|
Professor loses weight with no-diet diet
Updated: 2005-12-05 10:07
Slowly and steadily his weight began to drop. Exercise helped.
His friends and co-workers soon took notice of the slimmer Hawks.
"It astonished me, actually," said his friend, Steven Peck. "We were both
very heavy. It was hard not to be struck."
After watching Hawks lose and keep the weight off for a year and a half, Peck
tried intuitive eating in January.
"I was pretty skeptical of the idea you could eat anything you wanted until
you didn't feel like it. It struck me as odd," said Peck, who is an assistant
professor at BYU.
But 11 months later, Peck sometimes eats mint chocolate chip ice cream for
dinner, is 35 pounds lighter and a believer in intuitive eating.
"There are times when I overeat. I did at Thanksgiving," Peck said. "That's
one thing about Steve's ideas, they're sort of forgiving. On other diets if you
slip up, you feel you've blown it and it takes a couple weeks get back into it.
... This sort of has this built-in forgiveness factor."
The one thing all diets have in common is that they restrict food, said
Michael Goran, an obesity expert at the University of Southern California.
Ultimately, that's why they usually fail, he said.
"At some point you want what you can't have," Goran said. Still, he said
intuitive eating makes sense as a concept "if you know what you're doing."
Intuitive eating alone won't give anyone six-pack abs, Hawks said, but it
will lead to a healthier lifestyle. He still eats junk food and keeps a jar of
honey in his office, but only indulges occasionally.
"My diet is actually quite healthy. ... I'm as likely to eat broccoli as eat
a steak," he said. "It's a misconception that all of a sudden a diet is going to
become all junk food and high fat," he said.
In a small study published in the American Journal of Health Education, Hawks
and a team of researchers examined a group of BYU students and found those who
were intuitive eaters typically weighed less and had a lower risk of
cardiovascular disease than other students.
He said the study indicates intuitive eating is a viable approach to
long-term weight management and he plans to do a larger study across different
cultures. Ultimately, he'd like intuitive eating to catch on as a way for people
to normalize their relationship with food and fight eating disorders.
"Most of what the government is telling us is, we need to count calories,
restrict fat grams, etc. I feel like that's a harmful message," he said. "I
think encouraging dietary restraint creates more problems. I hope intuitive
eating will be adopted at a national level."
|
