ten-pound
weight gain had been proceeding grimly, year in, year out,
despite the fact that I spent an average of eight months out of
every year on some diet or other. As I put it to myself then, I
was getting fatter and fatter despite dieting. Now I recognize
that I was getting fatter and fatter because of dieting, but that's
getting a little ahead of my story. The point for me, in that
breakthrough moment, was that dieting didn't work. If it
hadn't worked for the first twenty-five years I'd done it, what
would be different about the next twenty-five years? I decided
to give it up for good.
On the face of it, this breakthrough didn't look entirely
logical. On one hand, I was resolving firmly never to be fat
again. On the other hand, I was resolving with equal firmness
never to diet again. If I didn't diet, what was I going to do
instead?
My solution at the time was to focus on eating healthfully.
From my years of compulsive dieting, I already knew a great
deal about the nutritional properties of food. I decided to
apply this knowledge to a "permanent lifestyle change." I
would eat balanced, healthy meals, and only balanced healthy
meals, every day for the rest of my life. I would steer a sane
middle course between the extremes of self-denial and
self-indulgence that had, till then, governed my eating.
I figured my weight would gradually come to reflect this
middle way. I would probably never be slim, but I could at
least reverse my steady decline into morbid obesity.
I don't know how this would have worked over the long
term. It was the best idea I'd ever come up with on my own,
and I managed to stick with it for four or five months.
Though I wasn't on what 1 called a "diet," I had succeeded in
losing about forty pounds. Perhaps I truly would have kept
my resolution for life, for it was certainly more keep-able than
previous resolutions, and I was very determined. Yet my
program still fell a bit short of my true desire--to enjoy my
life and my food without having to fuss over it all the time. It
is possible this desire would eventually have reasserted itself,
leading back to my old cycle of careless eating, overindulgence,
weight gain, and despair. I'll never know, for as fate
would have it, my sane and reasonable idea was supplanted
by a truly brilliant one. I discovered a way to attain my true
desire: to have my cake, and a trim, healthy body besides.
While staying overnight at a friend's house, my mother
had casually picked up a book about weight loss she found on
the nightstand. She doesn't have a weight problem herself, but
there was nothing else to read, and the title arrested her. It was Diets Don't Work, by Dr. Bob Schwartz. Knowing I'd recently
come to the same conclusion, she figured it might interest me.
"Interest" is too mild a word. In mounting excitement,
I devoured the copy she bought for me. Schwartz offered
compelling evidence that diets don't work for anyone (i.e.,
not just me). He confirmed my own inkling that diets don't
merely fail, but that in the long run they exacerbate the
problem. I already knew that I was fat despite dieting, but
by the end of his book, I finally understood that dieting
had contributed to making me fatter. It was a whole lot worse
than useless.
If Schwartz had merely strengthened my own resolve
never to diet again, I'd have been grateful to have found his
book. But he went on to offer an alternative solution much
better than the one I was attempting to implement on my
own. He noticed that medical studies on how to get thin
almost always focused on the behavior of heavy people.
It seemed to him that if you wanted to be thin, it would be
better to study what thin people do.
So he started to observe people who had been slim all
their lives. One thing he noticed immediately was that thin
people seemed oblivious to the idea that some foods were
fattening. Calories, fats, and carbohydrates never entered into their consideration when deciding what to eat. Indeed, many
of them were quite clueless as to the nutritional content of
foods. There was no particular pattern to what thin people, as
a group, put into their bodies. Some ate traditionally balanced
meals, while others lived on sweets or fast food. Some ate lots
of meat while others ate lots of bread and pasta. The only
common denominator was that, whatever they were eating,
it wasn't making them fat. Exercise didn't seem to be a factor
either. Some were very active, and some seemed to have a lot
of nervous energy, but an equal number of thin people were
slow-moving and sedentary. Some even managed to live
confined to a wheelchair without putting on weight.
If not diet or exercise, what was it that all these naturally
thin people had in common? Oddly enough, Schwartz found
they were most like each other in their lack of reflection
about what and why they ate. Ask heavy people why they ate
what they did at their last meal, and you'll usually get a pretty
longwinded answer. They'll tell you in depth and detail why
it was good for them, or why, if it wasn't good for them, they
ate it anyway. Ask a thin person and the almost universal
response is to shrug and say, "I was hungry." Ask an
overweight person at noon what they'd like for dinner, and
they've usually got a good idea. Ask a thin person the same
thing, and they don't seem to comprehend the question.
A thin person may be keenly interested in food when they
are hungry, but the moment their hunger is satisfied, the
whole subject fades into oblivion for them. In short, the main
difference Schwartz found between the naturally thin and the
overweight was in how--and how much--they thought
about food, eating, and weight.
As it happened, my roommate at that time was naturally
thin. I found her at once enviable and perplexing. While
my side of the fridge was stocked with fresh veggies, low-fat
dressings, high fiber breads and the like, Dana's idea of a
staple was full-fat chocolate fudge ice cream.
Where I carefully planned each nutritionally balanced
meal and ate it at the regularly appointed time, Dana's eating
seemed to follow no discernible pattern. At random intervals
she would suddenly announce, "I'm hungry," then ask herself
aloud, "Hmm, what sounds good right now?" If it was 7 p.m.
and Cheerios appealed to her, Cheerios she would have. Once
in a while she would declare herself hungry but have no
answer to the follow-up question of what sounded good.
On those occasions, she would decide to wait until she
felt hungry enough to want something specific. Around
eating, her only rule seemed to be to please herself, precisely
and completely.
When, inspired by Schwartz's book, I began to observe
Dana more closely, I discovered that she was extremely precise in the way she pleased herself. She would open that
pint of chocolate fudge ice cream, take a spoonful and really
savor it, eyes closed, bliss spreading across her face. After a
bite or two, she'd reseal the carton and return it reverently to
the freezer. A pint would last her at least a week, and often
longer. She'd open a bag of chips, eat a handful, and then
forget about the rest till they'd gone stale. To throw away
two-thirds of a bag of uneaten chips didn't seem to bother her
at all. When I asked her why she left so much nice food
unfinished, she never gave staying slim as her reason. She'd
just say, "It hit the spot. I'm not hungry any more."
Schwartz's conclusion about what keeps naturally thin
people thin was amazingly simple. It goes like this: Thin
people eat only when hungry. Thin people eat exactly what
they are hungry for. Thin people stop eating as soon as their
hunger is satisfied. He went on to suggest that if overweight
people were to adopt these three behaviors consistently, they
would cease to be overweight.
So that's what I did. Compared with what I'd been doing
previously it was a cinch. I went on eating a lot of the healthy
foods I'd been eating before, because I'd actually come to
enjoy them. But I gave a pass to foods that had nothing going
for them--to me, at least--except their nutritional virtue. No
beets. No carrot sticks. No cabbage soup. For the first time in
my adult life, I indulged guiltlessly in my favorites--pizza,
nachos, and pastries. I discovered that a single slice of pizza,
when fully savored, gave me more satisfaction than I used to
get from polishing off the whole pie. Having assured myself
that I could eat the foods I like best whenever I was hungry
for them, I ceased to crave them. I had finally achieved my
true desire--to simply enjoy eating, without having to obsess
about it. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was fully
in charge of my eating. I was free of the "shoulds" that had
governed my choices while dieting and the rebellion against
all these "shoulds" that had driven my sporadic binges. I felt
like I was finally honoring my body's needs and treating
myself with respect. My newfound self-esteem spread to other
aspects of my life. I was handling everything more assertively
and confidently, not just food.
On an emotional level this approach was so satisfying,
that I probably would have persisted with it even if I wasn't
losing much weight. But in fact, I was losing steadily. On my
more optimistic diets, my goal weight had always been 185
pounds. That's still pretty hefty for a person of my height and
build, but having been heavy all my life, I couldn't conceive
of myself as any thinner. Once I passed the 300-pound mark,
I'd have been happy to settle for anything under 200 pounds.
This time I got down to 185 and kept losing. Wasn't trying to.
It just happened. I finally stabilized at my true ideal weight of
160 and have remained there since 1999.1 no longer own any
of the larger-sized clothes I used to keep as back-up, for I no
longer feel there's anything precarious about being thin.
The size I am now is the size I fully expect to be for the rest
of my life. I haven't the slightest desire to deviate from the
behaviors that are keeping me thin, because these behaviors
now come naturally to me and make me happy.

I had finally achieved my true desire--to simply
enjoy eating, without having to obsess about it.

If this is such a great idea, why isn't
everyone doing it?
Bob Schwartz's book was a bestseller, and the main idea
expressed by its title, Diets Don't Work, entered the mainstream
in a big way. Yet the American preoccupation with
dieting has grown explosively since its publication. You will
now routinely hear diet experts parroting the mantra "Diets
don't work," then going on to spell out what, when, and how
much you should eat. For "diet" they have merely substituted
the euphemism "permanent lifestyle change." You are told to
banish junk foods from your pantry forever, to resign yourself
to low-fat, low-calorie, or low-carb substitutes for your
favorite foods forever, to exercise daily forever, to stop eating
three hours before bedtime forever, to monitor portion sizes
forever, and so forth. This is the same old same old sensible
advice that doesn't work because few people can follow it forever.
The point is that if you are following rules about what,
when, and how much to eat, you are on a diet, regardless of
what you choose to call it.
In accepting the idea that diets don't work while continuing
to go on diets that they no longer refer to as diets, most
of the people who have been influenced by Schwartz seem to
have missed the boat on the solution he was presenting. His
greatest contribution, as I see it, was not his observation that
diets don't work (which was really just a statement of the
obvious) but the practical alternative he offered. Relatively
few of his readers have been willing and/or able to adopt the
behaviors of the naturally thin. Having gotten such great
results myself, I began to wonder why more people weren't
picking up his approach and running with it. After several
years of reflecting on the matter, I believe I have identified
the most common obstacles and what might be done to
remove them.
Let me say at the outset that I have little to add to
Schwartz's simple three-part formula. Eat only when you're
hungry, eat exactly what you feel like eating, and stop eating
when you stop being hungry. That is really and truly all it
takes to achieve a weight that is healthy for you and maintain
it for life. Both the beauty and the effectiveness of the idea lie
in its simplicity, and for me to embellish on it would not be
helpful. If you get it, believe it, and are, at this moment, able
to actually do it, you can stop reading right now. The reason
I am writing this book is that most overweight people have a
lot of trouble either getting it, believing it, or doing it.
Getting it
So what's not to get? The idea is so simple, an infant
could grasp it. In fact, infants do grasp it. Have you ever met
a baby who didn't cry to be fed when hungry and lose all
interest in suckling once satisfied? All of us are born knowing
what we need, how much of it we need, and when we need
it. Knowing this, and acting on it, is completely natural
for both animals and human beings. We are all born with
the instincts of the naturally thin--the instincts I call
"thintuition." Some lucky people manage to retain this
natural thintuition into adulthood and maintain a moderate,
healthy weight all their lives. If you are overweight, you lost
it at some point, and probably pretty early in your childhood.
Losing touch with our natural instincts around food is an

"Why can't he learn to clean his plate?"
almost universal, aspect of our social conditioning.
Early on, most of us learn that meals are served at fixed
intervals. By the time we are weaned, we've caught on to the
idea that food is not always provided at the exact moment we
want it, and that we are sometimes expected to eat it at
moments when we don't want it. Learning to conform to this
external schedule is the path of least resistance. We learn to
disregard hunger that crops up at inopportune times and to
eat when expected to eat, even if we don't feel hungry.
Instead of being prompted to eat by the physical sensation of
hunger, our eating becomes triggered by the clock and by the
presence of food. If dessert is presented as the reward for
cleaning our plates, we learn that foods considered good for
us must be consumed to the point of satiety before we get to
taste the foods we really desire. We learn to enjoy yummy
will get other terrible diseases if you eat too much "bad" food.
Children in Africa have big bellies from not eating enough
good food. Children in America have big bellies from eating
too much bad food. If Brussels sprouts are a good food and
French fries are a bad food, our instinctive preferences are
probably not a reliable guide to avoiding a big belly. To know
what's good and bad, you have to rely on what doctors,
scientists, parents, and teachers tell you. You have to learn
about things like vitamins, calories, proteins, and fats.
In short, we've spent our whole lives learning the precise
opposite of eat when you're hungry, eat what you want,
and stop eating when you're not hungry any more. What is
perfectly obvious to every infant on the planet strikes us as
utterly preposterous when we hear it as an adult.
foods despite feeling full because it's when we're already full
that the yummies are usually served.
All of this learning has happened on an unconscious level
by the time we reach school age. As we get older--and
nowadays, not very much older--we also acquire a lot of
conscious information about food. We learn that food is
supposed to give you energy, that food makes you fat if you
don't burn it all off, that you will get various disgusting
diseases if you don't eat enough "good" food, and that you
We are all born with the instincts of the naturally
thin--the instincts I call "thintuition."

Believing it

So naturally you have trouble believing it. Your head is
already jam-packed with contrary information. Maybe what
you've been reading for the past few minutes has sounded
pretty convincing.. But I can almost guarantee that before
today is over, you'll turn on the television or open a magazine
and be-told that a certain kind of food makes you fat, or that
you'll never lose weight if you're not exercising thirty minutes
a day, or that your best hope is a gastric bypass operation.
If Schwartz had been a voice crying in a wilderness, he might
actually have been heard. But the voice of one author--even
a bestselling author--is difficult to hear over the din of
umpteen thousand diet experts.
Maybe you also have trouble believing because it just
plain sounds too good to be true. How can the solution to
a problem you've been studying and struggling with for
years be so ridiculously simple? How can it be so seemingly
painless? How can it possibly be true that you could lose
weight by consistently pleasing yourself? After all, it was by
pleasing yourself that you put on all those extra pounds in
the first place, wasn't it?
No. Not exactly. As we'll discuss in much greater detail
later, you gained weight by way of a perpetual conflict
between deprivation and overindulgence--neither of which is
pleasurable. If you're like most overweight people, you are
out of touch with what actually pleases you. In obsessing so
much about food, diet, and weight, you have lost your connection
with how your body feels and what it really wants.

The problem, believe it or not, is that you don't enjoy
eating enough. You think about food more than you actually experience food.
Thintuition is excluding every opinion--even your
own--about how you should be nourishing yourself, so as
to let your body's real needs make themselves heard. It is
trusting that your body is inherently wise, capable of knowing
and desiring what is best for it. When you say the idea of
thintuition sounds too good to be true, what you are really
saying is that you don't trust yourself.
And that is hardly surprising. If you've struggled a long
time with your weight, you have come to feel that you are not
in control of your body. You may even feel it betrays you
by blowing up like a balloon the instant you relax your vigilance,
punishes you by getting fat when you're just trying to
eat like a normal person. (As I'll explain later, your metabolism
may indeed be screwed up right now as a result of dieting.
The good news is that your body knows how to correct this
problem, and will do so when you learn to listen to it better.)
The first reaction of many overweight people is that if
they always ate what they really wanted, they'd have ice
cream or cheesecake or French fries (or whatever else they're
currently forbidding themselves) for breakfast, lunch, and
dinner. That's a fantasy born of deprivation. When allowed
to express their desires freely, most bodies demand variety.
Eat ice cream at every meal for a couple of days, and pretty
soon you're likely to lose interest in it and develop a yen for
whatever your body is presently missing.
Pregnant women are notorious for the specificity of their
food desires. An expectant mother may wake up in the
middle of the night with a sudden and imperative yearning
for guacamole, want a cheeseburger for breakfast or blueberry
pancakes for supper. It is widely (and correctly) assumed that
these unusual desires signal some need of the developing
fetus or depleted resource in the mother's own system.
Pregnant bodies are really no different from other bodies in
this respect. The difference is in our attitudes. The expectant
mother is expected to feel strong desires for specific foods.
Because these desires are expected and socially approved, she
expresses and fulfills them without inhibition. When you
develop your thintuition, you give yourself permission to
honor your own needs as a pregnant woman does. If you
do this, you will find that your body responds with similar
specificity, creating in you the desire for whatever nutrients it
presently needs. You don't think, "I need protein." You just
ask yourself, "What sounds good?" and find that the answer
is something like meatloaf or scrambled eggs.
Look at it another way. How did people figure out what to
eat before the advent of modern medical science? Throughout
most of human history, people haven't had a clue what
proteins, vitamins, or calories even were, much less how
many of them were in whatever they were hunting, growing,
or gathering. Nevertheless, they managed to nourish themselves
just by eating whatever was around that seemed nice to
eat. And they didn't get fat! The fact that humanity survived
for millennia without scientific knowledge of nutrition
is all the evidence you need that humans possess inborn
intuition about what their bodies need.

When you develop your thintuition; you give
yourself permission to honor your own needs.
Schwartz observed that thin people tend to enjoy getting
hungry and to dislike the sensation of being full. He noted
that for many overweight people, the opposite is true.
Possibly he underestimated the difficulty this presents when
the overweight try to adopt the behaviors of the naturally
thin. If you're really going to eat only when hungry, you have
to be in touch with what hunger feels like. If you're going to
stop when satisfied, you have to be able to recognize that
you're satisfied before you feel stuffed. For many overweight
people, this is problematic. They are out of touch with the
physical signals that tell them when they need to eat and
when they need to stop. I will be devoting a whole chapter to
this problem later in the book.
For what it's worth, I can testify that I actually did what
Schwartz recommends, with spectacular results. And
although I know many others who have also succeeded with
it as well, I suppose I ought to add the disclaimer that "these
results are not typical" of the millions who have read Diets
Don't Work. If they were, the obesity epidemic would already
have abated and the legions of diet experts would be looking
for another line of work.
So what's different about me? My story will have amply
demonstrated that I'm as capable of failing as the average
overweight person, if not more so. I think the only thing that
made me different was that, at the time I read Schwartz, I was
ready to completely let go of all my previous beliefs. I wasn't
just fed up with dieting. I was fed up with thinking about diets,
fed up with hearing about them and reading about them,
deeply and meaningfully disgusted with the whole diet mindset
and its many promoters. I wasn't just tired of having a fat
body. I was tired of having a fat person's thoughts.
To succeed with thintuition is to think one simple
thought: "I give my body exactly what it needs, no more and
no less." But that particular thought is incompatible with
nearly every other thought you've ever had about food and
weight control. It cannot productively coexist with any of the
propaganda of the diet industry, or any of the self-reproaches,
admonishments, and intentions you've been filling your
head with up 'til now. It's not your body that needs to go on
a fast--it's your mind.
That is why I believe that I have something to add to Bob
Schwartz's groundbreaking work. I have learned to dispel the
thoughts that conflict with my thintuition, to reject them
entirely. I hope the following chapters will enable you to do
the same.
thintuition is to think
one simple thought:
"I give my body
exactly what it needs,
//

no more and no less.
Chapter 2
How Dieting Makes You Fat



All diets fail in the long run because they have
failure built into their design. Diets cannot
help but fail because bodies were never meant
to engage in repetitive cycles of dramatic
weight loss and weight gain. The human body isn't designed
to work like that and, just as importantly, neither is the
human mind. Human beings were meant to eat in accordance
with their body's natural wisdom and so remain as slender
as animals in the wild. This eating as our natural instincts
dictate is the art and skill of thintuition. It is a form of mindfulness
applied to eating. You can succeed permanently with it
because it is in harmony with your basic nature.
If you're like most dieters, you already know from experience
that dieting can work in the short run. That's what's
so seductive about it. You also know from experience how
disappointing it can be in the long run. With each new diet,
results seem to come more slowly. And each new weight loss
seems to be more short-lived. The pounds come back faster
each time you go off a diet and, if your results are typical, you
eventually find that you weigh more than you did when
you started.
It's not your imagination and it's not your fault. This
predictable failure is built in to both human physiology and
human psychology. You are failing because what you are
attempting to do is in direct conflict with your basic nature.

Dieting messes up your metabolism
Let's quickly review what you already know. Food
supplies energy. What you don't convert to energy before the
next meal gets stored for later use as fat. If you've got a lot of
fat, you're storing more potential energy than you're ever
going to need. So it seems perfectly logical to try to correct
the problem by taking in less than you need at the moment,
obliging your body to burn what it has previously stored.
That's how the whole idea of dieting got started.
Unfortunately, it's a bit more complicated than that. You
see, for most of human history, getting enough food has been
a big hassle. Food tended to arrive by fits and starts. If you
lived by hunting, you killed a big animal now and then, and
ate the whole thing before it spoiled, knowing it could be
days or weeks before you managed to kill another one and eat
again. If you lived by farming, there was loads to eat at
harvest time and you stuffed yourself then, knowing that the
pickings would be slim all winter.
The human body, in its wisdom, adapted by slowing
down its energy demands (metabolism) whenever food was
scarce. When it wasn't getting calories, it figured there were
no calories to be had and learned to get along on fewer of
them. In times of scarcity, everyone's body slowed down,
rationing the potential energy that had previously been
stored. The constant abundance of food most people in the
developed world currently enjoy is something that the
human body has only encountered relatively recently in its
evolution. If this abundance had always been the norm, you
can be sure that the body would have adapted itself to cope
with excessive--rather than inadequate--quantities of food.
People would be able to eat as much food as they wanted
without ever getting fat.
When you overeat, your body does not question why you
are giving it more food than it needs. It just knows instinctively
that too much eating means that the times are good.
And so, being provident, it holds on to the excess food you
offer it as a hedge against future hard times. That is its
wisdom. If you ever did find yourself hard pressed to find
food, you'd be glad of the fat it has stored.
Similarly, when you eat too little, your body assumes
there's no food to be had. From the body's point of view,
dieting means scarcity, impending starvation. The body doesn't
know that all you want to do is look good on the beach. As
far as it can tell, the harvest has failed and the buffaloes have
all run away. No telling where the next meal is coming from, so better slow down and conserve energy. When you don't eat
enough, your body's sole concern is to keep you alive until
the famine is over. The more frequently these "famines"
come, the quicker on the uptake your body becomes. If you
diet several times a year, your body figures you're living
in Ethiopia. That's why you've got such a slow metabolism.
It's also why your body hangs on for dear life to whatever
extra calories you consume when you eventually go off the
diet. It is actually true that you can't eat as much as normal
people eat without getting fat. You're not just imagining
this. Habitual dieters are literally training their bodies to live
on fewer and fewer calories, and to store food more efficiently
as fat.
You have probably heard that it takes more calories to
sustain muscle than to sustain fat. This is true. When
you diet, the weight you lose is composed of water, fat, and
muscle. When you go off the diet, the weight you regain is
mostly fat and water. So with every diet you are changing
your fat-to-lean ratio for the worse. That means you need
fewer calories to maintain your current weight than you
would need if you weighed the same but had never dieted.
This is another reason why the more you diet, the less you
can eat without getting fat.
If you understand your body's logic, you will also be able
to see what you need to do to correct your metabolic
problem. You have to send your body the message that you
are not, after all, going through a famine or anticipating one
any time soon. You do this by eating enough--and no more
than enough--every time you are hungry. To your body,
enough right now means that food is readily available. No
more than enough means that you expect food to be in good
supply for the foreseeable future and don't need to stockpile.
When it gets this message consistently, your body becomes
less cautious about expending energy. Your metabolism
speeds up. Even if you're not exercising much, you feel more
energetic, more alert and alive, just sitting still.

Dieting exaggerates your interest in food
It stands to reason that what occupies our attention day
and night will tend to dominate our lives. Most diets require
us to make special arrangements for our eating. You may have
to buy different foods for yourself than you buy for the other
members of your household, and you may have to prepare
your food in a special way. You have to interrogate your server
before ordering in a restaurant and read the fine print on every
package before putting it in your grocery cart. You probably
also have to count something--calories, carbs, fat grams, or
"winning points." All of these activities lead you to think about
food more than you otherwise would. All this thinking you do
about food is what makes you different from a thin person,
In a study conducted by Ancel Keys, Ph.D., during the
Korean War, a group of naturally thin male volunteers were
put on a strict diet. Being of normal weight at the outset, they
were not in the habit of giving much thought to food. But
soon after the experiment commenced, food became the
main topic of their every conversation. They read about it.
They daydreamed about it. Halfway through the experiment,
thirteen of them expressed the intention of becoming
professional cooks! For most of them, the obsession with food
continued long after the experiment ended and they were
allowed to return to normal eating. Many reported insistent
cravings for specific foods--cravings they'd never experienced
before the diet. Many also reported that they often felt
driven to eat more than they believed they really needed and
had trouble noticing when they were getting full or stopping
themselves when they did notice. Some developed persistent
weight problems.
In another study done at the University of Toronto in
1975, psychologists C. Peter Herman and Deborah Mack
served their experimental subjects with milkshakes, then
brought in ice cream and told them they could eat as much
of it as they wanted. The subjects were divided into three
groups. Group One received two servings of milkshake before
the ice cream appeared. Group Two received just one milkshake,
and Group Three got no milkshake at all. When the
experiment was performed on people who had never dieted,
the researchers got the results they were expecting. The less
milkshake the subjects had previously consumed, the more
ice cream they ate. You're probably wondering why they
had to do a scientific experiment to discover something so
obvious, right?
Well, here's the interesting part. When the experiment was
repeated with frequent dieters for subjects, the results were
exactly the opposite. The group that had been given two milkshakes
at the start of the test actually ate the most ice cream.
For a naturally thin person, to stop eating when satisfied
requires no special will power. The thought of eating simply
vanishes as soon as hunger ceases. But to resist the cravings
induced by dieting requires a tremendous struggle, because


the thought of a particular food often refuses to go away until
that food is actually eaten. Even if you don't give in to the
craving, resisting its incessant prompting requires a huge
expenditure of mental energy. You become mentally and
emotionally exhausted and, in your fatigue, find it harder and
harder to remain in control. And if you give in to the craving,
you may find yourself eating a ridiculous quantity of the
"forbidden" food, gorging yourself till you feel almost sick.
Believe it or not, this highly annoying fact is also an
expression of the body's natural wisdom. A person who is
starving doesn't especially feel like plowing a field, hunting
a mastodon, or scaling a tree to get a banana. In order to
motivate someone whose energy is low to go to the trouble of
obtaining food, the human organism responds to what it
perceives as potential starvation by making thoughts of food
more compelling. The more you resist, the more your body
insists. "Will power" only exacerbates the problem. Your body
insists louder because you don't seem to be listening. Your
cravings may vastly exceed any real physical need because
your body has gone into emergency mode. By dieting, you
have confused it into believing it is starving. That's how it
interprets rapid weight loss and repeatedly unsatisfied hunger.
When a body in starvation mode finally gets what it has been
wanting, it responds as if preparing to survive the next Ice Age.
Admittedly, it's hard to see the craving for something like
cheese curls as an expression of natural wisdom. We often
crave foods that have little to offer nutritionally, foods
we could perfectly well do without for the rest of our lives.
Later we'll discuss the emotional component of some of these
irrational cravings. For now, the point I want you to get is
that naturally thin people don't have them. They eat what
they desire without passing judgment on their desire, and as
a result they are able to desire and eat in moderation. They
may eat foods of dubious nutritional value, but they don't
crave or binge on these foods. A desire that is satisfied when
it arises does not escalate into a craving.

Dieting diminishes your confidence
When we diet, we are attempting to impose conscious
control on a process that was designed to occur automatically
and instinctively. That's what we mean by "will power." If
you succeed at all, it's at the expense of a tremendous inner
struggle that very few people are able to sustain year in and
year out, Trying to do what your body and mind were never
designed to do sets you up for eventual failure. These repeated
failures can be devastating to the self-esteem of the dieter.
Our temporary successes with dieting only make matters
worse. Each time you diet down to your goal weight, you feel
triumphant about all the temptations you managed to resist
along the way. You have managed to accomplish something
very difficult, against tremendous odds. People admire you
for your tenacity, and you admire yourself. But this sense of
triumph sets you up to lose confidence as soon as you start to
regain the weight. If getting thin means you are a paragon of
self-discipline, getting fat again must mean that you are
undisciplined, self-indulgent, and out of control. When you
yo-yo diet, your self-confidence fluctuates in inverse proportion
to your weight.
The phenomenon can be especially perplexing to the
many overweight people who are confident, disciplined, and
assertive in other aspects of their lives. You may have no
trouble at all making and keeping conscious resolutions that
have nothing to do with food. When you resolve to do things
like limiting your credit card spending, returning phone calls
promptly, folding the laundry as soon as it comes out of the
dryer, or reading to your child every night, you are able to
follow through consistently. Your conscious intentions lead
reliably to desired actions and you feel like you are in control
of yourself--except when it comes to your weight. If you're
like most dieters, you take this very personally. The fact that
the majority of dieters go on secret binges doesn't enter into
your consideration at the moment you are hating yourself for
the latest food fest. Your failure feels unique and entirely
personal, the expression of some fatal flaw in your character.
You may even have labeled yourself a "food addict."
In an effort to shore up your wobbly self-esteem, you may
then start looking for external excuses. The idea that your
problem might be genetic has tremendous appeal, because
your genes are obviously not your fault. Yet attributing the
problem to a factor entirely outside your control leads to
further feelings of helplessness. If the cause is really genetic,
there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
The shame that overweight people feel is all the more
cruel because many of them have shed literally thousands of
pounds of fat in their repeated attempts to diet. If you have
managed to lose weight by dieting, you have tremendous will
power--far more than the average thin person. It is not that
you lack self-discipline. It's that you have been applying
discipline to the wrong activity.
In the Ancel Keys study, many of the participants developed
serious psychological problems. They became anxious, withdrawn,
and depressed. Their concentration and their interest
in the world around them declined. Many also became
extremely critical of their own bodies. Recall that none of
these men was overweight at the time the diet began. Despite
the fact that their bodies were normal to begin with, and
becoming thinner, some of them began, for the first time in
their lives, to perceive themselves as fat. They developed all
sorts of new complaints about the size and shape of their
ideas about how great our lives would be if we could just get
thin. These exaggerated hopes and fears about fat contribute
to the extreme emotional ups and downs that accompany
yo-yo dieting.
bodies. For just as dieting makes you think too much about
food, it also leads to thinking too much about how you look.
This is particularly painful in a society that equates
It's not that you lack self-discipline. It's that you
have been applying discipline to the wrong
activity.
beauty with thinness. On any given day, you are bombarded
with countless direct and subliminal advertising messages
telling you that fat is unattractive and defeatist, and that
people who are fat are more likely to be failures in their social,
sexual, and professional lives. The diet industry wants you to
feel bad about being fat. What else but self-loathing would
drive you to eat their unappealing foods, experiment with
potentially dangerous supplements, or adopt goofy regimens
for which there is no scientific support?
This is not to say that being obese is good. If you are
carrying a significant amount of excess weight, losing it will
likely make you healthier and happier. But dieting often leads
to an excessive focus on weight, which comes to seem like the
sole cause of any and every problem and disappointment. If
we lose a close relationship or suffer a career setback, we tend
to blame our weight. Conversely, we may develop unrealistic

Dieting encourages you to abdicate your
personal power

The premise of thintuition is that you, and you alone, are
the ultimate authority on what, when, and how much you
should eat. Nobody else knows if you are hungry. Nobody else
knows what nutrients your body needs at this particular
moment. This information comes from your own body, and
the only way to know it is to pay attention to what your body
is telling you.
When you diet, you are giving away this natural authority to
someone else. You are looking outside yourself for the answers.
It doesn't really matter whether the advice you're following is
good or bad, whether it's based on sound scientific research or
the kooky belief system of some formerly fat celebrity. From the
perspective of thintuition, even good advice is bad for you
because, in taking it, you are basing your behavior on abstract
thoughts about food and eating rather than the actual
experience of hunger and satisfaction.
Take for example the idea that you shouldn't skip breakfast.
The reasoning behind this idea seems to make a lot of sense.
So maybe you don't feel hungry when you first wake up,
but you dutifully consume a "sensible" breakfast: half a
grapefruit, a poached egg, and a slice of whole wheat toast. If
your body actually needed these foods at this time, you would
have woken up hungry for them. Indisputably sensible as this
meal might be, to eat it at this moment is to overeat. Your
eating is motivated by an abstract idea ("Breakfast is good
for me") rather than by physical hunger.
The same goes for the apparently sensible idea of portion
control. Since overeating makes you fat, it seems perfectly
logical to measure and limit portion size. But the idea that six
ounces of chicken is an appropriate portion is entirely irrelevant
to your body's needs. Six ounces of chicken might have been
too much yesterday; it might be too little tomorrow. Depends
on how hungry you are. Until you're actually eating it, you
don't know how much chicken you need. Your body will tell
you by ceasing to send hunger signals when it's had enough.
In following a diet, most of us tend to internalize its
author as our personal judge. The process is especially blatant
when restaurants tout certain menu items as "doctor
approved." Who cares if Dr. So and So approves of you?
Approval never made anyone thin.
In dieting, we don't just surrender our personal power to
the diet "experts," we endow foods themselves with the
power to make us thin or fat. If you're following a low-fat
regime, you believe that a cheese omelet and three strips of
bacon for breakfast will make you fat, while cereal with fruit
will make you thin. If you're following a low-carb regime, you
believe the opposite. Nutrition moderates often criticize such
diets on the grounds that they lead people to eliminate foods
that are good for them. Equally dangerous to the dieter is the
subconscious magical belief that the "good" foods on a diet--
the ones you're allowed to eat in unlimited quantities--will
somehow cause weight loss. It is as if, by eating Lean Cuisine,
we believe we are ingesting the quality of leanness.
"bad" foods and "good" foods
We endow foods themselves with the power to
make us thin or fat.

When we label certain foods as "good" or "bad" we subtly
endow them with the power to make us good or bad. You
really want a cheeseburger, but instead you order a green
salad with low-fat dressing on the side. What a good girl or
boy you are! Your lunch companions must be basking in the
glow of your halo. Or, you knew you shouldn't have that
chocolate cake, but you couldn't resist the temptation.
Naughty, naughty! Our moralizing about food has become so
extreme that people are starting to treat the selling of fast
food as the moral equivalent of making napalm or nerve gas.
Your conscience has better things to do than to pass judgment
on everything you put in your stomach. The contents
of your lunch box are not the content of your character.
How did you decide what you should weigh in the first
place? If your notion of your ideal weight came from your
doctor, the Body Mass Index, or the professed weight of your
favorite supermodel, you are giving the power to decide
what's good for you to someone else. That is not necessarily
to say that you're trying to weigh too little. (When I began to
practice thintuition, I eventually stabilized at a much lower
Will eating devil's food cake
make me a bad person?"
weight than I'd been expecting.) The issue is the motivation
behind the goal, not the goal itself. You have achieved your
personal best when the size of your body is no longer an
obstacle to anything you want in life, and when you can
maintain your desired size without obsessing about it. The
right weight for you is the weight that feels great. You can't
know what it is by consulting a chart or comparing yourself
to other people.
Thintuition is a process of reconnecting with your own
physical experience. To begin practicing it requires a leap of
faith, for dieting has trained you to distrust your body and
your choices. If every time you've stopped dieting in the past
you've ended up overeating and putting on weight, you may
have come to believe that this is your natural inclination. In
fact, it is an unnatural inclination induced by the emotional
and metabolic stress of rebound dieting. You cannot correct
by dieting a problem that is caused by dieting. When you
make a firm and lasting commitment to stop doing this to
yourself, your metabolism will gradually self-correct and your
cravings will abate. Bodies are very smart.
your personal best
when the size of your
body is no longer
an obstacle to anything
you want in life.
Chapter 3
The Overfed Head

imagine what it would be like if all the citizens
of the greatest and most powerful nation in the
world were suddenly afflicted by a mysterious
and irresistible compulsion to alternate
between cycles of self-inflicted food deprivation and ravenous
eating, until they became as bloated as balloons. Imagine
each person slowly succumbing to diseases, breathlessness,
organ failure, humiliation, fear, confusion, panic, and
disorientation--and death.
Thankfully, we're not quite there yet. But we're getting
there fast because, as a nation, we are being more and more
conditioned to accept misleading explanations of and counterproductive
solutions to our weight problems. Despite the
mass of empirical evidence that dieting makes matters worse,
we continue to be bombarded with the mythology that this
or that variation on dieting is different from all others, and
will solve our problem once and for all.
Where does all this diet mythology come from? Most of it
wasn't around in your grandmother's day. Although interest
in dieting dates back to the nineteenth century, it didn't have
widespread impact until recently, because the commercial possibilities inherent in making people obsessive about food
and weight hadn't been recognized and exploited. Both the
problem of overweight and our obsession with the problem
have escalated in proportion to the growth of information
and communication technology. This is no coincidence.
It was quite possible, one hundred years ago, to live a
happy, active and productive life without being affected in
any significant way by the power of advertising. But since
those relatively innocent times, the situation has changed out
of all recognition. The modern advertising industry has the
ability to reach every man, woman, and child in this country,
and to infiltrate your consciousness morning, noon, and
night. And the impact of advertising messages has become
infinitely more powerful and seductive than it was even forty
years ago. Modern advertising techniques are able to target
specifically defined groups with the lethal accuracy of a
sniper's bullet.

'Betty, I can't believe this show takes
$40 billion a year."
To get an idea'of the scope of the problem, watch television
for two or three hours and make a note of every single message
you receive about food, body and weight. You will discover how
repetitively you are inundated with the following impressions:
People with thin, shapely bodies are happy, healthy,
and desirable.
	Certain foods make you fat.
	Certain foods cause health problems.
	Certain foods make you thin.
	Certain foods can prevent disease.
	The foods that make you fat are delicious.
	Eating is fun.
	Special occasions require special foods.
	Large quantities of food are a bargain.
	Certain foods give you indigestion, but you can remedy
this by taking medicine.
	You can lose weight rapidly by:

a)	enrolling in a program
b)	joining a gym
c)	buying a book
d)	eating special foods
e)	taking a drug or diet supplement
f)	having a gastric bypass operation
In other words, during a single evening of television
viewing, you are repeatedly enticed to eat whether hungry
or not while being reminded constantly that the resulting
fat is unhealthy and unattractive. Torn by these conflicting
influences, you are offered a variety of products and services
that promise to resolve the conflict.
Taken as a whole, the messages you absorb from the
culture express a schizophrenic sort of consumerism. You are
exhorted to consume food for all sorts of reasons besides
hunger, and then to consume various other products
(including foods) to undo the lamentable results. The only
consistent element in these otherwise contradictory propositions
is that what you need to lose weight lies outside of
yourself and has to be purchased.
If this were a conscious conspiracy to make Americans fat
and unhappy, you'd have to admire its brilliance. But it's not
a conspiracy. It's just what happens when a lot of different
industries and professions--many of them quite well-intentioned--go
about the business of making a buck. Your
problem is their opportunity. It is a basic fact of economic life
that when profit can be made from a problem, those who
profit have a natural stake in its continuation. A permanent solution would eventually eliminate its very reason for
existence. From a business point of view, the ideal solution is
one that subtly exacerbates the customer's problem, leading
to further demand.
Imagine for a moment what would happen if scientists
were to discover a cheap and easily produced substitute for
gasoline. Such a discovery would certainly revolutionize the
world as we know it, just as the invention of the internal
combustion engine made the horse and carriage obsolete
within a couple of decades. But what would be the effect of
such a discovery on the multi-billion-dollar oil industry?
Those whose fabulous wealth is derived from our dependence
on petroleum obviously could not be expected to rejoice over
the development of a cheap and renewable source of energy.
To invest in perpetuating the problem is a much safer bet
than investing in its solution.
The industrial equivalent of diets is planned obsolescence, where a product is designed to fail or wear out quickly so that
you will go out and buy a new one. The short-term success
followed by long-term failure that is built in to dieting ensures
that you will trade in last year's diet for a newer model as
soon as the pounds return. The cycle can continue profitably
so long as customers blame themselves--rather than the
product--for the transience of the benefits.
After reading the last chapter, you may be thoroughly
convinced that dieting is not only useless, but actively
harmful. You suspected so all along, didn't you? Yet despite
the wealth of evidence that this is so, most people have a lot
of trouble resisting the allure of diet mythology. This is due
partly to the sheer volume of diet propaganda circulating in
the culture. But it is also because, whether true or not, diet
mythology can be very persuasive. So let's examine some of
the ways it sucks you in.

The appeal of scientific authority
The medical profession over the years has lent its authority
and prestige to dieting as a means of losing weight. The
reasons for this are obvious. Doctors are seeing more and
more people whose health and quality of life are being
seriously jeopardized because they are overweight or obese.
The medical profession knows better than we do that excess
weight increases the risk of potentially fatal or crippling
conditions that afflict millions of Americans every year.
You yourself are probably familiar with these frightening
statistics because we are constantly being reminded of them
in the media.
While most doctors agree that obesity is medically
dangerous, that is pretty much the only fact about which
they have achieved scientific consensus. For every diet
approach backed by a bestselling M.D., you will find a host of
other physicians telling you that it's scientifically unfounded
at bes"t, and possibly downright dangerous. Some doctors
specialize in gastric bypass operations. Others recommend
against them. Doctors are not even in perfect accord about
what you should weigh in the first place. Some will say that
an extra twenty pounds is a medical issue that ought to be
addressed, while others will assert that the effects of frequently
losing and regaining that twenty pounds are actually more
detrimental than carrying the extra weight consistently. If
scientific knowledge is defined as those facts about which
scientists have achieved overwhelming consensus based on
consistent experimental data, it must be admitted that there
is very little scientific knowledge about weight control.
Most dieters know from bitter experience that the results
of dieting are temporary at best, and that weight loss becomes
more difficult with each new diet. Between bouts of self-reproach,
intelligent dieters quite reasonably suspect that
there is some physiological reason for this that science might
eventually explain. When a new diet, based on some new
scientific--or pseudo-scientific--principle arrives on the
scene, it is natural to hope that the magic formula has finally
been discovered. Diets that target certain food types or food
combinations while promising that you can eat unlimited
amounts of other food types have particular appeal because
they absolve the dieter of responsibility for previous failures.
Just as you suspected, the problem is not that you eat too
much. It's that until now, nobody realized that certain
foods or food combinations are more likely to be converted to
fat. Now that the secret has finally been revealed, you'll be
able to eat as much as you want and stay slim.
In our fascination with the intricacy of these theories, it's very easy to lose sight of the big picture. Throughout most of
human history, people have eaten the full variety of foods
available to them, naively combining them on the basis of
what tastes good: bread and butter, beans and rice, pancakes
and syrup, meat and potatoes, crackers and cheese. If this
procedure really caused people to get fat, the epidemic of
obesity we're now seeing would not be a new phenomenon.
Similarly, many of the artificial substitutes for foods that
are now considered fattening are of very recent invention.
If using these substitutes were truly helpful to weight control,
you would expect Americans to be getting thinner instead of fatter. Or what about the theory of genetic predisposition
to fat? If that is truly the explanation, why do so many fat
people have skinny ancestors?
The allure of quick and dramatic results
Dieting often does work--in the short term. You have
probably achieved rapid and substantial weight loss on
previous diets, and you remember how great you felt about
that success. So when you feel a pressing need to lose weight
quickly--to fit into your summer clothes or look good for
some special occasion--the prospect of quick results can be
extremely enticing. On any given day that you conceive this
desire, you can turn on the television or open a magazine and
read stories of people who have achieved it on some sort of diet.
Some of this advertising is outright deceptive. For example,
in some ads, the models were photographed for the "after"
picture first, then paid to put on weight for the "before"
picture. In other cases, both photos are taken on the same
day, the apparent weight loss being achieved through a
combination of make-up, lighting, and posture. But even
when the weight loss depicted in such ads is genuine, you are
being subtly misled to generalize from the atypical experience
of a few. They tell you about isolated individuals who have
met--and maybe even maintained--their goal weight, rather
than providing you with statistics about the average amount
of weight lost by participants in a program and the average length of time this weight loss is maintained.
Would you sign on for a diet program if you knew for sure
that a dramatic weight loss would inevitably be followed by
an even more dramatic weight gain? Or if you knew that the
weight loss could be maintained, but only by following the
diet strictly for the rest of your life? Your own experience will
confirm that these are the actual results of dieting. Yet the
diet ads play on a hope that springs eternal, leading the
dieter to fall again and again for the con that all previous diets
were simply the wrong diet, and that with the right diet,
everything will be different.
Dieting reminds me of the ancient myth of Sisyphus, who
was condemned by the gods to spend all eternity rolling a
stone up a hill, only to watch it roll down again once he'd
pushed it to the top. You are living the same myth so long as
you allow yourself to be persuaded that your latest diet is the
last one you'll ever have to push up the hill.

Misery loves company
If dieting is a delusion, it is at least a mass delusion.
How do you face reality when everyone around you is busy
perpetuating the lunacy of diet mythology?
We are socially rewarded for doing what everyone else is
doing, thinking what everyone else is thinking, discussing
,. and repeat four to five times per year.
what everyone else is discussing. In contemporary America,
dieting is second only to the weather as a universal topic of
conversation. When you dine out with friends, they don't
just order, they editorialize about what they are ordering.
Almost everyone these days has a food theory. If you take the
view that food is just fuel, you won't have much to contribute
to the conversation. (When was the last time you heard
people discussing their choices at the gas pump?)
Dieting also creates a lot of drama. While on a diet, you
can regale friends, family, and co-workers with a blow-by-blow
account of your progress, your triumphs and setbacks, how
easy or difficult you are finding it. As the weight comes off,
people notice and congratulate you. Run into someone you
haven't seen in a while and the first comment you hear is how
much thinner you look. When you slim down, you get loads
of praise for both your appearance and the effort you've made.
You also get to hold forth as a diet expert, explaining how you
did it and exhorting your overweight friends to take the same
approach. Fluctuating weight gets you a lot of attention.
You may even have relationships that are based entirely
on your struggle to lose weight--perhaps a support group
formed through your diet or fitness center. The warm encouragement
and commiseration you receive from these people
may depend to some extent on your remaining in the same
boat with them. You may also have adopted your diet coach
or trainer as a sort of mentor--a friendly parent figure whom
you seek to please with your weekly weigh-ins and your
adherence to their advice.
You can gauge how much social satisfaction you obtain
from dieting by asking yourself, "How much do I talk to
others about my diet when I am dieting?" If it's a lot, social
reinforcement may be luring you back into diet after diet,
against your better judgment. Consider how your relationships
might change if your weight were to stabilize in the
normal range and cease to be a preoccupation. What would
you talk about instead?

Partial truths
The overall falsehood of diet mythology is peppered with
a few truths about nutrition, exercise, and general health.
For example, it is true that some foods provide better nourishment
than other foods. It is also true that if you exercise
regularly, you are likely to look and feel better and to be
happier with your body. These facts are undeniable. They
just don't happen to be especially relevant to the question of
weight control.
If exercise were the key to weight control, you would
expect to see a correlation between the physical demands of
a person's job and their body weight. Construction workers,
furniture movers, janitors, and kindergarten teachers would
tend to be thinner, on the whole, than accountants, writers,
and computer programmers. This is obviously not the case.
You find plenty of heavy people in active occupations, and
plenty of skinny people with sedentary jobs.
Exercise does burn calories, but not that many.
You'd have to walk for an hour to burn off a cookie. Its real
benefits to weight control are less direct. Regular exercise
accelerates the resting metabolism and increases muscle mass,
both of which optimize the efficiency with which you burn
calories all day. It reduces stress and gives a feeling of overall
well-being, which can be a help if you tend to overeat when
nervous or unhappy. People who exercise also tend to like
their bodies more, even if they're overweight. Personally, I
love to work out, and have even taught exercise classes. So
don't think I'm knocking it when I say that reliance on
exercise for weight control is an expression of the diet
mentality that's keeping you overweight.
The problem lies in making a mental connection between
exercise and eating. After a strenuous workout, chronic
dieters tell themselves that they get to eat more, or need to eat
more. It may or may not be true that you are hungrier after
exercise, but that's not the point. The point is that
eating more is your conscious or unconscious objective. You
are trying to need more food in order to justify eating it.
Why? If you are trying to increase your hunger, you must
have some reason other than hunger for wanting food in the
first place. That desire for food in the absence of need for food
is what distinguishes you from a naturally thin person. When
overweight people exercise in order to justify eating, they
tend to exaggerate the hunger they've worked up and to
overeat. I wholeheartedly encourage you to exercise if that's
what you feel like doing. But to succeed with thintuition, you
will need to make a complete conceptual separation between
exercise and eating.
The idea that some foods are better than others from a
nutritional standpoint is obviously true. Making good nutritional
choices will certainly contribute to your health, but
this will not make you thin. You can get very fat on a
balanced, healthy diet. You can also stay slim eating nothing
but junk food. What makes you fat or thin is not what you
eat, but why you are eating. To eat for any reason other than
hunger will cause you to put on weight. That fact is no less
true if you are eating to get your minimum daily requirement
of some nutrient.
The trouble with being nutritionally conscious is that it
tends to exaggerate the power and importance of food. We are
told to avoid certain foods because they cause diseases and to
consume other foods because they have the power to prevent
diseases. It's the latter proposition that makes the biggest
impression on the overfed mind. Doctors and nutrition
experts say to eat more fiber, or eat more fruits and vegetables,
or eat more foods rich in antioxidants. On an unconscious
level, the message absorbed by an overweight person is
simply "eat more." Like exercise, nutrition becomes our
mental justification for overeating.
Let's get real. When was the last time you saw an
American afflicted with scurvy or beriberi? Malnutrition is
very low on the list of health risks you face, especially if
you're overweight. When you learn to tune into your body's
promptings, you will find yourself drawn to the foods it actually needs--which may or may not resemble your current
theory about what it needs. If you continue to believe you
require nutrients that you're not actually getting hungry for,
take a daily multivitamin and stop worrying about it. For an
overweight person, excessive thinking about food presents a
far greater health risk than not eating enough oat bran.
It is theorized that some foods may cause allergies or
addictions, leading us to crave them when we actually should
be avoiding them. Yet research has shown that craving is a
predictable result of dieting alone. Imbalances that have
arisen from dieting usually correct themselves over time
when you start to satisfy your natural food preferences and
eat moderately. Certainly if you have been diagnosed with a
specific allergy or a condition such as diabetes, you should
heed your doctor's recommendations as to what foods are off
limits. You can still follow your thintuition by choosing to eat
what you like best from the list of foods that are safe for you.

Making good nutritional choices will certainly
contribute to your health, but this will not
make you thin.

To practice thintuition is to regard your natural inclinations
as the sole and absolute authority on what, when, and
how much to eat. All other theories are incompatible with it.
This is not just because so many of these theories are false and
unproductive. From the standpoint of thintuition, even a
well-founded theory that is working well for other dieters is
unhelpful. Reliance on any external authority--even a very
smart one--diverts your attention from your own experience.
It leads you to make food choices based on abstract ideas
rather than your natural instincts.
If your body is overweight, your head is overfed. All the
thinking you do about food and weight has led to an
unhealthy obsession, an exaggeration of food's power to help
or harm you. It's your head--not your body--that needs to be
on a diet. As once you resisted cheesecake and potato chips,
you now need to learn to resist the all-you-can-think buffet of
food and diet information, no matter how enticing you find
some of the items on offer.
The decision to practice thintuition entails some initial
loss. You've invested a lot of time and energy in acquiring
masses of information that you will now need to disregard. It
can be painful to admit that all this past effort was of no avail.
It can also be scary. All that information you've acquired has
been subconsciously training you to distrust your own
instincts. You have been told again and again that, left to
your own devices, you will make the wrong choices. Those
extra pounds you're carrying seem to prove it. In the next
chapter we'll explore some of the psychological factors that
have led you to make poor choices in the past, and talk about
how to reestablish self-trust.


"I think I'll have the cheesecake instead,'
To practice thintuition
is to regard your natural
inclinations as the sole
and absolute authority
on what, when, and how
much to eat.
Chapter 4
Inaccurate Eating



In a recent internet survey, participants were
asked to choose the primary reason why so
many Americans are overweight. The multiple
choices offered included factors such as metabolism,
genetic predisposition, lack of exercise, and specific
food choices. Overeating was not even listed as one of the
options. It seems the current trend in the U.S. is to blame
overweight on anything and everything but the actual cause.
Face it: if you weigh more than you should, you are eating
more food than your body needs. The idea is unpopular
partly because it places the responsibility for excess pounds
on the person carrying them. How can you be responsible for
what you can't seem to control, no matter how hard you try?
The issue is further complicated by the fact that many
overweight people eat no more than thin people. If your
metabolism has gotten confused by frequent dieting, it may
literally be true that you can't eat what you consider to be a
"normal" amount without gaining weight. The condition is
correctable, but for the moment, you are stuck with its
unhappy consequences. The prospect of having to eat like a
bird all the time to get thin lends tremendous appeal to any
diet that permits unlimited quantities of certain foods.
So what is the right amount to eat? You will remain confused
about this so long as you are trying to conform to some
external standard. Comparing what you eat to what other
people eat, to what your favorite restaurant considers an
appropriate portion size, or to some objective measure such as
daily calories, fat grams, carbs, etc., leads to inaccurate eating.
The external standard means nothing to your body. Attempt
to conform to it and you will end up eating too much or
too little. Inaccuracy in either direction is what confuses
your metabolism.
The right amount to eat is determined solely by your
hunger. What you eat when truly hungry will not make you
fat, because hunger is a sign that your body is ready to
convert food to energy. Conversely, anything you eat when
not truly hungry will get stored as fat, because that's how
your body handles nourishment that it can't immediately
use. Your diet may "permit" or even require you to eat a seemingly
nonfattening snack such as an apple in the middle of
the afternoon. If you're not actually hungry at snack time,
that apple is contributing to the problem, not the solution.
On the other hand, if you are very hungry and what you want
is apple pie, there is no reason to deny yourself.
While the notion of harmless apple pie is immensely
appealing, part of you is probably regarding it as dangerous.
In the past you've gone overboard on the foods that you like
best. Thintuition is a freedom you're afraid you might abuse.
That's a legitimate worry if you're being driven to eat by
motives other than hunger. And right now you are. If you
didn't eat for reasons other than hunger, you would not have
become overweight in the first place.
In Diets Don't Work, Bob Schwartz used the term
"emotional eating" to cover all impulses we have to eat when
we don't physically need to. Some of these motives have subsequently
gotten a lot of airplay. On talk shows you will hear
from people who have been sexually abused and went on to
get fat as an unconscious defense against unwanted sexual
attention. You hear about people who learned to comfort
themselves with food when feeling neglected as children,
about people who turn to food for relief when feeling
stressed, about people who eat in defiance of an overly
controlling parent or partner. Maybe you identify with some
of these stories.
It's true that some people are driven to overeat by the
kind of deep-seated emotional issues that require therapeutic
support. But there are many other motives for overeating that
are not dramatic enough to provide fodder for talk shows.
Let's consider some examples.

	Stan travels frequently on business. While the airlines
used to provide meals on almost every flight, as a cost-cutting
measure they've now gotten miserly with food.
Add frequent delays to the equation and there's a real
possibility you might find yourself stuck in the air for
hours with nothing to eat but a packet of peanuts. To
prepare for this eventuality, Stan takes the precaution of
downing a couple of slices of pizza just before boarding
any flight. He adopts the same strategy before going
into a meeting that he expects to run long, or starting a
workday that he expects to be very busy. Unexpected
hunger is a hassle he doesn't want to have to deal with,
so he eats more than his fill at the times when it's
convenient for him to eat.

	Jessica attends an aerobics class right after work, three
evenings a week. Although she's not especially hungry
when she leaves the office, she's afraid she'll run out of
energy before the class is over, so she grabs an energy
bar. After class, she often treats herself to a big dinner,
figuring she needs the extra sustenance. Any time her
energy is running low, Jessica assumes she needs to eat.

When she was a child, Emily was a very picky eater.
Every family dinner seemed to turn into a major struggle
with her parents, who spent the whole meal trying to
coax, cajole, or threaten her into cleaning her plate. Her
inner conflicts around food and autonomy have led to
a lifetime of yo-yo dieting. Her weight fluctuates
between borderline obese and fashion model skinny.

As a child, Emily's older sister Amy came to define
herself in contrast to her "problem child" sister by dutifully
eating whatever was put before her. Her parents
often praised her for this and exhorted Emily to be more
like her. As an adult, Amy persists in her pattern of
"sensible" eating, dutifully consuming three square
meals a day whether she wants them or not. For years
her weight has remained stable. Though she weighs
about thirty pounds more than she wants to, she
believes it is much saner to resign herself to being
moderately overweight than to fluctuate between
extremes like her sister.
As a cost accountant, George is vigilant about avoiding
waste. At any function where food is served, he'll eat
Whether hungry or not, for he figures that every free
meal is an offset to his own food budget. For the same
reason, he favors all-you-can eat restaurants, making
two or three trips to the buffet table to ensure that he
gets his money's worth. Rather than waste money by
throwing food away, he will force himself to finish the
leftovers in his fridge before they spoil.

Dimitri's strong libido attracted Katrina when she first
married him, but after their first few months together, it
began to exhaust her. Her own sex drive was much
lower, and she didn't feel adequate to meeting
his needs. As if to compensate for this perceived failure,
she began to cook big and elaborate meals. Sated by
her heavy cooking, Dimitri often dozed on the couch
after dinner, and made fewer sexual advances. Perhaps
she was also becoming less desirable to him as she put
on weight. Without ever adopting this as a conscious
plan, Katrina had discovered that their mutual appetite
for food could smooth over the disparity in their
sexual appetites.

	For Erica, food is an expression of her sensuality and
her love of life. She's a fantastic cook and loves to give
dinner parties. An avid reader of restaurant reviews, she
enjoys sampling exotic ethnic cuisines and the work of
fashionable chefs. Eating is also one of the chief pleas ures of travel for her, and the presence of a renowned
restaurant is reason enough to place an out-ofthe-way
town on her itinerary. A "seize-the-day" eater, she tends
to regard each meal as a unique and wonderful experience
that won't come again, a slice of life that she insists on
living to the fullest.

	Billy has been suffering from bouts of homesickness
ever since he moved to New York from his native
Alabama. When he's feeling depressed by the physical
coldness of the climate and the emotional coldness of
the big city, he indulges in food nostalgia. A feast of all
his down-home favorites puts him back in touch with
his Southern roots and gives him a warm fuzzy feeling.

	Jeff's work as a labor mediator is very stressful. He
spends a lot of time around angry, argumentative
people, and needs to be a voice of calm and reason.
When he's feeling edgy, he finds that it helps to eat a
lot of heavy carbohydrates. A couple of donuts for
breakfast or a big plate of pasta for lunch seems to dull
, the rough edges, slow down his racing mind, and make
him feel calmer.

	Myra, the mother of five small children, is bewildered
by the forty pounds she's gradually gained over the past
decade. She can't imagine where they're coming from,
because she can scarcely recall the last time she enjoyed
a meal. The food on her plate goes virtually untouched
as she busies herself with feeding the kids, listening to
her husband, and getting up to answer the phone. Her
real eating is almost entirely unconscious. She'll munch
on cookie dough while preparing to bake, polish off
uneaten food from the children's plates while cleaning
up, snack in the car while chauffeuring the kids around,
and spoon ice cream directly from the carton as she
flops, exhausted, in front of the television. At the end of
the day, she hasn't the faintest idea what, how much or
why she has eaten. Her inability to focus on eating is an
expression of her overall neglect of her own needs.

	Since her mother died of cancer, Melanie has became
preoccupied with her own health. She reads a lot of
books on nutrition and is willing to spend more for
foods that are nutritionally correct. Any food said to
have disease-preventive properties gets immediately
added to her diet. She plans her meals carefully to
ensure that she gets her minimum daily requirement of
all the nutrients she considers vital, Whether hungry or
not, she eats her flax seed and oat bran muffin for breakfast,
soy-based meat substitute and three veggies for
lunch, and so forth. Even the ounce of dark chocolate
she eats for dessert is mandated by her nutrition program:
chocolate is rich in antioxidants.

Sally was slim and unusually attractive when she married
Alex five years ago. Soon after their marriage she noticed
that he seemed increasingly paranoid about the many
admiring glances she got from other men whenever they
went out. Sometimes he flew into unfounded jealous rages.
Around the same time he also got in the habit of bringing
home treats for her--boxes of expensive chocolates, fresh
croissants, and gourmet cheeses. Although she complained
that all these goodies were going to her waistline, Alex
professed to like her plumper shape. The more she ate and
put on weight, the less anxious and jealous he seemed. Her
overeating seemed to forge some truce between them.

> Tina works long hours at a job she finds rather boring.
Eating at scheduled intervals is how she breaks up the
,day and gives herself something to look forward to. She
spends the first two hours of the workday anticipating
her midmorning yogurt break. After that snack, it's
another two hours 'til lunch. The long afternoon is
punctuated by a trip to the coffee bar for a latte and a
later trip to the vending machines for a small pack of
chips. Eating also structures her time at home.
Whenever she doesn't know what else to do with
herself, she moseys into the kitchen to see if the fridge
has any suggestions.

What all these people have in common is that they are
eating for reasons other than hunger. Those reasons are as
individual as the people them selves. Some of them are
obviously emotional: Emily's unresolved autonomy issues,
Billy's homesickness, and the unconscious attempts of Alex
and Katrina to solve their respective marital difficulties with
food. But other reasons seem more practical than emotional:
Jessica's eating for energy, Melanie's eating for health, Stan's
preventative eating before he boards a flight. Some reasons
are linked to personal identity and beliefs, like George's
economy eating, Amy's "I'm not-a-problem-child" eating,
and Erica's live-life-to-the-fullest eating. And some reasons
are scarcely reasons at all. They are just unexamined habits,
like Tina's use of food to fill and structure time, or Myra's
mindless grazing.
For the most part, the people I've described are not bingeing
or stuffing themselves to any outrageous degree. What makes
them overeaters is not the amount that they are eating but
their reasons for eating. They are using food to solve problems
or meet needs that have nothing to do with hunger. This
leads them to eat at times when their bodies don't need any
food, or to go on eating after their hunger has been satisfied.
In other words, they are eating inaccurately.


Sheila couldn't decide whether to bring the
vegetable platter or the disappointment dip,
Food is just fuel
If the only benefit we ever received from eating was to
replenish spent nutrients, we could all be perfectly happy
subsisting on flavorless diet shakes for the rest of our lives.
Obviously most of us can't. Food nourishes the soul as well as
the body. It is rich in memories and emotional associations.
It comforts, pleases, and amuses us. Thin people, too, have
these feelings about food.
When I insist that food is just fuel, I'm not suggesting
that you should take a Spartan attitude toward it, denying all
the sensory and emotional gratification it gives you. Trouble
only arises when you seek this gratification in the absence of
physical hunger. If you're longing for mac & cheese, mashed
potatoes, or a chili dog because of the happy emotional
associations you have with these foods, by all means indulge.
Just wait till you're really hungry to do so. When you follow
your thintuition, you can be a gourmet, a vegan, or a junk
food junkie--whatever floats your boat. As long as you are
physically hungry when you sit down to eat--and you stop
eating as soon as your hunger stops--your whims are law.
Recognizing that many of us are driven to overeat by
deep-seated emotional conflicts, some experts maintain that
you will not succeed in managing your weight until you get
to the root of the trouble. It is true that if you are eating to
solve some problem other than hunger, that problem may
clamor for attention as soon as you stop overeating. If you
want to eat because you feel lonely, sad, or bored, yet realize
that you're not really hungry, you will have to find some
other way of addressing those emotional needs. Learning to
follow your thintuition may bring buried issues to the surface
and precipitate some emotional discomfort.
Still, I don't believe that your efforts to eat mindfully
have to be placed on hold until you've worked through every
difficulty and received a clean bill of psychological health.
My own initial experience was that thintuition itself went a
long way toward alleviating the issues that drove my overeating.
At the root of many weight problems is a tendency to disregard
one's own needs and feelings and to surrender one's autonomy.
This leads to wild fluctuations between self-indulgence and
self-denial--neither of which is emotionally nourishing.
To follow your thintuition is to reclaim your autonomy and
consistently honor your true needs. It is a way of being very
good to yourself. This concentration on identifying what
you truly need and want is both wise and kind, and can work
wonders with whatever it is that ails you emotionally.
Being wise and kind with yourself includes dealing wisely
and kindly with your lapses. When you begin to practice
thintuition, you may find that you sometimes give in to
strong desires for food at moments when you're not really
hungry. These slip-ups are an opportunity to learn more
about the needs and feelings that tempt you to overeat. If you
have eaten in the absence of hunger, ask yourself why. Don't
pass judgment on the reason. Simply note it. You will begin
to notice patterns. Perhaps you are most likely to overeat at
the end of a stressful day, or when you suffer a disappointment,
or when offered food that's just too delicious to pass
up. Once you identify your personal triggers, you can develop
tactics for coping with them.
Let me stress one more time that when I speak of
overeating, I'm not talking about the amount you eat, per se.
Overeating is not about how many calories, carbs, or fats you
consume, how frequently you eat, or what size portions you
eat. It's about your motives for eating. To eat a carrot stick
when you're not hungry is overeating. To eat a slice of carrot
cake when you're legitimately hungry is not.
But how do you know when you're hungry? How do you
know when your body has had enough? These questions are
not as dumb as they might sound at first. We'll tackle them in
the next chapter.

Satisfying Your Hunger

To follow your
thintuition is to
reclaim your autonomy
and consistently honor
your true needs.




When I first began to practice thintuition,
it sounded so easy. Eat only when
hungry; stop when satisfied. What
could be difficult about that? But
on the very first day, I encountered an unexpected snag. I
realized that I didn't really know when I was hungry, or when
I'd had enough. Oddly enough, I wasn't sure what hunger felt
like. All my life, I'd been saying, "I'm hungry" because that's
what you say before you eat. Hunger, for me, was simply the
intention to eat. I could not immediately connect with the
physiological state Bob Schwartz seemed to have in mind.
I've since discovered that I'm not unusual in this.
Overweight people have a lot of trouble connecting with
their bodies in general, and with the sensation of hunger
in particular.
When you're heavier than you want to be, you have a lot
of good reasons to disengage from your body. For one thing,
you probably don't really like your body. You are displeased
with the way it looks, and you may have disagreeable sensations,
such as feeling winded when you climb a few flights
of stairs, or chafed by clothes that don't fit you well. The size
of your body makes you feel self-conscious at times, and
stands in the way of things you'd like to do.
You probably also distrust your body. You are dismayed at
how quickly it puts on weight the moment you relax your
vigilance. You have come to think of your body as a big
problem that can only be solved by doing things you wish
you didn't have to do. Hunger, in particular, is a sensation
you distrust. If you're trying to stick to a diet, hunger is
synonymous with temptation. It makes you want to eat at
times when you're not supposed to, or to indulge in foods
that you're not supposed to have. In your mind, hunger is
what happens just before you break your latest resolution.
Besides dreading what hunger might make them do, a lot
of overweight people are mildly anxious about the sensation
of hunger in and of itself. Asked to describe it, they will use
words that apply to illness or distress--words like "pang."
They conceive of it as a kind of trouble the body is in, rather
than as a healthy and natural occurrence. For many overweight
people, hunger is so often linked to anxiety that the
two feelings have become intertwined. Not only do you feel
anxious when hungry, but you tend to assume you're hungry
whenever you feel anxious. This is not merely due to trying
to solve emotional problems with food, as we described in the
previous chapter. It's a more fundamental confusion about
your physical experience. Emotions cause physical sensations,
and you may have learned to mislabel some of these
sensations as "hunger."
True hunger is difficult to describe in words. It is a physical
sensation accompanied by the desire to eat and, quite often,
a specific idea of what you want to eat. Naturally thin people
are never in doubt of these signals because physical hunger
is the only reason food ever crosses their minds. If they're
wanting food, they must be hungry--end of discussion. For
inaccurate eaters, it's a bit trickier, because they are used to
thinking about food and desiring food for reasons other than
physical hunger.
To get in touch with real hunger, you also need to learn
what hunger is not So let's look at some of the sensations that
inaccurate eaters often confuse with hunger.

Abdominal discomfort
Real hunger doesn't cause stomach pain or "pangs" until
it has become quite advanced. After three days without food,
your stomach might hurt, but it shouldn't hurt if you've just
passed lunch. Excess acid will cause a gnawing sensation that
seems to be relieved, at least temporarily, by eating. But excess
stomach acid is not the same as hunger. Often it is caused by
stress, and it may also be caused by chronic overeating. When
you are truly hungry the stomach merely feels empty-that is, you no longer feel in it the presence of the iast meal you
ate. Your beily may also make rumbling or gurgling noises. |

Feeling empty
Sadness, loneliness, and boredom may all be accompanied
by a physical sensation that feels like something is
missing. It might feel almost like there's a gaping hole in your
gut. This isn't hunger. When you perceive that the stomach is literally empty, you feel neutral about it on an emotional
ievel. The emptiness is a merely a fact, not a source of distress
or discontent. Many thin people actually enjoy the light
feehng they have on an empty stomach.

Low energy

Food provides energy, so it's natural to assume you're
hungry when your energy seems low. And sometimes you
truly are. But energy drops have many possible causes

including eating too much. Your energy may be low because
you're bored, because you're trying to suppress a strong
emotion, because you've been sitting still too long, because
you need some fresh air, or because you're just plain tired.

Irritability and distraction
When hunger has reached a fairly advanced stage,
you may feel short-tempered, or spacey, or have difficulty
concentrating. As with low energy, there are a host of other
reasons why you might be feeling this way.

Thirst
The body needs fluids more often and more urgently than
it needs food, and the sensation of thirst may be difficult to
distinguish from hunger. Often when we are thirsty, we feel
vaguely "draggy" without feeling especially dry in the mouth
or throat. If you're not sure whether you feel hungry or
thirsty, the easiest way to find out is to drink a glass of water,
Thirst symptoms disappear immediately as soon as you have
something to drink.
The best way to learn your body's genuine hunger signals
is to get hungry on purpose and observe what happens. Thin
people have lots of direct experience of hunger to draw on,
because they don't especially mind hunger or rush to relieve
it. This is usually not the case with inaccurate eaters, however.
They tend to overreact to the first signs of hunger, relieving it
before they've had time to fully experience what it feels like.
Some inaccurate eaters never get truly hungry, because they
are eating so often to meet needs other than hunger.
The human body can survive for many weeks without
food. There's nothing dangerous about missing a meal. It
won't even cause you serious discomfort. Mind you, I'm not
recommending that you start skipping meals as a method of
weight control. I'm simply pointing out that hunger isn't
an emergency. Unless you're diabetic, letting yourself get a
little hungrier than you're used to isn't going to do you any
harm. Prolong your hunger just enough to learn what it feels
like, how it differs from your other impulses to eat--and to
get over your fear of it. Try postponing a meal for an hour or
so, or skipping a habitual snack, and pay close attention to
what you experience in your body.
When you get in touch with your actual hunger, you may
make some surprising discoveries about it. For example, you
may find that it doesn't correspond to your current meal
schedule, or that your hunger levels fluctuate from day to
day. I must admit that I'm still surprised sometimes when
I come home from a ten-mile run and don't feel especially
hungry. Having burned up all that energy, why doesn't my
body need more? And why do I sometimes find myself unusually
hungry the next day, when I'm still recovering from my
workout and not exerting myself much? There's probably a
scientific explanation, but I don't know what it is. All 1 know
is that when I eat in accordance with my actual hunger--as
opposed to my idea of how hungry I should or shouldn't be--
I'm able to maintain my ideal weight without a struggle.

Good to be full?
A famously skinny actress had to gain thirty pounds for a
role. When asked in an interview how she would go about
losing the excess weight after the film, she replied, "I'll just go
back to doing what I like to do. I like to stop eating when I've
had enough."
To the inaccurate eater, that statement is all but unintelligible.
She likes to stop? Stopping feels good? If eating is a
pleasure, where is the pleasure in stopping?
Most naturally thin people enjoy their food every bit as
much as overweight people do. In fact, many enjoy it more,
because they eat whatever they really want, without inhibition
or self-reproach. The difference is that they also enjoy
being finished. They like the feeling they get when they have
eaten exactly enough to satisfy their hunger, and not a bite
more. They strongly dislike the way they feel when they have
eaten more than enough.
Inaccurate eaters, on the other hand, tend to feel that
they haven't finished eating if they still "have room." They
have learned to tolerate the sensation of fullness, or even to
enjoy it. The tag line of a recent commercial--"It's good to
be full"--is the overeater's motto. The very word "full" has
positive connotations for them. It may be subconsciously
connected with other feelings or conditions such as completion,
abundance, success, strength, generosity, stability, or
tranquility. Some overweight people can't feel connected
with their body at all unless they are full. When they don't
have a sensation of heaviness in the belly, they feel as if
they're not quite "all there." What thin people often especially
dislike about fullness--feeling heavy, dull, and groggy--may
be perceived as a benefit by someone who is driven to overeat
by anxiety or stress. Being full has a sedative effect.
Diets appeal to this desire to feel full when they promise
that you can eat unlimited quantities of certain foods.
Confusing satisfaction with fullness also leads some people to
believe they need gastric bypass surgery. Convinced that to
satisfy one's hunger means eating until there's no more room,
they discard part of the stomach so that there will be less room
available. Minuscule amounts of food will then produce the
desired feeling of fullness. This drastic and potentially dangerous
"solution" is based on an equally drastic misunderstanding of
the real problem. If your weight problem is severe enough to
qualify you for such surgery, the issue you need to come to
grips with is your compulsion to feel full. Healthy people dislike
that feeling, and you can retrain yourself to dislike it, too.
Satisfaction is different from fullness. When your body
has gotten as much food as it needs for the present, it
stops sending hunger signals. This usually occurs before the
stomach is completely full, so it doesn't matter how big your
stomach is, or how much room you have left. Eating has
accomplished its purpose: you're no longer hungry That
means you're finished, regardless of how much more food
you could cram in if you really tried.
The moment of satisfaction is subtle. It is the absence of
the strong feeling that initially drove you to eat, rather than
an equally strong new feeling like fullness. Most overeaters fail to perceive the moment of satisfaction because they are busy
pursuing fullness. By the time you notice that your belly feels
heavy or your belt is getting tight, you are well beyond the
satisfaction point.
Getting satisfaction
One of the great ironies of being overweight is that inaccurate
eaters think about food quite often when they're not
really hungry, yet have tremendous difficulty focusing on
food while they're actually eating it. You could even say that
the problem of overweight people is that they don't enjoy
eating enough. That's why they don't perceive the moment of
satisfaction--their attention is elsewhere when it occurs.
To be unable to focus on the act of eating is another
symptom of overall disconnection from the body. It may
have something to do with shame. A lot of overweight
people feel they need to conceal what they're really eating,
or how much they're really eating. They tend to eat relatively
little when around other people, then indulge in what they really want to eat when alone. Yet these moments of indulgence
are rarely savored. You may eat standing by the fridge,
or while engaged in something else like driving, watching
television, reading, or working at your desk. Distracting yourself
from the act of eating keeps you from fully registering
what you are doing and feeling guilty about it. Alas, distracting
yourself also prevents you from fully enjoying your food. The
pleasure you might be getting from it is largely wasted
because your have detached from your physical senses. You
may be eating too much because the enjoyment you expect
to get from food keeps eluding you.
Strange as it might sound, to succeed with thintuition,
you will need to learn to take more pleasure in eating. You
may end up eating smaller quantities, but you won't feel
deprived because you will be getting so much more enjoyment
than you used to. Until you learn to relish the act of eating,
wholeheartedly and single-mindedly, you will continue to
have difficulty identifying the exact moment to stop.
Until now, I've refrained from offering direct advice. My
whole point has been that you need to stop listening to
advice and start listening to your own instincts. But after a
lifetime of learning to worry, obsess, and berate yourself
about food, you might need a little coaching in how to really
savor the experience of eating. So I'm going to make some
recommendations. These are not rules, and you might not
practice them all the time or for the rest of your life. They're
just some specific behavior changes that have helped me and
others tune in to the experience of satisfaction and identify
the moment to quit.

Treat every morsel of food you consume as an official meal.
Even if it's just a cookie or an apple, sit down at a table and
put it on a plate. Approach it with a sense of ceremony.
Give eating your undivided attention. If you're eating
alone, don't watch television or read. Just be with
yourself. Dining with others is a bit trickier, because
obviously you can't completely ignore them. But keep
bringing your attention back to your food whenever
there's a lull in the conversation, or let your companions
do most of the talking.

Go slowly. Put your fork down between bites. Savor the
flavor, the aroma, the act of chewing. Notice how your
whole body feels, not just your mouth. Notice how
pleasurably it responds when the food you have chosen
is exactly what it was wanting.

Eat first what appeals to you most. Your policy from
now on is "pleasure before duty." Don't save the best for
last, because you may run out of hunger before you get
to it and then be tempted to overeat. If your favorite
part of fried chicken is the skin, go for it. If you want to
pick all the cheese off your pizza and leave the crust
behind, you're entitled. Don't put anything into your
mouth that doesn't taste wonderful. Eat like a child
whose parents are away. You don't have to finish your
peas to earn your dessert.

Don't sweat portion size. How much food a restaurant
puts on your plate or what a food package defines as a
single serving is completely irrelevant to how much you
need to eat. If you've taken or been served too much,
you don't have to finish it. If you've taken too little, you
can always have seconds. You are never obliged to clean
your plate. Instead of defining food you leave uneaten
as "wasted," consider it evidence of your newfound
accuracy. (If you feel guilty about throwing away food
when people in the world are starving, donate to famine
relief. Overeating isn't going to help those unfortunate
people in Ethiopia.)

How hungry you feel at the start of a meal is not always
a reliable guide to how much you will need to eat.
You never know that for certain until you're actually
eating. You might feel like you could eat a horse and sit
down to one, only to find that your hunger has abated
much faster than you expected. Or your hunger might
be fairly modest, so you figure you are eating accurately
when you order just an appetizer. But modest as it
seems, the appetizer might actually be too much. It's eating accurately, not ordering accurately, that will make
you slim. Order or cook as much as you feel you want,
but commit yourself only on a bite-by-bite basis.

	If you sometimes overeat to flatter the cook, pay tribute
with your pleasure instead. Make a big deal of savoring
the food. Praise it extravagantly instead of eating it
extravagantly.

	Notice how taste and your other sensory experiences
change over the course of the meal. As the saying goes,
"Hunger is the best sauce"--meaning that the first few
bites you take are often the most delicious. When the
flavors come to seem less intense, or a tad repetitive,
that's a sign that your hunger has diminished.

	Notice how your energy level changes. The act of
digestion itself requires energy--which is why you feel
sluggish or sleepy after eating too much. When you first
start to eat, it may be a struggle to make yourself go
slowly, for your whole body feels energetic and eager.
But once the edge is off your hunger, your energy
level declines slightly. This subtle feeling of slowing
down usually begins before you are full, and is a good
indication that you've eaten enough.
Keep asking yourself, "Do I feel hungry?" At the beginning
of the meal, it will seem like a silly question. It will
get harder to answer as your hunger diminishes and its
signals become more subtle. At the point when you can
no longer detect the feeling of hunger, consider yourself
a bite or two away from complete satisfaction. Savor
those last two bites, then stop.

You might be tempted to go on eating past the point of
satisfaction because you're still really enjoying the food.
You'll enjoy it even more if you save it for when you get
hungry again. This is why Tupperware, doggie bags, and
microwave ovens were invented.

You might be anxious that if you don't feel full, you
haven't really eaten enough, and will soon be hungry
again. Eat only to satisfy the hunger you feel right now,
not to forestall future hunger. Be happy that you're going
to get hungry again! Feeling hunger more keenly than
you're used to is a sign that your metabolism is starting
to work better. There is no reason to dread your hunger,
for you have promised yourself to enjoy the food you
want every time your body asks for it. Letting yourself get
good and hungry first will enhance your pleasure.

The Hunger Guide
Naturally thin people are precise about hunger and
fullness. Where an overweight person generally just says, "I'm
hungry, time to eat," a naturally thin person makes subtle
distinctions like, "I'm a little bit hungry, but not ready to
drop what I'm doing yet." Or, "I'm starting to get hungry, but
this airplane food doesn't appeal to me. I think I'll wait and
have something after we land." Or, "I can't finish a whole
dessert but I want just a bite of something really rich and
gooey." It is this level of precision about how they're really
feeling that enables thin people to fully satisfy their hunger
every single time without overeating.
The difference between your current weight and your
ideal weight often amounts to no more than a few bites too
many at every meal, or a modest amount of between-meal
nibbling when you're not hungry. Recognizing this, some
weight control experts will recommend minor but permanent
"lifestyle" changes, such as giving up your afternoon cookie
or your bedtime snack. Trouble is, you might actually be
hungry for that cookie some afternoons. The source of your
unwanted girth might not be the "empty calories" in the
cookie at all. It might be the salad you oblige yourself to eat
with every dinner because you think you're supposed to, or
the nutritious breakfast you force down when you're not hungry.
It might be the leftovers of a meal you wanted very much
yesterday and now don't especially care for, or the popcorn
you were hungry for when you entered the theater then went
on mindlessly eating once you got caught up in the movie.
The only way to know for sure is to pay close attention to
your hunger levels throughout the day, each and every day.
While working to develop my thintuition, I found it helpful
to assign a numerical rating to my hunger level before,
during, and after each meal. By doing so, I learned to make
the subtle distinctions that thin people make automatically.
Between meals, the numbers helped me differentiate between
early "some food would be nice" hunger and fully developed
"gotta eat now" hunger. Continuing to rate my hunger throughout
a meal taught me to identify the exact moment when I was
satisfied, when any more than one more bite would put me into
the fullness range. I've turned my rating system into a handy
chart, called the Hunger Guide, which is illustrated on the following
page. On the thintuition website (www.thintuition.com),
you can print a full-color version for free, or purchase other
versions of it in various formats--a credit card size to slip into
your wallet, a tent card to display on your dining table, or a
moveable wheel that reminds you of the physical signs that
accompany each level of hunger and satisfaction.

hunger guide

buffet full 9
painfully full 8
uncomfortably full 7
slightly full 6

hunger disappears 5

hunger nearing
satisfaction

hunger starts
diminishing

hunger
satisfaction 2
continues

hunger gratification
begins

during meals

between meals

5 hunger is satisfied

slight hunger

-, moderate hunger

-j legitimate
hunger

,, considerable
hunger

_ hunger needs u gratification
-1 uncomfortable hunger
-2 intense hunger
-3 severe hunger


While trying tQ make a permanent behavior change, it is
helpful to track your progress. When you keep a record, you
are less likely to eat mindlessly or to lie to yourself about your
eating habits. From the perspective of thintuition, there are
no wrong food choices, so counting calories, fat grams, or
portion sizes is counterproductive. The Hunger Guide gives
you a more meaningful set of numbers to jot in your diary.
You can record your hunger levels at the start and finish of
each meal. When you find that you've eaten your way into
the fullness range, you can jot down the reason, look for
patterns in these reasons, and address the underlying problem.
Track your hunger levels throughout the day, but don't keep track of what or how much you are eating. Remember
that overeating is about why you are eating, not what you are
eating or how much. In eating mindfully, your goal is not
necessarily to eat less. It's to eat exactly what your hunger
requires. If you are eating only when really hungry and
stopping as soon as your hunger ceases, you are eating
the right amount for your body. Rating your hunger levels
will help keep the focus where it belongs--on your physical
experience, not your food.
Occasionally you may realize you're on the verge of
fullness and choose to go on eating anyhow. Even thin
people do so once in a great while. In the beginning, you may
also overeat by accident, because you haven't yet learned to
distinguish satisfaction from fullness, or because you're
eating too fast, or because your attention wanders at some
point during a meal. These lapses are a great opportunity to
focus on how fullness really feels. Once you have some experiences
of being satisfied without being full, you can compare
and contrast. Notice what's unpleasant about being full--
the bloatedness, the dullness and sluggishness, the possible
indigestion, the feeling that what you ate two hours ago is
still lingering in your stomach. Compare this with how you
feel when you've left the table after eating exactly enough
and no more. Eventually you'll be able to understand how that
skinny actress could say, "I like to stop when I've had enough."
In eating mindfully,
your goal
is not necessarily
to eat less.
It's to eat exactly what
your hunger requires.
The Art and Skill of thintuition



Maybe what we are really seeking when
we cram in all the food our stomachs
will hold is not fullness, but wholeness. I know that in my years of dieting, I never felt whole--not
even in the triumphant moments of reaching my goal
weight. I had this sense that, regardless of what I weighed, I
never seemed to come together as my complete and authentic
self. My beliefs, intentions, desires, and actions were all
skidding off in umpteen different and contradictory directions.
I felt I wasn't meeting my full potential in any aspect of
my life. My fluctuating weight mirrored my inner restlessness
and uncertainty.
Dieting does that to people. It causes fragmentation. To
the extent that you accept the propaganda about food and
weight circulating in the culture at large, you find yourself
with a vast assortment of ideas and beliefs. Some of these
beliefs are mutually exclusive and many of them are flatly
contradicted by your own experience. But that doesn't stop
you from entertaining them. The beliefs give rise to all sorts
of resolutions, many of which are incompatible with your
desires-, your natural instincts, and the way your body actually
functions. Because the resolutions don't make a lot of sense
to begin with, they can't be kept for long and they lead to
contradictory behaviors. You alternately starve yourself and
binge. The resulting failures lead to a whole new round of
conflicting beliefs. ("I'm undisciplined and self-indulgent."
"I can't help being overweight. It's genetic")
The hallmark of whole people--people of power and
integrity--is that their beliefs align with their conscious intentions,
and their intentions align with their actions. What they
believe, they resolve, and what they resolve, they do.
Conviction, desire, and behavior all add up to one seamless
whole, moving in a single, consistent direction. I recovered
this wholeness when I resolved never to diet again and began
to practice thintuition. To act on my commitments was never
a struggle, because these commitments were based on reality
and fully compatible with both my conscious desires and my
unconscious instincts. The stable and trim weight that resulted
mirrored both the consistency and the newfound simplicity
of my inner life. As I cleared out the clutter of diet propaganda
that had expanded to fill every available convolution of my
brain, the fat went away with it.
You may be wondering whether this is the chapter where
I'm finally going to tell you how much weight you can expect
to lose, and how fast. It isn't. I can't tell you, because I honestly
don't know. What I do know is that any "expert" who
tells you what weight you will attain and how fast you'll get
there is just spitting into the wind. Your body is the sole
expert on what it wants to weigh and how quickly or slowly
it wants to move toward getting there. Your body's primary
agenda is to be healthy. It will seek the weight that is good for
it at a pace that is good for it.
I was frankly surprised by how many pounds I lost,
how fast they came off, and how firmly I stabilized at my
ideal weight. Having never before achieved my ideal, I was
prepared to settle for less. I was fully committed to practicing
thintuition for the rest of my days even if the results were
modest, because I believed it was right. I was committed to
respecting and trusting my body's natural wisdom--whatever
the resulting weight--because I had resolved once and for all
to respect and trust myself. I believed that this was how to
treat myself right.
And I think that's really the point. If you go into this
because you believe--or at least hope--you will get someone
else's best-case-scenario result, your commitment to it is
conditional. As long as the pounds are melting away at the
hoped-for rate, you'll be a thintuition fanatic. But if the
results come too slowly, or you hit a plateau, you mentally reserve the right to bail on thintuition and resort to cabbage
soup, compulsive workouts, or gastric bypass surgery. That's
the same-old same-old diet mentality. When you focus entirely
on results, part of you is preparing to repudiate your latest diet
plan before you've even started. From the outset of every weight
loss program, you're envisioning the day you will go off it.
That secret intention to bail out eventually is your
common sense talking. You should quit when what you've
undertaken isn't good for you in the first place. Yet the lack
of full and permanent commitment is what ultimately dooms
your weight loss attempts. You will not be able to maintain a
stable and healthy weight until you discover the resolutions
that are truly right for you--commitments that express what
you desire, what you believe to be true, and what you are actually
capable of doing. Treating yourself right is the only plan
your body and your psyche will stand for on a permanent basis.

Reclaiming your birthright
The point of thintuition is not how thin you might become
in the future. Thintuition is about reconnecting with who you
really are, about awakening the healthy instincts you already have.
Everybody is born with thintuition. Even if you weighed
twelve pounds at birth, you had it. You cried to be fed whenever
you were hungry, and you lost all interest in feeding the
moment your hunger was satisfied. You eagerly ate whatever
you desired, and spat out anything you didn't need or want.
If you've ever tried feeding an infant or toddler who doesn't
feel like eating, you'll know what I'm talking about.
Until very recently in human history, obesity was rare.
Almost everyone was of normal weight, provided there was
enough food around. If they had any weight-related health
concern at all, it was worry about being too skinny. Now, it
is true that the human body might change gradually due to
evolution, but gradually is the operative word. A marked
evolutionary change doesn't happen in a generation, or a
century. You have the same kind of body people used to have
back when nobody was worried about getting fat.
Your weight problem is the result of the culture you're
living in, not the biology you were born with. The culture
has taught you to base your eating on ideas rather than on
natural inclinations, and a lot of those ideas are just plain
silly. The scientific assumptions and procedures on which
they're based are of very recent invention. If our survival
depended on all this science, humanity would long ago have
gone the way of the dinosaur.
Thintuition is not about what you are trying to become.
It's about realizing who and what you already are. You are a
person who was born knowing what you need, a person
whose natural instincts still gravitate toward what will make
your body healthy. Regardless of how you may appear on the
outside, deep down you are naturally thin. You don't need to
change your basic nature. You just need to stop interfering
with nature by confusing hunger and its satisfaction with all
manner of irrelevant ideas and agendas.
You've probably long been in the habit of telling yourself
the opposite. You say to yourself, "I'm too fat," or "I can't
seem to lose weight no matter how hard I try," or "If I eat
those fries, they're going to go straight to my thighs." Self-talk
of any kind tends to be self-fulfilling, so if you keep making
negative assertions, negative results are hardly surprising.
The unsatisfactory appearance of your body reflects the
unsatisfactory nature of your thoughts. Positive assertions
work just as efficiently to bring positive results--the more so
if these positive assertions happen to be true.

Thintuition is not about what you are trying to
become. It's about realizing who and what
you already are.

This book has had a lot to say about the kind of assertions
you need to abandon. Now I'm going to offer you six simple
thoughts with which to replace them, six assertions that
express the truth about the nature you were born with. All six
describe this truth in behavioral terms. When you think the
truth, speak the truth, and act on the truth, your entire being
is properly aligned. You are whole. You make sense. Your
outward appearance will come to reflect the beliefs that you
put into practice, because that's what bodies do. It's what
your body has been doing all along.

The Six Practices of People Who Follow
Their thintuition

1 distinguish between appetite
and hunger.
Hunger is the physical need for food. Appetite is
the desire for the sensory pleasure and emotional gratification
we get from food. When hunger and appetite coincide, it's
time to eat. But as you well know, it is possible to experience
appetite when you're not actually hungry. Your body doesn't
need food right now, but you want some anyhow.
As a person who follows your thintuition, you can tell the
difference. You say to yourself, "That bacon smells fantastic.
But I'm not really hungry right now." Or, "It's noon and
I need a break. But I don't feel hungry for lunch." Or, "I'm
feeling emotionally empty and I seem to need something.
But I'm not physically hungry." You are not confused by
irrelevant impulses to eat, because you are able to distinguish
appetite from genuine hunger.

1 eat to satisfy physical hunger.
As a person who follows your thintuition, you act
on your ability to recognize when you are truly
hungry. You trust your body's hunger signals and treat them
with respect. If you are hungry, you eat. You don't care
whether it's an official mealtime or not. Your body needs food,
so you give it some. You take care of yourself that way. When
you'd like some food, but don't feel truly hungry, you wait.
You don't burden your body with food it can't use out of needs
or desires that have nothing to do with physical hunger.
1 eat the foods 1 desire.
As a person who follows your thintuition, you eat
what you really want--and only what you really
want--every single time you get hungry. You regard hunger as
a precious resource, too valuable to waste on foods you don't
care for.
You eat what you like best for two very good reasons.
First, you know that constantly depriving yourself exaggerates
your desire for certain foods, setting you up for a binge.
Desires that are constantly denied gain power, leading
eventually to rebellion and overindulgence. You don't put
yourself in that situation, because you don't pass judgment
on your desires. When you feel hungry, you don't go looking
for reasons to deny yourself what you really want.
Secondly, and more importantly, you trust your body to
know best what it needs. If it's low on protein, it will alert you
by making you hungry for a protein food. If it requires a certain
vitamin, foods rich in that vitamin will appeal to you. You know
that if you get in the habit of ignoring or denying your desire
for foods you consider to be frivolous, you won't hear your body
when it tries to tell you it needs spinach. You don't deliberate a
lot about nutrition. You just trust that your body's natural desire for
a variety of foods will lead you reliably to the nutrients you need.
1 savor each and every bite.
Because you embrace the experience of hunger
and the food preferences that arise from it, you
thoroughly enjoy satisfying your hunger. When the time
comes to provide your body with what it needs, nothing is
more important. You give the matter your full attention. You
don't let yourself be distracted by competing activities, or
avert your attention out of shame. You focus single-mindedly
on satisfying your hunger and enjoying every step of the process.
Because you savor every bite of your food, you rarely
overeat by accident. You experience the way each bite is moving
you away from hunger and toward satisfaction. You can
pinpoint the exact moment when your body has had enough.
Truly relishing your food enables you to be satisfied with
less. Instead of bolting down a pint of ice cream, your attention
wandering, your enjoyment dulled by self-reproach, you fully
experience the sweetness, the creaminess, the melting in your
mouth. From a half-cup of ice cream you derive more gratification
than overeaters get from polishing off the entire carton.
1 regard food as fuel.
Pleasure is a byproduct of eating, and an important
one. But there's a big difference between a
byproduct and a purpose. The only purpose of eating is to
replenish the nutrients and energy your body uses up.
As a person who follows your thintuition, you understand
that food is just fuel. Any other meanings food has acquired
for you are incidental. These meanings may enhance your
pleasure in consuming what your body needs. But you
recognize that they would become harmful if they led you to
consume food it doesn't need.
Because you get that food is just fuel, you are struck
by the weirdness of the contrary messages that constantly
bombard you via the media. You notice how advertisers keep
trying to entice you to equate foods with irrelevant emotions
and conditions--fun, togetherness, self-reward, prosperity,
relaxation, economy, strength, health, or athletic prowess.
You see how medical science, as reported by the media, assails
you with equally irrelevant hopes and fears, promising that
certain foods will enhance your longevity, lower your cholesterol,
or improve your memory, while warning that other
foods will give you everything from zits to cancer. You notice,
too, how sometimes your own mind proposes food as a
solution to problems that have nothing to do with hunger.
But you're not taken in. You are clear that hunger is the only
problem food has ever solved for you.

1 stop eating when my hunger
disappears.
As a person who follows your thintuition, you eat
exactly as much food as you need to satisfy your hunger, and
not a bite more. Because you are paying close attention to the
process of eating, you notice how your hunger diminishes a
little with each mouthful. You notice when your body has
stopped sending hunger signals, and you are aware that this
moment occurs before it starts sending fullness signals. You
are aware that you are satisfied well before your belt starts
feeling tight, well before you feel heavy, dull, or sleepy from
having overeaten.
Most importantly, when you notice that you are no
longer feeling hungry, you stop eating. You have learned to
dislike the sensation of being full as much as you like the
pleasure of eating. Knowing that you're not going to like
the way you feel afterward, you resist the temptation to keep
eating just because it tastes good. While in the long run
you know that overeating will make you fat, your more
immediate motivation is simply not to feel stuffed. You stop
eating because you don't want to feel that way.

Your outward appearance will come to reflect
the beliefs that you put into practice, because
that's what bodies do.

Frequently asked questions
A FAQ is usually just what it sounds like--a list of questions
that have been asked repeatedly, with corresponding
answers. I could probably list a good hundred or so questions
that have been put to me by private clients and attendees at
my thintuition seminars. But the answer to nearly all of them
is the same. It is (drum roll, please):
"Why are you asking me?"
For example, there's a whole category of questions
concerning the relative merits of various foods. "Is it really
okay to eat	.	.	?" (Fill in the blank with
whatever delicious food you imagine you need permission to
enjoy.) How would I know whether it's okay for you to eat
donuts or nachos or deep-fried pork rinds? You're the only
one who knows whether you're hungry. You're the only one
who knows what you're hungry for. What you choose to put
in your stomach is no business of mine.
Another category of questions concerns frequency of
eating. "How long should I go without eating?" "Is it okay to
eat six times a day?" Again, how would I know? You're the
only one who knows how often you get hungry, or how long
you can stay hungry and still function well.
Then there are questions about exercise. "Can I eat more
if I work out?" Beats me. Are you hungrier after a workout?
"Do I need to exercise at all?" Well, do you? If your body
wants exercise, it will tell you. It won't tell me.
Having come to the end of this book, you have by now
heard everything I have to tell you about thintuition as a
method of managing weight. The essence of it is to listen to
your own body and follow its guidance. Your body will tell you
everything you need to know about how to keep it healthy,
happy, and attractive. Looking for answers from anyone else--
including myself--disempowers you and keeps you stuck.
Helping others to manage their weight is my life's
mission. In the course of pursuing it, I've had to give a lot of
thought to the question of what "help" consists of. The last
thing this world needs is one more blowhard posing as a
weight loss expert. The problem for most overweight
Americans is too much information, not too little of it.
What most people seem to need, as they work on developing
their thintuition, is support in unlearning, in forgetting
or ignoring all the'misleading ideas they've already absorbed
until now. Many also find they need social support. The two
needs 'are linked. The culture relentlessly bombards us with unhelpful ideas about food, weight, and health, and many of
these ideas carry a powerful emotional charge. No sooner do
you resolve to eat what you really want than you switch on
the television and hear that what you really want to eat will
make you fat or sick. You can't help but feel anxious, mistrustful of your own desires. Or, just when you've resolved to give
up dieting for good, you hear of some new diet that's producing
spectacular results, based on some new scientific theory
that sounds really persuasive. Your hopes stirred, you consider
for the umpteenth time that maybe dieting does work,
maybe you've just never been on the right diet. How can your
hard-won common sense compete with all this relentless
propaganda, especially when everyone around you seems to
believe it? To connect with people who think like you do can
be a big help in resisting the insanity of the larger culture.
You have learned by now that eating for any reason other
than physical hunger is overeating, but some of those reasons
can feel very compelling when you try to give them up.
If you've been eating out of loneliness, grief, boredom, or
stress, what are you going to do instead? How are you going
to handle the intense emotions that may arise when you
stop using food as a tranquilizer? When you take control of your eating, these other troubled areas of your life may start
clamoring for your attention. For this stuff, too, it helps to
have social support.
Finally, it helps to share your progress and setbacks with
others who are pursuing the same goal. Weighing in, commiserating,
and celebrating success were aspects of formal programs
like Weight Watchers that I actually enjoyed. I figured it
would be great to have a place to get all that without having
to subject myself to the accompanying diet mythology.
So I set one up. On the thintuition website
(www.thintuition.com) you'll find a whole community of
like-minded people with whom you can share via chat rooms
and bulletin boards. If the main thing you want is company,
just sign on and hang out. If you want a more formal program
to follow, you'll find interactive lessons on the six practices,
various exercises to try, a place to journal, and a personal
progress chart. You can read my occasional diatribes against
the diet industry, and post diatribes of your own. But
the most important aspect of the site is the opportunity to
connect with others who will confirm and reinforce your own
natural instincts and common sense. I hope you'll join us
there, and give me the pleasure of hearing your thintuition
success story.

A note from Rob Stevens
I want to thank you for being open to new information, for
having the courage to change your life, and for taking the
first step in recovering the thintuition that you always had
inside you.

Everyone possesses thintuition. It's a natural body sense--
as natural as knowing whether you are hot or cold, energized
or tired. But many of us have lost our connection with our
natural thintuition through perpetual dieting and from listening
to the overpowering megaphone of the diet industry.
However, your thintuition is there--quietly waiting to be
awakened.

Once reconnected with your thintuition, you will discover
how natural it is and how much sense it makes. As long as
you continue to follow your thintuition, you will eventually
reach and maintain your natural body weight.


Acknowledgements
To my loving parents, Alice and Tom: Alice, you have always
been my biggest fan, my main support and the foundation of
my weight loss journey to freedom. I love you and thank you.
And to my amazing father, Tom. You had the courage and
commitment to let go of a lifetime of fears that kept you overweight
and concerned for your health and well-being. I dedicate
this book to you. Congratulations on your new body and
life by thintuition. I told you, Dad, trust me. This stuff really
works.
I want to express my gratitude to the following brilliant
and talented people, who have tirelessly gone above and
beyond what I've asked of them: Steve Shefler, Catherine
MacCoun, Maura Junius, Julaine E. Flick, Amy Walsh, Andy
Crestodina, Barrett Lombardo, Frank J. Voznak, Dirk I. Tiede,
Jeff Conta, Jeffrey Dillon, and Mark Nieds.
To the many others who have supported me in my efforts
to bring the thintuition philosophy to life, thank you!


My best to you,

fafrt ^sCw&nfr


Products

At thintuition.com you will find an online store.
Here are some of the products you will find there:

The Overfed Head: audiobook version
Listen to this book on any CD player.

The Overfed Head: e-book
An electronic version to read on your computer.

Hunger Guide slide wheel
A durable plastic slide wheel that helps you get in touch with various levels
of hunger to guide your eating.

The thintuition e-learning weight loss program
A complete online weight loss course including a wide variety of support
features. This program can be customized to fit the needs of large groups
and corporations as well.

All products are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk
quantities for health and wellness facilities, corporations, schools, groups,
and other business use. For details contact: info@thintuition,com

Sources

Pages 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 33, 34, 41 & 89: Bob Schwartz. Diets Don't Work. Houston, TX: Breakthru Publishing, 1996.

Pages 50, 51, 55 & 56: Ancel B. Keys, Joseph Brozek, and Austin Henschel. The Biology of Human Starvation. Minneapolis, RUN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1950.

Page 51: Study with zero, one, or two milkshakes and ice cream
(dieters and non-dieters). C. Peter Herman & Mack, Deborah Mack (1975).
Restrained and unrestrained eating. Journal of Personality, 43, 647-660.

Page 74: From a January 13, 2004 article posted on www.bankrate.com
by Ellen Goodstein.

Page 86: From USA Today Snapshots posted on Yahoo.com. February 9, 2004. Which diet is the most popular way to lose weight? Porter Novell!, Anne R.
Carey and Gia Kereseiidze.