Reconnecting with our body’s signals is a way to reduce overeating and maximise health.
Question:
I am permanently in a wheelchair and wonder if there are dietary techniques to help me from gaining weight. I use my arms a lot, but it is my waist/hip area I would like to control.
Answer:
Weight gain around the waistline may seem merely a cosmetic concern, but because so-called belly fat is often more than skin deep, abdominal fat has a dark side.
Subcutaneous fat is the padding located just below our skin and is not of particular concern from a health perspective. It’s the visceral fat that lies deep inside the abdomen – large fat deposits around our internal organs – that pose a significant health risk.
When excessive amounts of visceral fat accumulate, they produce hormones and other compounds that increase blood pressure, alter cholesterol levels and impair our insulin usage (leading to insulin resistance), thereby increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and more.
But what can we do, given that weight-loss diets invariably fail in the medium to long term for almost all dieters?
For women, the issue is complicated by their midlife transition. The hormonal changes that occur around perimenopause contribute substantially to increased abdominal obesity, according to a 2012 review in the journal Climacteric. So, irrespective of wheelchair use, hormonal changes will likely contribute (or have already contributed) to abdominal weight gain for you.
Hormones aside, the question remains: how do we eat in a way that optimises health and overall wellbeing? Rigid diets with fixed rules are still common, but in reality, they produce only short-term weight loss. Almost all dieters eventually regain all their lost weight, and in some cases, more weight than they initially lost. So, clearly, weight-loss diets are not the answer.
Instead, a growing segment of nutrition health professionals advocate non-diet approaches to healthy eating, such as intuitive eating. Studies have found that intuitive eating improves health for overweight women who are chronic dieters. Unlike dieters, intuitive eaters achieved and maintained improvements in blood pressure and blood-cholesterol levels in one study, whereas dieters did not. The intuitive eaters also kept a steady body weight, whereas the dieters lost weight and regained it all during the two-year study.
Another study, published in 2021, found that intuitive eaters appeared to have better psychological health and exhibited fewer disordered eating behaviours than dieters. A study from 2017 also found intuitive eaters had fewer body-image concerns than dieters.
Intuitive eating is an evidence-based scientific framework that focuses on responding to our body’s signals of hunger, fullness and satisfaction – something many of us have ignored during our adult years.
Young children intuitively respond to their appetite, which results in noticeable changes to daily food intake (perplexing many parents). However, many adults lose touch with this natural ability and must relearn how to listen to their body’s hunger and fullness signals.
I highly recommend the latest (fourth) edition of Intuitive Eating: A revolutionary anti-diet approach, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, as a starting point to learn how to eat intuitively.
Even without the book, you can start becoming an intuitive eater by at least reconnecting with your body’s hunger and fullness cues, thereby reducing overeating.
Start by noticing how hungry and full you are before and after each meal, and write your ratings down on a sheet for a week or two to help you tune into your hunger and fullness.
Eating more slowly will help you to think about how full you’re getting and work out when to stop eating.
There is much more to intuitive eating than just checking and responding to hunger and fullness cues, but this is an excellent place to start, and it’s likely to be much more beneficial to your health and wellbeing in the long term than any weight-loss diet.
