What does intuitive eating really mean? (and why you shouldn't eat if not hungry) Episode 08

• Intro
• Conclusion

Links

• 30 Day Challenge - how to start a carnivore diet
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Starting A Carnivore Diet

If you are interested in starting a carnivore diet, but don't know where to look, make sure you check out my easy yet detailed guide.

What does intuitive eating really mean? (and why you shouldn't eat if not hungry) Episode 08

Intro

Welcome to the Meat Medic Podcast. I'm your host Dr Suresh Khirwadkar.

I'm a GP a lifestyle physician and I'm a practicing carnivore. I've had great success myself personally and with patients by following a carnivore diet and I want to spread the word about the many benefits of eating meat.

What is it?

welcome to the meek medic podcast I'm your host Dr Suresh kawadka I'm a GP and lifestyle physician and I'm a practicing Carnival I've had great success myself and with patience by following a carnivore diet and I want to spread the word about how to achieve Optimal Health through diet nutrition and lifestyle changes in today's episode I want to discuss intuitive eating and what it means I say discussed a lot on the Carnival forums eating till satiety but what does this actually mean A patient with loss of appetite now I recently saw a patient who was concerned that they weren't so sometimes just weren't hungry and this really actually was concerning them a lot they were worried that this was somehow abnormal and that they should always feel hungry or at least want to eat really large meals now of course my medical trading took over and took me straight to thoughts like cancer bowel disease and so on thankfully of course after a comprehensive consultation there weren't any issues found and I was able to reassure my patient and use the opportunity to discuss the diet and metabolic health I questioned why they thought it was a bad thing that they sometimes just weren't hungry they've got me thinking a bit about intuitive eating it's something I discuss a lot with my patients and it's something I've personally become a lot more in tune with since starting the carnivore diet so what is intuitive eating What is intuitive eating? on the website intuitiveeating.org they talk about the 10 principles of intuitive eating so I think that's a good place to start so to talk about rejecting diet mentality honoring hunger making peace with food challenging the food police discovering satisfaction feeling fullness coping with emotions with kindness and not food respecting your body movement and honoring your health now you can read the website but what does this actually all mean well in a nutshell it means not restricting foods and stop looking for quick fixes respecting being hungry understanding what it means accepting the food is okay and it's nutrition for the body understanding that we aren't good or bad depending on the food that we eat learning our satiety signals and when we don't need any more food and accepting our body as long as we are healthy think all very good advice on the whole but what does this actually mean in real Real life meaning? life well we all know there's no quick fixes when it comes to nutrition and diet the idea that we are what we eat does actually have some Merit but it's not as simple as we'll eat fat in your beef fat in fact it's often quite the opposite fat consumption generally helps us to lose weight but if you eat garbage well you probably will be garbage there's really not much way around that some people are more tolerant than others of bad food but bad food will inevitably lead to bad health I mean it's pretty much a fact of life I do agree though with the idea of not going on yo-yo diets repeated dieting because they can cause more harm than good and generally people whose cereal diet will gain weight over time and end up with more health problems as a result of the food that they consume now I actually somewhat disagree about restricting Foods though restricting Foods I think can be a good Restrictive eating and cheat meals thing but of course we have to be sensible about it restrictive eating isn't necessarily A Bad Thing it's not healthy to say well you could eat as much ice cream as you like you'll never be healthy if that's all you eat eating a little bit of ice cream isn't going to kill you but it also isn't really healthy for you okay if it helps you to maintain your Healthy nutrition and health goals by providing you at least some psychological relief you know otherwise known as cheat meals I think that's okay it's a lot of evidence this actually can be very beneficial for some people now some people say carnivore diet is incredibly restrictive because of just the narrow diet and I hear a lot of people patients have come to see me saying that they they just they can't do low carb they can't do keto because it's just oh it's too restrictive but I actually disagree with that statement I don't feel it's restrictive at all because I'm eating the food that I want to eat how can that possibly be restrictive I think it's only restrictive if you're if you aren't eating the food that you want to eat so if you really want to eat ice cream and you not you can't eat ice cream well that is a restrictive diet the real question though is why do you want to eat the ice cream in the first place if you know it's bad for you how can that be good to eat bad food look maybe a little cheat here and there can help you but we've got to accept I think that some food actually just is bad for us so the next big part of course is listening to our hunger signals now the website actually says in this Carbohydrates part that carbs are good and I pretty much completely disagree with that external or exogenous carbohydrates are factually shown to be non-essential to life which means you don't ever need to eat carbohydrates but I digress slightly listening to our hunger signals really does actually mean what it sounds like listening to your body and understanding Hunger, leptin and insulin what hunger is So Hunger is defined as an uncomfortable sensation caused by insufficient dietary energy now that's a pretty bland kind of statement really but it basically means that you know it's not nice to to be hungry and you probably need to eat it's not a cue though that you need to just go and Gorge yourself immediately or that you'll somehow die if you don't get that food but it does sometimes feel like that if it feels like that and you're getting hungry and so forth it's probably because your hormone leptin is being blocked leptin is produced by fat cells and essentially tells your brain hey I've got enough fat already don't worry about it you're not starving this hormone can be pretty effectively blocked by insulin which of course is produced primarily through the ingestion of carbohydrates and sugars it's kind of the equivalent of your brain having one of those really big kind of you know dog cones on and you can't see the rest of its body if you can't see your energy stores as soon as your stomach is empty it thinks you're gonna die because well it's empty and it's got no fuel he took a high carbohydrate diet will block leptin and make your hunger signals completely screwed up and so it will make you feel like you need to eat immediately and Gorge yourself or you'll die now it's kind of like leptin's kind of like the fuel gauge in your car and your fat cells are your fuel tank but insulin has basically just kind of cut the fuel lines so you've got all this this fuel but you can't see it you can't use it and what you end up having to do is just constantly get out of the car and just pull a fuel into the engine directly it's incredibly inefficient way of working and every five miles or whatever you're just you're just gonna conk out and you're gonna feel terrible if you can get the insulin down well basically you're re you're re-engaging those fuel lines you're reconnecting them anyway a lot of people need to relearn hunger signals when going on a low carb diet especially carnivore because their brain isn't actually used to the effect of leptin they don't know what that feels like and some people get really hungry others actually don't get hungry at all and don't eat enough now the second part of this kind of part is learning satisfaction now this refers Learning satisfaction to the sensation of feeling full and being satiated and we don't want to eat till we're bursting that's uncomfortable and unpleasant on the whole we don't even really want to feed eat till we feel full there's a chances are we probably actually ate too much but eating to satiation is a different thing altogether it means eating until you're done not bursting just pleasantly filled now just like the patient in the example earlier if you've ever eaten a meal and halfway through you felt you know what I'm okay I'm done that's okay you're eating to a satiation and satisfaction and that's a good thing it promotes healthy eating behavior and it's unlikely to produce eating disorders this is of course not exclusive to enjoying food we can just totally enjoy food whilst not overeating or indulging in unhealthy eating behaviors most people will tell you that eating meat will tell you it's a great steak it's highly enjoyable probably more than a tub of ice cream actually fact you're infinitely more healthy and they aren't overeating we don't have to eat unhealthy food to Taste and listening to your body feel good or enjoy the food we eat it's a common misconception that Health Food the healthy food tastes bad an unhealthy food tastes good in fact many times it's the opposite the exception being sugar of course because it's a drug now we have taste buds for a reason and it's okay it's to tell our body that we're putting food in it and it's good or bad for us again with the exception of sugar if it tastes good the chances are a body wants it and if it tastes bad the body probably doesn't want it the human race has kind of just forgotten how to listen to our own bodies making peace with food and honoring your health means not beating yourself up if you have a slight snip up you're not going to screw your body up if you have a sip of orange juice or a scoop of ice cream but if you do it repeatedly every single meal then maybe yes you're going to have a problem but once in a while won't really hurt anything you can't undo a whole day or week of good eating and nutrition with a single slipper so don't panic and don't blame yourself just get back into eating in a healthy Manner and shrug it off Emotional eating coping with emotions and not food is important emotional eating can be a major health problem we need to learn how to regulate our emotions without resorting to food now many people can sympathize with opening a tub of ice cream when we're feeling down or tired for that quick dopamine hit from the sugar but it doesn't usually last very long quickly goes away and we're left with feeling a feeling of guilt and emptiness can we probably be still hungry anyway and so we just eat more and the cycle Case example kind of just continues so coming back to my patient my example of a patient who didn't feel hungry so what did I do with them well of course after my medical training kicked in and I initially jumped straight to cancer and other healthy health issues kind of reorganized in my head and actually the first thing I actually said to the patient was why does this concern you now this wasn't someone who never wanted to eat he wasn't caucetic the medical term for significantly underweight this was someone who was a healthy BMI in fact slightly overweight if anything they just sometimes ate and halfway through the bill didn't want to finish it so after a proper consultation examination didn't show anything significant of course I reassured them and explained that actually this was all pretty normal they were just simply listening to their body we went on to discuss further things Disordered eating around intuitive eating and listening to hunger signals and exploring their metabolic health but it got me thinking how far have we gone a society that we think sometimes just not being hungry is pathological that we need to fear not being hungry or something to worry about that was somehow harming ourselves if we're not full to bursting with food all the time and for the rest of the day I just couldn't help thinking how crazy this is as a society that we pathologicalize not eating when we aren't hungry we're so addicted to eating that we just feel unwell when we don't eat even if we're not even hungry and that we worry when we're not hungry and we need to see the doctor because sometimes we just didn't want to eat as perfectly acceptable not to be hungry all the time or want to eat all the time as a society we've created so much disordered eating and it's hard to know when it started really but I'd wager it probably came in around the time of the infamous breakfast is the most important meal of the day line how many times have we heard that and it's still touted today a simple Google search will reveal hundreds of health sites stating this as fact but do you know where it came from Kellogg's it was a 19th century marketing campaign to sell breakfast cereal absolutely no evidence in health and it just shows the power that marketing and money has over all of our health policies and behaviors breakfast has never been the most important meal of the day break fast is but we'll cover that in another upcoming episode on fasting so the marketing line really creates disordered eating and we tell our kids and ourselves that they must eat breakfast even if they're not hungry now there really is the very definition of disordered eating telling someone to eat when they're not hungry how can that possibly be good for someone how many times have we told people you must finish everything on your plate even if you're not hungry you must eat it all you can't waste food how many of our times have our parents told us that how many times we tell our kids that you can't get dessert if you don't finish your veggies well why are we even eating dessert every meal anyway is completely non-essential and why are we rewarding our kids for eating something they don't want to eat that's just Madness and is guaranteed to create disordered eating so intuitive eating is difficult but it starts with us parents and we have to do better to educate our kids on how and what to eat when to eat and how to listen to their hunger signals and satiety signals and of course ourselves as adults what do I feed my kids? now I don't have the magic answer but I try I'm a parent I've got three young kids I completely get it it's bloody annoying when you make dinner and they don't want to eat it and then five minutes later they're suddenly hungry again now I'm not immune to that half time my kids don't even eat their food and then they just want to go and eat something five minutes later sometimes food gets wasted and it sucks but I tried to listen to them I make them food a selection of food usually and I kind of just put it on the table they pick what they want and they eat how much they want now when we first started doing this it was kind of just chaos but over time they've become a bit more sensible and pick mainly what they want to eat and ask for more if they're still hungry anything left over get eaten later and generally they want actually far less sugar than they used to and they want to eat more wholesome food more meat and actually sometimes they want to eat vegetables they haven't gone full carnivore like me but that's fine because they're eating what they want to and I believe that's probably what's best for them I believe they're listening to their body and their bodies are telling them go any vegetables and that's fine with me so intuitive eating is difficult but not impossible it takes some effort and definitely takes some getting used to it but we can all do it thank you for tuning in to this episode of the meet medic podcast subscribe for more episodes and if you want to support this podcast please see the links in the description

Conclusion

Intermittent fasting can be incredibly potent, and potentially has multiple health benefits. It's proven to be beneficial in fat loss and diabetes and anecdotally helpful in many other conditions. It's easy to do, requires no special training, no supplements or pills, and can be done by almost anyone. If you're pregnant breastfeeding or a child it's not routinely recommended so, if you do fall into these categories then you should speak to your doctor about the risks and benefits of intermittent fasting.

If you are looking for a guide on how to start a carnivore diet, click here

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