by RebusCannebus » Sun Mar 02, 2014 10:49 pm
All my life, the answer to the question "When am I full?" has been "When the food is gone." Otherwise, I felt I had no internal mechanism that could reliably and clearly tell me when to stop. I'm following MWL fairly strictly now. The only way I will actually lose weight on it, though, is by instituting some behavioral boundaries to compensate for my "satiety blindness". I eat three meals a day with nothing in between (not textbook MWL, but it's what I have to do). I put down my utensil between mouthfuls. It now takes me 45 minutes, eating alone and without interruption, to finish a typical lunch/dinner. I weigh/measure (also not textbook McDougall) the more calorie dense items I eat (starches) . I've become zealous about starting my meals with the less calorie dense foods (e.g., a big salad) and saving starches for last.
And you know what? It's actually helping me. Not only do these parameters (when combined with the principles of calorie density) help me consume fewer calories, they seem to have helped me develop some genuine discernment about when I'm full. Of course, I then have to make a conscious decision to stop eating when I detect fullness. That's a whole 'nother challenge. As is dealing with what happens when I become un-full before my next meal. That part hasn't been easy. My personal experience has been that the dirty little secret of satiety via the calorie density approach is that achieving satiety that way is easy (i.e., eat a trainload of low-calorie-density food and feel full); keeping satiety is hard (i.e., two hours after a huge but fatless meal I'm sometimes hungry again). But that's just another dimension of this issue: Learning how to distinguish actual hunger from, say, the mere lack of fullness, or from emotional hunger.
Another thing about detecting fullness: For me, it's harder to do sitting down. If I stand up, I get a much better sense of whether I've had enough or not. Strange, huh? Anyway, I can see from this thread that I'm not the only one with these kinds of issues. Good topic.
Peter