How it all Started…
Curious about why I ended up, sometime after turning 30, with a little extra weight on me, the answer was revealed. I remember having a practically "out-of-body " experience in the 17th hour of a fast one Yom Kippur.
Reeling from crippling hunger, I remember looking down at my arms, and thinking, "I would miss my fat". Of course that sounded odd to even me. How could I "miss my fat"? Fat is the enemy, right?.
So I pondered, how it could be possible that I believe extra fat was comforting?…And this is what I came up with.
Some of us are programmed to feel safer having extra weight or getting extra full. In my case I wasn’t sure where it came from, this programming. Was it a legacy from my great-grandmother’s generation, where extra fat could mean the difference between life and death on the prairie? (her three month old daughter died of gastroenteritis) Or was it was from my own experience of eating breakfast too early and dinner too late, and always being SO hungry when I was a kid.
I guess both experiences affected me, so that I ate my dinner like I may never eat again and I still do—unless I catch myself. It is hard to break old habits.
Over the years I have heard hundreds of different stories for why someone would ignore or override their bodies, their perfect homeostatic machines.
For many years, this programming to eat all dinners like my last, haddn’t kick in yet, and I relied on my perfect homeostatic machine. Until I turned 30, I could, and did eat anything I was hungry for without gaining a pound.
I definitely ate at least twice as much as my roommate in college, and weighed exactly the same. Hmmm. How could this be?
In nursing school, I took a nutrition class where I learned that an apple a day could actually mean an extra five pounds a year.
So I realized that just small changes could make all the difference. And I also saw that some people could stay exactly the same slim weight for decades with almost NO change up or down…
When I got to Public Health graduate school, I thought about how backwards medicine was asking the question, “How can people lose weight?”, instead of, “What makes some people naturally slim?…”
When you ask the question, “How is it that some people are naturally slim”, the answer is they eat when they’re hungry until they’re satisfied.
After getting married and having a baby and not wanting to work long hours delivering babies as a midwife, I decided to start a private practice where I retrained people to eat intuitively.
I read a zillion self-help books on intuitive eating and emotional eating. I looked for scientific studies about the follies of dieting…but there wasn’t much.
I conducted a qualitative study to discover what dysfunctional beliefs got people “off track” with their eating.
I discovered that there were four basic belief systems that derailed people. I developed a questionnaire to help in the diagnosis. And I created hypnosis tapes to help people reprogram these beliefs. Go to What Beliefs Keep You from Being Naturally Slim quiz.
I saw people in my private practice for over five years. But I was frustrated. It was very labor intensive making it very expensive. And yet, I was seeing the same patterns in people. It seemed I could make this automated…
In December of 2008, after months of challenging conceptual and technological work, we created an automated program that basically does everything I did in my private practice—rewiring people to eat intuitively.
After asking people how hungry they were when they ate yesterday, I would plot it out and show them where they were off. If they were eating all their calories at night, I would show them, it was related to not eating enough at lunch… and they would be a “Nighttime See-Saw Eater”.
I discovered 18 non-intuitive eating patterns—and now, when people fill out the “Interview”, they get their diagnosis, and their feedback. This is exactly the same thing that I would do for people in my office.
By the way, since my hiatus from academia, there are tons of studies showing the follies of dieting. Dieting just doesn’t work. Because when you ask the question, “How do you lose weight?” you come up with the formula, decrease calories in, and increase calories out.
Unfortunately, the human body was meant, above all, to withstand famine. So when you decrease calories in, you completely mess up the internal weight watcher. (See “Did you know?”)
Since December, I have decided to opt for the "Give it Away Free" model of dissemination.
Please enjoy these resources and turn your life and the world upside down.
And the journey continues…
