To be slim without dieting, you need to follow some basic rules which are:
Eat when you’re hungry;
Eat foods that you feel like eating and that make you feel good after you’ve eaten them;
Eat your food slowly and with awareness;
Stop when you are satisfied (not stuffed!)
I realise that this can be much easier said than done! Our articles explore how you can move towards eating in this way, which is a much more long term approach than going on a diet to lose weight.
This article talks about eating when hungry and stopping when satisfied. This is vital to re-build trust with your body and to teach your body that it does not need to store fat because it will always get fed when it needs food. Eating before you get ravenous also ensures that you don’t get to the point where you’re so hungry, you’re just stuffing it down in a frenzy!
A useful tool is the “Hunger Scale” which rates how hungry or full you feel on a scale of 1 to 10, as follows:
10 – Ravenously hungry, maybe feeling faint or shaky, desperate to eat.
9 – Very, very hungry.
8 – Hungry enough to really enjoy the food and confident that it will taste great. But not so hungry that you feel ill or absolutely desperate to eat.
7 – Fairly hungry and looking forward to eating.
6 – You just have some early feelings of hunger. You need to wait a little before you eat but plan to make sure you can eat soon.
5 – Neutral, neither hungry nor full.
4 – Pleasantly satisfied. You have had just enough food to feel satisfied, and not stuffed. This amount of food leaves you feeling energized, rather than tired or bloated.
3 – You have gone slightly beyond satisfied. You might be eating on autopilot, to clean your plate, to please someone else, to rebel against being deprived or just because it is so good! Stop and ask yourself why you are still eating.
2 – Stuffed. You’ve overdone it. You’re feeling somewhat uncomfortable, you might want to loosen your belt or sit back in your chair.
1 – Absolutely stuffed to the limit. Possibly feeling sick. You’ve really over done it! (Work out why you ate so much, but remember, nobody died!)
Make sure you eat at a 7 or 8 on the scale and stop eating at a 4. Remember you don’t have to stuff yourself because if you get hungry again later you can always eat some more. The more you start to tune into your feelings of hunger and fullness, and make sure you eat in response to hunger, the easier it will become to maintain a healthy weight
For help with the other principles for staying slim without dieting, take a look at my other articles or visit the website – see the link below.