Gains, pt 3. Living with what's wrong with me.

(If you're just getting here you might read part 1 and part 2 first)

So, to sum up so far:  I have an irrational fear of getting hungry.  Fear of getting hungry makes me overeat at meals so I won't get hungry later.  Because I try never to get hungry, I have screwed-up hunger signals; because I have screwed-up hunger signals, I look for external cues (rather than internal hunger/fullness signs) to decide whether and when to eat.  There are two approaches to this problem:  (1) get over the fear, (2) find non-overeating ways to deal with its effects.   This post is about approach #2.

For example, I know I respond to cues like  "Someone near me is eating, so I should be eating too"  or "There is still food here, so I should eat it."  At least in my home, I can make a few simple improvements:  eliminate junk food so that people eat healthful things near me; use smaller plates so there is less food here; serve less food so there aren't many leftovers.  I stopped keeping junk in the house long ago, and more recently I bought smaller dinner plates and tried to produce less leftover food, after reading Brian Wansink's book Mindless Eating.  I realize now that these things are working because they alter the environment so that the external cues I respond to are helping me instead of hurting me.  Other things to do in the same vein, particularly if you work and eat outside the home, are to avoid dangerous places like all-you-can-eat buffets, and to try to eat near thin people.  

If you want to go a level deeper, you can try to substitute more-helpful external cues for less-helpful ones.    When I pre-planned and pre-measured my meals and snacks, I introduced a helpful external cue:  "I will stop eating when I have consumed a certain mass or volume of a particular food, i.e., a certain number of calories."  Weight Watchers' "points" plan works the same way, as does consuming only "the recommended serving size" of everything.   A suggestion I've heard about, but not yet tried, is what I think I'll call the Boolean Diet: consciously switch from "Someone near me is eating, so I should eat" to the more-restrictive "Everyone near me is eating, so I should eat," or equivalently, "Someone near me is not eating, so I should not eat too."  This might be a good thing to try the next time I go to a party.  At mealtime, it amounts to waiting to pick up my fork until everyone else has begun, and not picking at the leftovers when others have finished.

Having the planned meals and snacks around helped me in another way I didn't predict.  For a while, I saved time by assembling my midmorning and midafternoon snack in advance, toting them with me in a cooler if I had to be out running errands.  A typical summertime snack was not very large: for example,  3 strawberries, 5 almonds, and an ounce of Tilsit cheese from the dairy farm.  Still, even this small snack -- carried with me and ready to eat whenever I got hungry -- made me feel safe!  I didn't feel the compulsion to eat extra at meals because I knew that if I got hungry, I could eat something healthful right away.  So I found a more constructive way to satisfy that irrational anxiety.

Still better is to get rid of it, of course.  More on that later.

(Part 4)

Comments

[Christy P]

I enjoyed Wansink's book also. Especially the part about oldest children saving their favorite snack for last while youngest children ate their favorite snack first.

Boolean eating sounds like a good idea, but this bit from the second paragraph, "...and to try to eat near thin people." may or may not work - some of the thin people I know eat the most. Metabolism and recognizing inherent differences seem to be key.

In my house, when I am not pregnant, I aim to eat 60% of the quantity that my husband eats and serve in the kitchen with that in mind. That restriction, combined with my lack of beer calories, works for me. If he didn't have the beer calories, he might blow away.