My Experience With Intuitive Eating - Part I

This isn’t my first try at intuitive eating. I’ve actually tried it twice before, once intentionally and once unintentionally. Both times were positive, but I ultimately reverted to emotional eating and the dieting mentality.

My first stab and IE was unintentional. I was a French major in college and spent a semester studying in Paris during my junior year. I arrived in the City of Lights as a chubby 20-year-old, but came home the thinnest I’ve ever been as an adult. I didn't realize it - didn't even know what intuitive eating was - but France was all about intuitive eating. At that time, there were no “diet” foods. Saccharine and aspartame were banned so you couldn’t even get a diet soda! You just ate real foods in reasonable portions and walked everywhere you went. I was nowhere near the size of all those svelte Parisiennes, but I was eating sanely and not obsessing about food or diet. More importantly, I was just having fun. And gradually, without even realizing it was happening, I got thinner. I’m sure I would have lost even more weight if I’d spent an entire year there instead of just a semester.

As an interesting aside, I went back to Paris two years ago for the first time since that college experience and they’re not the same French they were when I was there as a girl. While they’ve surely got a long way to go to catch up with the Americans, I saw chubby people every single day that I was there; that was unheard of 20 years ago. This time, I was shocked to see that candy and soda machines were everywhere, including on the platform of every subway station. Twenty years ago, you could have died of starvation before you’d find a candy machine! This time, fast food abounded and I saw people walking around eating. Again, unheard of two decades ago. Back then, people didn’t snack and they ate proper sit-down meals with their families; they didn’t snarf a sandwich on the run. But also just as interestingly, diet products were not hard to find on this trip. The French may not have liked saccharine or aspartame, but splenda is apparently just fine because it was everywhere, as was Diet Coke. And a stroll through the grocery store found as much junk food, as many frozen meals, and almost as many diet products as you’d see in any American store. Apparently, a lot of French people no longer have the time or desire to cook or sit down to enjoy a proper meal anymore either and oddly, they're starting to have a weight problem. Is there a connection, you think? Hmmm... Even more sadly, it seems that we’re spreading our bad habits around the globe, and it shows. Go U.S.A.!

Well, that was my first inadvertent experience with IE. The next time was a purposeful experience. More on that in days to come.