DIET | DETECTIVE^®

I have a friend who I can depend on when I have to lose weight. She is not a weight loss counselor or psychologist or trainer. She is simply someone who  does not like to eat.  And when we spend a week together as we do once a year for our annual hiking trip, I know that I will lose at least 5 pounds simply by eating or not eating the way she does.

Mary Jane ( not her real name) is not anorexic. She is simply very very thin. If you look at her sideways, she looks two dimensional. Her childhood was spent fighting off her grandmother’s insistence that she clean her plate and as she told me, “ when I finally left home, I was determined that no-one would ever tell me that I had to eat what was in front of me.”

The first time we went hiking together as part of a larger group, I was intrigued by her eating habits. The rest of us would dip into our  trail mix or munch on a banana while walking and eat a large sandwich and cookies at lunchtime. Mary Jane would eat half a banana , a few nibbles of nuts and maybe half a sandwich. , After 6-7 hours of hiking some fairly steep trails, we would all be ready for a full course dinner at night. But not Mary Jane. She would eat half a roll, a few ounces of chicken or fish, some vegetables and then announce that she was full.

Watching her it was obvious that thin people simply eat less than those who weigh more. This is a fact that most of us would rather not know.

But it was also obvious in watching her that year and for many more to come that Mary Jane is one of the only people I know who never eats when she was not hungry. Or to put it another way, when her need to nourish her body was met, she stopped eating. If this meant leaving 3/4ths of the food on her plate, she did. She never ate dessert because she was not hungry.  Nor did she lust after some wonderful pastry or chocolate or candy that our hiking group might encounter when coming into a new town when our hike was over.  Once we were walking through a town square late in the afternoon on the way to our inn after a day long hike. It was a warm afternoon and people were sitting outside eating large dishes of what looked like homemade icecream. My mouth watered as we passed the cafe but when I suggested to Mary Jane that we stop and have some ourselves, she agreed to stopping only if she could get some iced tea. The icecream and baked goods being consumed around her did not tempt her.  As I was on my “ see what Mary Jane eats, eat what Mary Jane eats” program, I did not have any icecream either. Although I wish I had.

Does Mary Jane have superhuman will power? Is she secretly obsessed with keeping her size 00 figure?  Did her lack of interest in eating stem from a lifelong desire to show her grandmother that no-one can make her eat?

I don’t think her disinterest in eating is related to any of the above. Mary Jane simply does not have an appetite. She has hunger but she doesn’t have this impulse to eat , what I call appetite, after her hunger is satisfied.

Alas most of us do have an appetite. It is our appetite that provokes us into eating long after our hunger is satisified. We are full but the food on the plate is so tasty, we continue to eat it. We are full but our appetite  makes us want those after- dinner   cookies,  crunchy snacks,  cake,or an icecream cone. We are full but upset, angry, tired, bored, frustrated,  anxious, worried or overwhelmed and we eat.    

When I am eating with Mary Jane, I become acutely aware of how much  eating I normally do after my hunger is satisfied. And I notice how easy weight loss becomes when I ask myself, “ am I really hungry or am I eating because the food is there or I am tired or using food as a distraction or entertainment.?”

Mary Jane isn’t available for my weight loss needs after we finish our hiking week. So I have to rely on the next best thing; fooling my appetite into being satisfied. Fortunately, I know how to this ; it is as simple as eating a cup of wheat chex or puffins cereal or munching on a cup of pretzels. These fat free carbohydrates will get my brain to make serotonin, a chemical that acts as an appetite shut-off. So I too can eat only out of hunger, even though Mary Jane is not around.

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