There are an infinity of diets and nutritional tips out there, and all of them promise the same thing - that you can lose weight without sacrificing the foods you love and without feeling hungry. Despite the abudance of all this diet material, rates of obesity are currently spiralling out of control in the Western World. This would suggest to me that something is fundamentally wrong with almost all diets and the commonly accepted principles of losing weight healthily.
From my personal experience of struggling with weight all my life, my experience as a hypnotherapist, my knowledge of human natural history, and my understanding of the nature of the mind and perception, I have reached a controversial conclusion: FEELING HUNGRY IS GOOD FOR YOU.
This assertion slaughters the great "sacred cow" of thinking in modern nutrition - that feeling hungry is bad for you, an illness that needs a remedy. I feel like the little boy in the story of the Emperor's New Clothes who can see there's something blatantly preposterous going on. The crux of the problem, and the reason weight-loss fails in the majority of attempts, is the misguided paradigm of pandering to feelings, when in reality the individual's perception is itself warped, and there is no real understanding of what hunger actually is. Apart from in the cases of genuine clinical eating disorders, being hungry and "feeling hungry" have nothing to do with each other at all.
Put any overweight person on 1500 calories per day with adequate vitamins, minerals and protein, and there can be no doubt that the changes within that person's body are very good for them. Unfortunately, what in most cases sabotages this positive change is what's going on the person's mind - they feel absolutely terrible! The problem is clearly not what's actually happening to them, but the way mind is processing the input its getting from the nerves.
The solution to this problem is not more food! Neither is it attempting to come up with some magic formula in which the individual consumes far less calories than they are used to and doesn't feel hungry. If such a magic formula really existed it would work for everybody. At best, any particular diet only works for a minority.
The real answer is to dump commonly accepted but completely wrong ideas about the feeling called "hungry", and rather than bending over backwards to avoid it, embrace it, give it a new label and accept it as how healthy people feel most of the time - rather than a "bad" feeling it's actually a very good sign indeed. With that in place, people should replace their ideas about eating to what they're doing, rather than what they're feeling.
In the second part of this article, I will explain how feelings of hunger have got confused with real hunger, and how this can be adressed.
