From skwigg's journal:
Something weird is happening. I'm reading the original Intuitive Eating book (2012 revision) and it's not giving me a rage attack. In fact, I'm thoroughly enjoying it, highlighting it up, and nodding in agreement. Weirder, I took the "Are You an Intuitive Eater?" quiz and aced that thing. I give myself unconditional permission to eat. I eat for physical and not emotional reasons. I rely on internal hunger/satiety cues. And yet this book, even though I've been familiar with it for like 20 years, is not what got me there. This book made me crazy initially. So, I guess I'm reading it with fresh eyes and looking for clues about where the original disconnect may have occurred.
Clearly, I wasn't ready for these concepts at the time I picked up the book. Either that or the book wasn't able to meet me at that particular level of diet madness and baby step me back to trusting myself in a safe way. Going from total restriction to total freedom was a bit like learning to swim by being thrown in to the deep end of a pool face first. It didn't go well. I ended up traumatized, 10+ pounds heavier, and doubting myself more than ever. My first brush with intuitive eating sent me RUNNING back to dieting.
Now, I'm reading this and my thoughts are, "Yes, of course. So true. I agree. Yep. Mmm-hmm."
My mission to figure out where things went wrong is complicated by the fact that there have been so many revisions to the book. For example, they took out almost all numbers because they didn't want people comparing or obsessing. They've apparently added details about how approaching intuitive eating with a diet mentality or an expectation of quick weight loss will go really wrong. Maybe that would have been helpful to know back then. I didn't approach it as a learning process. It was my new (non-diet) diet. I tried it. It didn't work. I blamed it for sucking and making me fat, and hurried on to the next diet. Ugh.
From skwigg's journal:
I'm so glad I gave intuitive eating another chance. I know where it went wrong before. Going from massive restriction to zero structure was overwhelming. I wasn't eating intuitively. I was eating rebelliously, desperately, and in a very UNattuned manner with regard to hunger and fullness. That wasn't my fault or the fault of intuitive eating, it was survival biology, which I took to mean that intuitive eating was stupid and I was broken. It also went wrong because I initially read Geneen Roth and not the actual Intuitive Eating book, which is much more reassuring and informative than "eat all the cookies you want, you'll stop eventually." I know others who have turned it into the hunger and fullness diet, or the hunger and not-quite-as-starving diet, using it very restrictively for weight loss and blaming themselves when they break "the rules." That was never the authors' intention either, but we all bring our own baggage I guess.