Children and intuitive eating

I raised my children with strict rules - they could only eat chocolate after tea and only if they had been good, they could only eat sweets after tea at the weekend and only if they had been good. They were allowed fizzy drinks once a week, never allowed lollipops and no cereal with more than 20g of sugar per 100g. I wanted to give them eating habits that would keep them healthy. And then I realised that I was giving them attitudes to food that would ruin their relationship with it: food is a reward, some foods are bad and shouldn't be eaten, some foods are good and have to be eaten before any bad food can be eaten, food is an emotional issue. So after much careful deliberation, I decided to change.

The switch from heavy regulation to intuitive eating could not be done slowly - it had to be done all at once. We told the girls, aged 3, 6 and 8, that they could now eat anything they wanted provided they were hungry, they sat down at the table and concentrated on their food and they stopped when they had had enough. We asked them what foods they wanted to eat and we bought them in abundance. And then the binge started.

In the first 2 days they ate more sweets than they would have been allowed to eat in a month. They ate coco pops, chocolate brioche, marshmallows, chocolate digestives and turkish delight. They didn't eat any bread, fruit, vegetables or cheese. In short, they indulged their food fantasies.

As they started to realise that this was a permanent change, they slowly reduced their bingeing and started to eat more of the foods they had enjoyed before. My biggest challenge then was getting them to understand what 'hungry' meant. How often do any of us actually get hungry before we eat? How do you explain to a child what hunger means? They wanted to eat again 30 minutes after a big lunch, and said they were hungry. Is this what it is like being a growing child, or were they just bored and saying they were hungry? Was it a big lunch for me because I had eaten too much and they had only eaten just what they needed? I had to trust them and allow them to eat.

3 weeks on things are really settling down. They eat what they want for breakfast but if they aren't hungry, they don't eat and I put a snack in their coat pocket on school days for break time. We still sit down for family meals but they don't have to eat if they aren't hungry. If they prefer, they can get something else out of the fridge or the cupboard if they aren't hungry for what I have made. I put the main course on the table and allow them to help themselves. At the same time I put any cake we have, yoghurts, fruit and puddings on the table. They can move onto sweet whenever they want, or even start there.

The discussions about what they can and can't have have stopped completely. They know that if they are hungry, they can eat and they don't bother me with the details any more. I don't have to consider and agree to or turn down their requests any more, or deal with their pleading or complaints. I don't have to decide if they have had enough main course to have pudding, or remember if they have been good enough to have their treats. For them, food isn't an emotional issue any more - it has nothing to do with their behaviour, their previous eating or the time. It is just about whether they are hungry or not, and what they are hungry for. Exactly what it should be about.

My only remaining concern is their teeth. We have always tried to keep their eating of foods containing sugar to 4 occasions a day and most days it is now more than that. I will be taking them to the dentist in August and will see if there has been any change in the state of their teeth.

Although I am aware that their diet is not as 'healthy' as it was, I believe that a daughter is for life and not just for childhood. Although I was controlling their food intake now, I was setting them up for eating problems as adults. Taking their whole lives into account, their new beliefs about food will give them a healthier overall lifestyle and a good relationship with food and their own bodies.

on alcohol

Sitting here with a glass of wine, I think it is time to talk about alcohol.

My family has a tradition of over-use of alcohol so I have always known that I have to be careful . I do have a lot to thank alcohol abuse for - I started seeing my husband because I had heard that he needed a drink at lunchtime and decided to go and save him. I didn't know at the time that he had a similar family history and was well aware of where he was heading. But I did save him, and he repaid me by becoming the love of my life.

In my late 30s I had come very close to being dependent on alcohol. I spent 2 months of the year abstaining completely, which is widely acknowledged to be a sign of dependency problems. Outside of those months, I usually had a set of rules to stick to: sometimes I only drank at weekends, sometimes I limited myself to 2 units in any one day, or 14 units a week. I never allowed myself to drink until Dave was home or the children were in bed. None of these rules did anything to curb my desire to drink.

I had my first memory blackout on my 19th birthday. I remember sitting in the bar in the early evening and telling the people I was with that I wasn't drunk enough to get on my chair and dance yet. That is the last thing I remember until the morning. Apparently, I was dancing on my chair before the end of that song, and was found wandering around at 2am, but I remember nothing of it. These memory gaps have been a regular occurence since and always caused a huge feeling of guilt - we all know that we get sentimental and over-emotional when drunk but not to even know what I did or said was quite embarassing and sometimes frightening.

After a few weeks of following the principles of Beyond Chocolate, I decided to apply them to alcohol. I got rid of all the rules with one new addition - as I couldn't really equate being hungry to alcohol, I made a different stipulation: if I 'needed' a drink, then there was something I had to address, and I found a different way of doing that. If I wanted a drink, then I had one. Often the need would subside if I just waited and then I could enjoy a drink later.

The difference this made was huge. Firstly, because I didn't drink out of a perceived need, I drank much slower. Previously, I had got past that 'I think I have had enough' stage, because by the time I felt it, I had already drunk enough wine to put me past it into the 'lets have lots more' stage. Drinking slower allowed me to notice this warning and stop when I had had enough. Much like food, I was no longer using alcohol as a way of expressing or supressing my emotions.

When I limited myself to drinking at weekends, Friday to Sunday for example, I always drank on those days. It would be a waste otherwise. When I could only have 2 units a day, I had those 2 units every day. Now I have as many units as I want and some days I have none. The most solid behaviour - not drinking when alone with the children - has remained. When I want to drink at these times, it is always out of 'need' rather than desire.

I have used the same approach to wine as I did to chocolate - I started focusing on quality rather than quantity. We are paying more for our wine now, but drinking less. I always look forward to a glass of wine when I have finished teaching and felt quite deprived when my rules didn't allow that. Now I can have one and yet I don't always. Perhaps the most exciting change is that I haven't had a memory blackout since I read the book. I haven't had a bad hangover either.

I don't think I have it cracked - I still feel that I am parked at the top of a slippery slope and will always have to be vigilant, but now I am static and not concerned about sliding down.

On depression

I used to think that The Rolling Stones song "Paint it Black" was about life after the Vietnam war, maybe because it was the theme tune to Tour of Duty. More recently I think it feels a lot like depression.

I woke up one day last week and depression descended on me like a soggy black blanket. "I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes. I have to turn my head until my darkness goes". As I walked to school I felt physically weighed down by the grief and blackness I felt. I could feel the dread of the coming day pushing on the back of my neck. "I look inside myself and see my heart is black".

I know that people who have never had depression can't truly understand what it feels like, but I think listening to this song is a good start. When I am feeling this way, there is no joy in the day. Every day has its ups and downs but when I am depressed there are no ups. What I found a happy thought last week is now a grim one, what I was looking forward to I know is going to be miserable.

Then people on the way to school smile and say "hello, how are you?" and I stick on the smile I made at home and give them the stock answer. I can't bring myself to lie but I know they don't really want to hear the truth so I settle for "OK. You?" and hope that they are as keen to move on as I am. If one of my friends notices that I am not myself then my cover is blown. She'll ask what's up and I will look at her and wonder how I could possibly answer that question. Then my eyes will fill with tears and I will try to get away before I make a fool of myself in the playground. I then hurry back home where I can hide.

Despair is an almost physical emotion. It weighs on my head and makes me look down. When I do look up, it is from that position which gives me a permanent frown. I just skulk through my day hoping it will end quickly but knowing that tomorrow will be no better.

Then suddenly, or slowly, it lifts. I start to find I am looking forward to something, or I enjoy something and I know things are going to get better. This week it all happened so quickly that I was quite shaken by it. I felt the deep despair almost from waking and then when I dropped off my littlest at nursery it lifted in a matter of minutes. As soon as I was back in my home alone I started to feel positive and relaxed. I wonder what that says about me. I daren't think. I just know that I need time alone to feel grounded.

Don't really know how to finish this section.

A landmark weekend

We've had last weekend planned for months. Since before I read Beyond Chocolate. I've imagined it so many times that I didn't think it could possibly live up to expectation. But it did. In fact, it exceeded expectation.

We left the children at home with my parents after lunch on Friday and drove to a spa hotel. We settled into our lovely room and then went down to the bar we saw on the way in - sat at tables outside in the sun, doing the things that people without children do. We lazed about drinking beer and chatting all afternoon and then had dinner in the hotel's restaurant.

We had £25 each included with the cost of the break and it was very easy to get 3 courses for that money. So, there I was, pretty merry after 5 bottles of beer and a cocktail, eating delicious food with my lovely husband. A recipe for over-eating, but I didn't. I ate all my starter and about half of my main course. Then I had the best cheesecake I have ever had - white chocolate with strawberry sorbet. I savoured each mouthful slowly with my eyes closed, and then left half of it on the plate.

The following day we had breakfast included in the cost. I wasn't hungry so toyed with the idea of having just one sausage and just one hash brown, but instead I went and got some yoghurt, some mango puree and a bit of honey. It was lovely and all that I needed to keep me going until lunch. On Sunday I had nothing for breakfast except a few cups of peppermint tea, because that is what my body wanted. £12.50 worth of breakfast available and I had a cup of herbal tea. I could never have predicted that.

So, after a weekend of eating and drinking exactly what I wanted, I felt on top of the world. Last time I stayed in a hotel where the food was all included, I ate so much that I was sick in the night when I had rolled over onto my stomach. This time I left the hotel 1lb lighter than when I arrived. I had the energy to visit the gym twice while there, which I was surprised to really enjoy, and I did plenty of little bits of swimming. I did lots of reading (Breaking Free from Emotional Eating by Geneen Roth) and a fair amount of quiet reflection.

Altogether, a totally perfect weekend and the most relaxing one I have had for years. And a triumph of Intuitive Eating over Bingeing.

Eating what I fancy

For any serial dieter, the concept of eating what you fancy is an exciting but all too short-lived one. It's not for life, it's just for Christmas. In many ways, it's what we do when we are in between diets. But are we really eating what we fancy? It feels like it is, but what we are probably eating is the foods we know we won't be able to eat when we are back on our diet.

Anyone who has ever done the Atkins diet will know how quickly you start to crave fruit and veg once the diet says you can't have it. This is the very food that you didn't fancy when you were on the Slimming World diet and it was 'free'. As soon as something is banned, we want it.

Every day I sat and watched the kids eating fun size chocolate as their treat after their evening meal, and wished that I could have some with them. When I started Beyond Chocolate they weren't banned any more. It didn't take me long to realise that I didn't actually like them very much. In fact, I eat them less often now than I did when they were banned, and it's not will power: I just don't fancy them,

I still eat chocolate, but probably no more often than I did before. What's changed is the amount and the type. I used to shove it in, mouthful after rushed mouthful, usually when no-one else was looking, usually standing up or hidden in my bedroom. Now I eat it slowly and enjoy it. My favourite at the moment is praline shells - I bite half of one and let it slowly melt in my mouth. I usually close my eyes at this point and enjoy the smooth velvety feeling. When it has all gone I eat the other half the same way. When that one is finished, if I fancy it I have another one. So far I have eaten no more than 3 in one sitting - I have had enough by that point. This isn't will power, I am just eating what I fancy. It amazes me how much I thought I loved chocolate, and yet I never allowed myself to sit and enjoy it. It's as if I was trying to get it in and eaten as quickly as possible.

When they hear the title Beyond Chocolate, a lot of people seem to think it is about stopping eating chocolate. That couldn't be more wrong. Those of us who have read it celebrate chocolate and the eating of it. We look for more ways of enjoying it all the time, and new sources to buy it. What we don't do is hide it, crave it, stuff it in or allow it to take control of our lives. We are in control.

and today...

I thought it was about time I wrote something about what is happening now. It was a great day for food, and lazing about. Dave and I didn't wake up properly until after 9am - the kids were downstairs playing. The we lazed about in bed reading and dozing until about 11am. This is heaven as anyone who has had small children will know. I was hungry when I got downstairs but Dave had already been down and put a leg of lamb in the oven and I knew that would be ready at about 1pm. So I had a banana to keep me going and went out into my veg garden to plot the death of some slugs.

We both busied about the house making food and getting software onto my netbook. I made cheese sauce for the cauliflower and we made some decisions about how we are going to work with the Beyond Chocolate approach for the children. Instead of putting the cheese sauce on the cauliflower, we served it on its own so anyone could take it in the proportions they wanted. We didn't serve the kids food at all. They served themselves so they could choose what to have and how much. We didn't say they had to finish what they had before having more of anything - we let them be in charge. It was quite different, but not different enough to be alarming.

I ate off a tea plate and added a couple of bits of this and that as I went along. In the end, I probably had about 1.5 tea plates-full of food. For pudding we had yoghurt (full fat) with granola and cherries. It's organic so I am hoping it will not make me as aggressive as dairy usually does. I half-filled one of the children's plastic bowls for my portion. I had some wine as well. Had about half a glass and gave the rest to Dave. It was nice, but I didn't want any more.

Felt a bit stuffed in the afternoon and not at all hungry when the girls had their tea at about 5pm. I had 2 bites of the choc-chip buns I made for them as they were an experiment and I wanted to know how they turned out. We had our tea at about 7pm - Dave had made a curry out of the leftover lamb and cauliflower and we had it with a wholemeal tortilla. I had a small bowl and one tortilla followed by one of the buns from earlier. That was enough for me and I haven't had anything else to eat today.

In comparison to how I used to eat, that is amazing. Even if I had eaten as little as that during a meal, I would have grazed all evening. And the wine - I often restricted myself to drinking just at weekends, so I would have had a drink tonight as I wouldn't be able to for several days. As it is, I am teaching tomorrow night and I love a glass of wine when I have finished teaching. I know I can have a glass of wine any night I like so I don't need to have it. If I start a glass and don't want to finish it, I don't.

I have a box of my new favourite praline chocolates a few inches fom my head. I have given myself permission to eat them whenever I am hungry and fancy them. I don't fancy them very often but when I do, I slowly eat 2 or 3 and really enjoy them. How different from the binge scoffing of the very recent past.

Well, that's today's successes. My challenge for this week is working out exactly what I do want to eat, rather than what I like most from the selection currently and conveniently available. The idea is that the more I get in touch with what I really want, the more satisfied I will be by what I eat and the more I will be giving my body what it needs.

Hunger

Geneen Roth writes in her book "Breaking Free from Emotional Eating" that not one of the twenty five or so diets she has been on has mentioned anything about eating when you are hungry.

One of the selling points for Slimming World for me was that I never had to be hungry: there was always free food I could eat. In fact, for many years, I got hungry very rarely and when I did, I considered it a mistake, the result of an oversight. I once met a woman who ran a slimming club who told me that hunger was our friend. I'm not sure what she meant by that but I don't think she meant it was signal to eat. But that's basically what it is, isn't it? It's not a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a natural thing, a sign from our bodies that we need to eat.

So why did I resist getting hungry? Maybe it was simply that I couldn't resist eating for as long as it took for my stomach to empty. I just enjoyed eating so much that I did it - lots.

Our society tells us when to eat. We get up and we must eat breakfast, after all "it's the most important meal of the day". We have to eat at our lunch break because we can't eat outside of that time. We eat dinner at a more flexible time but usually a whole family will eat together, regardless of whether they are all hungry or not. This shared meal time is one of the cornerstones of our civilisation and many others.

So we are brought up to eat not when we are hungry, but when we are told to eat. That coupled with the obsession with clearing our plate (because of the starving children in Africa, as if our over-eating helps them at all) adds up to a generation of people eating based on several factors of which hunger is not one. Our natural body signals telling us to start or stop eating are overriden and we learn to ignore them. Is this part of the reason for the epidemic of obesity that is expected or possibly already here?

So, what now? I have had a hard time leaving the feelings about breakfast behind. "It starts the metabolism" they say, but surely getting up and moving around starts my metabolism and failing to add food to my stomach can't stop that process. Now I eat when I get hungry. Sometimes that is as soon as I get up so I eat before the children come down. More often it is later and I eat after I have dropped them off at school and nursery or playgroup. I don't eat lunch as such, I eat again when I am hungry. If I have eaten early, it is often mid morning but it can be much later, especially if I am busy and don't tune in to the early signs of hunger.

Not eating tea with the children was hard. I felt strange sitting down but not eating. After a while I realised that it meant I could feed them in the kitchen and not have to keep running back and forward to get things, but it also meant that when I did eat, I could focus on it rather than chewing fast in between clearing up mess and sorting out arguments.

I always disciplined myself not to eat in the evenings when I was on a diet. This meant that I sometimes went to bed hungry, which isn't very comfortable. Now I eat in the evening if I am hungry in the evening, but if I am not hungry, I don't eat. It sounds so simple and logical but it is anything but simple at first. The grazing habit is very hard to break but once I got used to going to bed satisfied rather than hungry or stuffed, I didn't want to give that up again.

I am still working on this. If I have made a lovely meal, I sometimes still eat even if I am not hungry. And when I have had a drink, I usually snack without hunger, but not to the same extent as I used to. I am improving all the time and finding out new things about myself almost daily. For example, I found out today that my post-swimming hunger is very superficial and can be as easily satisfied with a drink as with food.

I will close with another quote from Geneen Roth: Being hungry is like being in love: if you don't know, you're probably not.