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Natural eaters are the embodiment of the age-old nutrition tenets of variety, balance, and moderation. Natural eaters come in all shapes and sizes. Some are tall, lean, and lanky; others are round and soft; still others are muscular and solidly built. The common thread among natural eaters is that food is simply not an issue. They rarely think about food apart from designated meal and snack times and are able to eat a wide variety of foods—including so-called “junk foods”—without experiencing a moral dilemma. This often prompts their dieting acquaintances to remark “How can you finish that whole slice of cheesecake?! I’d feel so guilty!” or “How can you eat whatever you want and never gain an ounce?” or “What do you mean, ‘you don’t want a brownie right now’?”
Do you know people who seem to be natural eaters? Spend time with them, observe their behavior, and listen to their conversations. You won’t hear them talking about the latest, greatest fad diet or discussing the calorie, fat, or carbohydrate content of the foods being served as if that were the most fascinating topic of the day. Natural eaters have a knack for listening to their bodies, honoring what they know about nutrition, and respecting their own and others’ food preferences. Sound appealing? There’s a natural eater inside each and every person waiting to be discovered. Resolve here and now never to tread the dieting path again; life has so much more to offer!

The emotional eater turns to food to lessen the intensity of negative emotions and enhance the enjoyment of positive emotions. He is usually sensitive to others’ needs, opinions, and attitudes. Criticism can send him in search of a candy bar, potato chips, and soda. Common emotional triggers for eating in the absence of physiological hunger are anxiety, depression, boredom, loneliness, fear, stress, excitement, joy, happiness, and many others. Food is the emotional eater’s drug of choice, and instead of turning to less acceptable methods (such as drinking, gambling, or smoking) of dealing with life’s curveballs, he heads for the freezer. All people, dieters at the top of the list, can fall quickly into emotional eating patterns, especially if they are overworked, deprived of quality sleep, or faced with more than they feel capable of handling.

The chaotic eater runs at full throttle day in and day out. She may juggle a full-time job with family and community responsibilities and often works long hours, stealing time from exercise and/or sleep to please as many people as possible. The chaotic eater frequently uses convenience foods and rarely sits down at a table to eat. She might eat in the car, on the bus, at her desk, during meetings, or while talking on the phone or answering emails. Her life is fast, and so is her food. She knows she should feed herself more nutritiously, but life is simply too hectic to make it a top priority.
Chaotic eaters spend a lot of time at the extremes of hunger and fullness. They may go many hours or most of the day with nothing more than coffee and a vending machine snack, and then gorge themselves at night when they finally have the opportunity.
Other chaotic eaters simply don’t want to be bothered with planning nutritious meals and
snacks. They believe that tedious task is reserved for health nuts and nutrition professionals. Dieting veterans can be chaotic eaters when they are “off” their diets; they reason that they’ll get back on the bandwagon when life slows down a bit and they can muster a little more willpower.

The restrained eater often appears to be the picture of health. He may work out religiously, scrutinize his food choices, and keep close tabs on his body weight. Below the surface, however, the restrained eater agonizes over food choices and may miss out on social events due to erratic eating and exercise patterns. He spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about food, planning what to eat or avoid, and/or exercising to “make up” for indulgences. The restrained eater may look like the textbook definition of health, but he is far from achieving a balanced lifestyle or peace of mind. Many dieters fall into this category when they religiously count calories, points, or grams of carbohydrate, fat, or protein. For some restrained eaters, food is the one thing over which they exert full control, so eating becomes their method of coping with an otherwise unpredictable life.

To identify your eating pattern, you must be willing to evaluate your relationship with food and eating. Humans have all sorts of reasons for eating—celebration, stress, boredom, comfort, loneliness, pleasure, social situations, cultural traditions, control, anxiety, habit, and countless others that have little or nothing to do with a physiological need for nourishment. The beauty of natural eating lies in its ability to both fulfill your body’s need for energy and respect your unique mind, heart, and soul. Does this mean that you should never eat for purely social, cultural, or emotional reasons? Absolutely not. By becoming a natural eater, you’ll begin to understand how your body adjusts for these situations and provides you with reliable hunger and fullness signals to reestablish your connection with eating’s original purposes.

Sound like a bunch of feel-good jargon? I will identify several eating patterns so that you can relate to these concepts on a more personal level. I’ve included examples of life situations that illustrate each pattern, but you may exhibit characteristics of the pattern without matching any of the examples. You’ll also find that you probably fall into more than one category depending on the situation at hand. The label isn’t as important as your willingness to examine all the ways in which you might use food.

Although this is a blog designed to help you improve your habits, many of you are also curious about what constitutes a healthy body weight. First and foremost, it’s important to remember that weight is simply a number. Focusing on body weight as a goal can be counterproductive for a number of reasons, but because we live in a weight obsessed age, this topic merits further discussion.

For many individuals, a modest loss of even 5% of current body weight can improve health parameters such as blood pressure, blood sugar, and blood cholesterol levels. Unfortunately, most people who embark on weight loss programs begin with completely unrealistic goals—they report an inability to be satisfied with modest, but beneficial weight loss. This kind of all-or-nothing mentality is a recipe for frustration, body dissatisfaction, and preoccupation with body weight and appearance. For these reasons, I will not use typical methods employed by many organizations and professionals to determine your “ideal” body weight (there’s nothing inherently wrong with the charts and tables; it’s simply more productive to focus your energy elsewhere). If you prefer, go back to the section on your personal weight history and use this information as a starting point to determine a healthy weight range. Choose a range that you were able to maintain as an adult without dieting or excessive exercise but that reflects adequate nutrition, regular activity, and attention to overall health.

Another important consideration is respect for your basic body type. Many people attempt to change their body shapes with dieting and exercising only to become frustrated, tired, and obsessed with their various imperfections. It’s an unfortunate result of a culture that has little regard for the beauty of genetic diversity in body types or the inherent worth of a person’s soul and character. Learn to work with the wonderful body you’ve been given. You don’t have to be enamored with every last inch, but do try to see yourself in a positive light.
In the same way that your genes determine where you store body fat, they will determine how you lose that fat. Do you have illusions of reducing body fat in select areas of your body? Many women, for example, are frustrated by the apparent tenacity of fat stores in their hips and thighs (or other areas of the body). Although balanced nutrition and regular exercise can improve many health parameters and decrease overall body fat, women must accept the fact that they are biologically wired to store fat in these areas. Keep this in mind if you are embarking on a weight loss program with someone of the opposite gender!
Again, focus on changing behaviors, and you will naturally arrive at a healthier weight. Identifying your eating style or styles is an important first step in changing your eating behaviors and working toward becoming a natural eater.

Diets are destined to fail you because

• Diets do not address all the factors related to food choices.
• Diets focus on the scale instead of behavior changes.
• Diets do not often include, encourage, or promote physical activity.
• iets do not require a lifestyle change.
• Diets have a beginning and an end.
• Diets create a parent/child relationship with food (being “good” or “bad” when you eat, or avoid, certain foods) that frequently leads to rebellious eating.
• Diets do not require you to change the way you think about food.
• Your body desires weight stability and will go to great lengths to maintain your current weight.

The end goal of every diet is weight loss, and in theory weight loss is simple—you have to consistently burn more calories (energy) than you consume. Unfortunately, this “simple” matter of energy balance is difficult to navigate behaviorally. Genetics, culture, social habits, motivation, and countless other factors affect whether you can lose weight and maintain the loss. Many individuals diet without considering the harm they may be inflicting on their bodies and minds or what is actually required to maintain a healthy weight for the rest of their lives. If you have been on and off diets for as long as you can remember or are considering a diet now, know this—you do not fail on a diet; the dieting process fails you.

Do you remember a time in your life when food was simply food? You ate when you were hungry, stopped when you were satisfied, and beyond food preparation and cleanup (if you were old enough), you spent relatively little time thinking about it. That is natural eating.
What if you cannot remember ever feeling this way about food? Perhaps for as long as you have known, food has been associated with everything but the messages your own body was sending. You might have been raised in an environment that did not support natural eating, one in which your access to food was overly restricted or you were required to ignore your body’s hunger or fullness signals. Or you may have fallen victim to the dieting culture so prevalent today, the one that promises that happiness is just a few more pounds away. If this is the case, don’t despair. As a human being, you were born with the ability to regulate food intake appropriately, and you can begin to uncover this ability again by working through some of the steps in the following sections.

NATURAL EATING OCCURS INDEPENDENTLY OF BODY WEIGHT
Becoming a natural eater is not a guarantee that you will change your body weight. People who maintain unnaturally thin physiques will probably gain weight as they begin to respect their bodies again. People who are maintaining excess weight due to environmental, emotional, or other conditions will probably lose weight as they incorporate the principles of natural eating. If you have ignored your body’s signals for a long time by chronically over or undereating (or going back and forth between the two), it may be more challenging to decipher appropriate hunger and fullness signals. If you believe you may be such a person, work with your physician, a counselor, and a registered dietitian to develop an eating plan and healthy lifestyle that respects this history.
The vast majority of people can experience the freedom of becoming a natural eater by working through the material in this blog and using other appropriate resources. Know that it may be a long and sometimes uncomfortable process, but the reward of a peaceful relationship with food and your body is worth every bit of effort you can afford!

Keep a log of your lapse experiences. Find patterns in your behavior so that you can modify your environment and plan ahead for the next time you are faced with a similar situation:

• What were you feeling?
• Where were you?
• With whom were you keeping company?
• What was the time of day?

It also might be helpful to jot down a behavior chain in a journal. This involves nothing more than writing down the series of events, situations, feelings, emotions, or experiences that led to the unwanted behavior. Your behavior chain might look something like this:

• I was having a decent day at work.
• My supervisor asked whether she could speak with me in her office.
• She proceeded to tell me that our department would have to make some changes and that my colleague and good friend would be leaving.
• It would be my responsibility to perform his job duties until we could find a more suitable arrangement.
• I was overwhelmed and angry.
• I drove home in a “stew.”
• When I got inside, I went directly to the kitchen to decide what to have for dinner.
• Nothing looked good.
• A package of cookies was on the counter, so I ate a few of those while I pondered what to fix.
• Still couldn’t find anything that looked good, so I had some chips, too.
• Settled on a frozen pizza but was really hungry, so I took the bag of chips into the living room and turned on the TV while I waited for the pizza to bake.
• When it was done, I was already engrossed in the TV program, so I took the pizza into the living room, too.
• By the end of the show, I had eaten six slices of pizza and felt sick to my stomach; I was too tired to go for a walk.
• I cleaned up and berated myself for being such a glutton; then resolved to “do better” the next day.

Sound familiar? I’m sure you could share countless similar stories. Why go through the agony of writing it down? Because seeing it on paper demystifies the unwanted behavior. It’s easy to understand why you ate six slices of pizza when you take the day’s events into consideration. If you can get a handle on the purpose your behavior was serving, you can identify alternatives that meet the real need. Seek the help of a counselor, minister, or therapist if you need help identifying or determining how best to meet these needs.