The Truth About Weight Loss: Chapter 5
Knowing Your Body’s Real Hungers
When you are struggling with weight problems, the first step in the “Truth” and “Honesty” part of the D.E.P.T.H. process is identifying your “real” hungers versus “phantom” hungers. By “real” hunger, I refer to your body’s actual need for nutrition. Although overweight and obesity are not always caused solely by overeating, most people who have a weight problem do have issues with food. Therefore you need to begin paying attention to your behavior so you can figure out when and why you eat, especially when you are not necessarily hungry.
There’s an old phrase, often used to admonish or ridicule someone who eats to excess: “Eats like a pig.” What most people don’t know is that, left to its own devices and offered a healthy range of foods, a pig will eat exactly what its body requires. It is in the pig’s nature to store food (a nature highly encouraged by breeders who want to realize as much body weight as possible from a given amount of feed), so the animal gets very large. Were the pig’s genetic tendency to store surplus nutrients reversed, so would be its tendency to obesity, for the pig eats only for nourishment, unlike humans, who eat — and overeat — for any number of reasons having absolutely nothing to do with our bodies’ actual needs.
Where the first step in our weight loss efforts is to acknowledge our present condition, the second step must be to identify what our bodies genuinely need in order to remain healthy. Just what and how much of each type of food the body actually requires is a constantly evolving standard, evidenced by the frequent revisions to the government’s widely publicized and almost universally accepted Food Pyramid (see following page).