Normal eating is going to the table hungry and eating until you are satisfied. It is being able to choose food you like and eat it and truly get enough of it—not just stop eating because you think you should. Normal eating is being able to give some thought to your food selection so you get nutritious food, but not being so wary and restrictive that you miss out on enjoyable food. Normal eating is giving yourself permission to eat sometimes because you are happy, sad or bored, or just because it feels good. Normal eating is mostly three meals a day, or four or five, or it can be choosing to munch along the way. It is leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful. Normal eating is overeating at times, feeling stuffed and uncomfortable. And it can be undereating at times and wishing you had more. Normal eating is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating. Normal eating takes up some of your time and attention, but keeps its place as only one important area of your life. In short, normal eating is flexible. It varies in response to your hunger, your schedule, your proximity to food and your feelings.
Agriculture is the main income-generating activity performed by the 95% indigenous Maya population in the Lake Atitlán watershed, a region nestled in the highlands of Guatemala. Despite this, there remains a high degree of malnutrition, with 29% of the population living in extreme poverty, predominantly found in the small rural communities in the hills above the lake. sourceposted by xchmp at 3:28 PM on November 29, 2012 [2 favorites]
"As it turns out, there are four factors that comprise eating competence:posted by matcha action at 4:28 AM on November 30, 2012 [3 favorites]
1. A good attitude toward food and eating. People with good eating competence enjoy eating, and they don’t feel guilty about either food or their enjoyment of food. They are pretty relaxed about it.
2. They are also decent at trying new things, and at eating not-super-favourite foods when the situation calls for it. They are not afraid of food — even “unhealthy” food — and, as such, they manage to eat a decent variety.
3. They are pretty good at internally regulating how much they eat. They can feel hunger. They can feel satiety. They can comfortably eat until they are truly satisfied, both physically and emotionally.
4. They plan ahead to feed themselves. They do the work necessary to ensure there is food on hand, and they have regular meals. They give some thought to nutrition, as well as taste, when selecting food. They make the time to eat, and to give some attention to their food while eating.
What are the outcomes for people who tend to eat this way? Well, they tend to have stable body weights (even if they are fat.) They also tend to have better blood pressure and blood cholesterol levels, which translates into a lower risk of heart disease."
I think the answer is not to clamp down with food restriction, but to build our eating competence skills by being responsible and structured, and also allowing ourselves to seek pleasure, with food.That's what I do, as a normative weight person, and it works fine for me; I don't think it's ridiculous to suggest that it might work for other people, too. She then goes on to make a really smart link between the way the food industry advertises and packages food, and the disordered ways we eat:
The industry at large profits from people eating in black-and-white, all-or-nothing ways: eating a ton of calorie-rich food, then clamping down and restricting and using products to help them eat as little as possible. Learning to eat well results in people eating moderately – by which I mean eating tasty, nourishing foods in comfortable quantities – which isn’t very exciting and doesn’t provide a good platform to sell products and diet books from.She ends with something I've been more and more thinking about myself in the last year or so (spurred in large part by FPPs and discussions here on Metafilter, actually):
Since weight loss is supposedly about “getting healthy,” why not cut out the middle-man? Focus on doing stuff directly for your health, and let your weight sort itself out.Skinny is not automatically healthy -- just ask the family of meth addicts on the other side of my block. I think sometimes the health at any size people overreach -- there are health consequences of being large, too. But the solution is to work on being healthier, not smaller, and emphatically not on losing weight in ways that have been scientifically proven to be both unhealthy and ineffective.
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posted by still_wears_a_hat at 2:20 PM on November 29, 2012 [2 favorites]