The Intuition Diet
I’ve never been on a diet in my life.
There are a million reasons; here are some:
* I don’t want to encourage my body-hatred and negativity by obsessing about what I eat
* I know I have a tendency to go overboard once I do start obsessing, and I’m, frankly, afraid of developing an eating disorder — when I really get going on a hatefest, they start to sound very tempting, and that’s saying something considering that I’m perfectly aware of the health costs
* I know that I’ll never keep up with something that requires me to count calories or mess around with special food, because I would find it crushingly dull and frustrating
* Being a philosopher, part of me finds things like dieting, makeup, clothing, etc. all blisteringly insignificant, and it’s hard to motivate myself to care for longer than the few minutes I’m hating what I see in the mirror. (To give an idea, I’m 30 and I just learned how to care enough to wear eyeliner to work–most days, when I remember.)
* Being concerned with natural health, I don’t trust meal-supplements, pills, or most diets right off the bat
* In the grand scheme of things, I only need to lose a little weight, and so there’s no impetus to do all kinds of crazy things to do it. Also, I get plenty of exercise and am in good health, so again, hard to care all that much
* I share almost nothing in common with most dieters-as-dieters, keeping me away from groups that might otherwise help me succeed or motivate me to bother
I’ve always liked the "Zen Diet", which I think I’ve written about before. It’s based entirely on awareness: Eat when your body is hungry; eat what your body wants; stop eating when your body wants you to. However, that presumes a shockingly good control of one’s psychology as well as an ability to read body-signals independently of psychological ones, and while trying itself has been good for me, I’m not good enough at it to actually produce results.
Usually I control my diet by controlling what I have access to — by only buying expensive dark chocolate, and no cheap sweets, and lots of fruit & veggies for snacks — but now that I live with my mom, that’s harder. Mom shops like it’s 1975: There’s always candy and often pop in the house, and/or baked goods, just as a matter of keeping the larder stocked. And I know I’m not going to get her to stop doing it. It has definitely impacted me, to the tune of about 15 extra pounds (I’m guessing) since Xmas, so now I need to do something a little more concrete to get some of the weight off, and keep the snacks out of my hands (and mouth). Something that’s easy enough, safe enough, and doesn’t engender obsession or negativity.
Is it surprising that I had trouble finding such a thing? Yeah, I didn’t think so. So I did what I always do…I thought one up. I call it The Intuition Diet, and here’s how it (hopefully) works:
Step One: How much to eat a day. It’s hard to keep track of everything you’ve eaten in a day — hard, and dull, plus a little close to obsessive for my taste. I needed a way to generalize it that would let me keep track without turning me into a bean-counter (literally).
So, the way this works is, pick how many calories you want to consume and divide by 100. For me, I picked 1600 as a goal, figuring I’d be happy with 1800, or even 2000 on some days. But I’d like to hit 1600; for my size, that’s an appropriate, healthy goal that should take weight off slowly, by virtue of almost certainly being less than I get now. Dividing by 100, I get 16.
That’s the number of 100-calorie servings I want to eat in a day. To keep track, I decided that for every 100-calorie serving I eat, I’ll put a dot on my hand, aiming to have 16 dots by the end of the day.
Now, no need to get crazy about what a "serving" is; generally speaking, a serving is about a handful. Most "serving sizes" are between 1/4 and 1 cup, and should probably be smaller for smaller people, right? So that’s good enough for me.
Next, how to determine the calorie count. I read the backs of my food when I can anyway, just so I know what I’m ingesting and can keep mental notes on what’s good and what’s not, but I *hate* math and there’s no way I’m adding up all those calories. I need a reliable way to estimate. And I think I thought of one: One serving of healthy food is about 100 calories. One serving of unhealthy food is about 200 calories. One serving of really unhealthy food is about 300 calories.
I actually did check this out over the last couple days, and it averages out pretty well. A serving of Coke is 200; of cake from the store is 275; of carrots or apples is 85; of nuts is 110. A small fast-food burger is about 600 — two handfuls of 300. A big fast-food burger will run you almost 1,000 calories, which, again, makes sense if it’s three handfuls of 300. If I round it all out based on the general "fatteningness" of foods, I’ll get pretty close to the answer I want.
So, that’s almost all of it, and that’s doably easy and non-obsessive: One dot for a healthy snack or healthy serving of food in meal form; two dots for not-so-good food; three dots for jeezus-should-I-really-be-eating-this.
The only thing remaining is drinks, which are often part of the critical failure for diets — however, I think I have a good way to estimate those, too. Water, naturally, doesn’t count. I drink several cups of coffee throughout a day (mostly decaf, but I just like coffee, darnit), and it all has a splash of milk in it. So I add two dots to cover all my coffee for the day. After that, drinks are tallied the same way as everything else — remembering that a serving is a handful (or about 1/2 cup), that actually works, too. Milk and real fruit juice are about 100; fake juice and pop and beer are 200; eggnog and milkshakes are 300. Ta-da!
Now, as far as sauces and "extras", I might tally them if they’re significant (i.e. tons of hollandaise had better count), but otherwise, screw it; it’ll come out in the wash. The fact that I’m going to be over-estimating for some healthy foods should cover that. Also, when it comes to serving sizes, I ain’t measuring; rather, I’m going to aim to have smaller servings if it’s "unhealthy" food and allow bigger servings for healthy food.
Of course, this system wouldn’t work at all if you weren’t aiming for a generally healthy conglomeration of foods — you could have only 10 dots, but if they’re all made of raw sugar and fat, umm, not so good. However, I make a habit of trying for healthy food when I can, and I’m starting to get good about voluntarily eating vegetables, so this isn’t really my concern.
What I like most about the Intuition Diet — besides its avoiding the pitfalls I fear in most diets — is that it’s open for all kinds of tweaking; as I do it longer, I should get better at estimating, better at picking healthier food, and better at avoiding the really nasty stuff, all of which should aid in producing better results. All without scales (don’t own one, don’t want one), measuring tapes (eek), crazy motivational stuff, expensive pseudofoods, or math.
Dieting via estimation. We’ll see if it works!
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Well,
I never found diets to be that helpful, but I have the opposite problem. I need to eat more, so instead of counting I end up getting more substance. So, for you, just figure out how much is normal for your sleep period, every section of your sleep and wake, take note how much you normally eat. You could still use the dots here, it still works. And just take a little bit off every time, and very little. The purpose is that it is progressive, and gets more and more. The time to stop is when you have hit your goal calories. But, you could do the cold turkey as well, just up to you. The purpose of a progressive is that you start planning for the next day, and you force the schedule quicker on yourself.
Sounds cumbersome. What happens when you wash your hands? Doesn’t it make more sense to simply adopt a healthy lifestyle which includes healthy eating?
I’m an old hand (hehe pun) at writing things on my hands and not washing them off, so I guess I’m lucky there.
As to “simply” adopting a healthy lifestyle, I encourage you to write instructions for transitioning into healthy eating that are simpler and less cumbersome than mine. Seriously, go for it!
But telling someone to “simply eat healthy” is like telling someone to “simply be morally good” or “simply be environmentally friendly”. A good idea, but totally unhelpful in practice — for those of us who aren’t there now, we need steps to get there. If my idea for moving towards healthy eating and slow, responsible weight loss that I can actually maintain doesn’t work, oh well, at least I had an idea, right? Maybe later on I’ll have a better one…or you will.
Dragon — I didn’t think this was “cold turkey”, since at first the goal is just to be aware of how much I eat, and aim for a reasonable amount of food (1600-2000 calories is actually quite a lot for someone my size!), and then, when I got the hang of being aware, gradually reduce, like you say. Sorry if that part wasn’t clear.
The problem with using sleep-periods is that they’re not identical, either in duration or in how much or little food I require during them, so I would probably get frustrated trying to figure that out at the same time.
Still, see my next post for how surprisingly well this worked on Day One…