Want to lose weight? Start by controlling your hunger pangs
Want to lose weight? Start by controlling your hunger pangs. Photo | Photosearch
What you need to know:
If you’re looking to shed a few pounds, I highly recommend thinking about why you eat and you could soon see the weight falling off.
When Wendo’s parents brought her to see me, they did so because Wendo suffered from serious autism. At 17(and 100kgs), she had not finished school and she was on medication for recurrent seizures. Despite her photographic memory and being good with numbers (autistic children are often very intelligent), Wendo has gotten to a point where her speech was deteriorating, she had serious eczema and she was tired a lot of the time.
Fast forward three and a half months and Wendo had made far-reaching progress. The debilitating anxiety had stopped and she was starting to make small talk with strangers. She wasn’t yawning all the time and her energy had made a marked improvement. She had also finished school. But despite her impressive strides on the autistic spectrum, it’s her weight that I want to talk to you about today.
In just 16 weeks, Wendo had lost 15kg (and was still going strong). How had she achieved this tremendous feat? Simply by doing as she was told.
You see, most of us don’t eat because we’re hungry. We live in a society, where people eat when they’re bored, lonely, angry, stressed, or tired (sometimes called BLAST), not to mention happy!
When you are eating at these times, you’re not paying attention to simple hunger cues or feelings of fullness. The eating is mindless and we end up putting things in our mouths that rationally, we wouldn’t eat. For example, it’s one thing to enjoy chips as part of your meal, but quite another to wolf them down in front of the TV.
Aside from the junk food in Wendo’s diet, there were also two substances that most commonly cause problems with people on the autistic spectrum (from ADHD and autism, to schizophrenia and epilepsy). They were gluten (the protein found in wheat, rye, barley, and oats) and casein (the protein found in dairy produce). One of the other things that we included religiously in Wendo’s diet was bone broth (made by boiling the large, tubular bones of large animals for 72 hours).
Wendo then ate at mealtimes and had a fruit snack if hungry (which she often wasn’t). There was no restriction on the size of the meal, just that the proportions needed to be half veggies, a quarter protein, and a quarter starchy carbohydrate. That was it.
Wendo lost weight because she started to eat healthier food and because she was eating when hungry. If you’re looking to shed a few pounds, I highly recommend thinking about why you eat and you could soon see the weight falling off.
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