HAES Eating: Eat What You’re Hungry For

The second leg in the three-legged stool called HAES-style eating is to eat what you’re hungry for.

I think this might be the most controversial of the three legs of Health at Every Size^® (HAES) eating. It can seem like an open invitation to eat until you pop. People who are deeply entrenched in the old calories-in-calories-out diet mentality have spent so much time and energy restricting, that it totally makes sense to me that when they think about eating what they want, things get a little crazy on the inside.

But eating what you are hungry for is as important to HAES eating as a third leg is to the stability of a stool. If you tell yourself you’ll eat when you’re hungry, and you’ll eat until you’re full — but you’ll only eat from a limited list of acceptable foods, you’re going to have a really hard time getting the full benefits of HAES. You’re still restricting, then, aren’t you? You’re still eating with an eye toward losing weight, instead of with an eye toward competent, intuitive eating that supports your total health and well-being.

When you fully embrace HAES eating, you stop moralizing food. There is no good food and bad food. There is just food. Some food makes you feel good immediately, and bad later. Some food makes you feel pretty good all the time. Some food makes you feel really bad all the time, because your body doesn’t play well with it. But, in general, food is just food.

If you’ve been dieting for most of your life, and you give yourself permission to eat whatever you want, there is a chance that what you want to eat is what you’ve been denying yourself (or equating with capital-B, guilt-inducing  Bad) for all those years. So you might find that for a while, if you ask yourself what you’re hungry for the answer is fried chicken or cake. Maybe two whole cakes, who knows? It could be cheese sandwiches or Lucky Charms or whole milk. Whatever it is, you might find that for a while, that’s what you want to eat.

And that will probably be scary. In fact, it might be so scary that it’s holding you back from giving HAES a try.

Facing the fear of food that falls into your personal Bad column is part of the process.

When you get to the other side, you realize that you don’t want to eat cake all day everyday any more than you really wanted to eat rice cakes with a measured teaspoon of peanut butter. You’ll realize that when fast food stops being the enemy, it’s really pretty gross anyway and you won’t actually want to eat it that often. Why would you, when you have the entire range of available foods open to you?

Even better, when that craving for a Western Bacon Cheeseburger does hit, you’ll just eat one and move on with your life. You’ll enjoy every bite, without it turning into a binge or a round of self-hatred or anything else. Not only that, you’ll eat that Western Bacon Cheeseburger because it’s really what you want in that moment, and not because you’re starting a diet tomorrow and maybe you’ll never, ever get to eat one again. EVER. Which often leads to adding a shake and a giant-size fries, and maybe even some tacos or a pizza, none of which you’re hungry for in the first place, because NEVER EVER AGAIN.

Something magical happens after your body and mind really get the message that no food is off limits. You’ll start to notice that you feel good when you eat some foods, and less good when you eat others. You’ll start to trust your own judgement about when, say, eating that cake is worth the sugar crash that comes after it, and when it’s not. You’ll start to realize that eating a balanced diet isn’t only about losing weight (which probably never happened in a meaningful, lasting way anyway), but also just feels good. And you’ll want to feel good, so what you’re hungry for will become the foods that are going to support that good feeling.

You’ll start to really get that feeling good is not equal to being good. And that, my friends, is like fairy tale magic. Because when you realize that whether or not you’re a worthy person isn’t tied up in your ability to strictly control what you put in your mouth, it’s like shackles falling off.

Eating what you’re hungry for is the most controversial part of HAES because it’s the scariest. There is a huge, multi-faceted, multi-billion dollar machine out there invested in making sure that you believe that you and your body aren’t competent enough to be trusted to eat what you’re hungry for. It’s set up to make you believe you can succeed in being beautiful and having faultless health, if you’re strong enough to follow through, and puts all the blame on you when it fails you time and time again. (If you were part of that machine, how invested would you be in your client’s success? Wouldn’t you want them coming back again and again with their wallets open? Or coming to you after the last diet fails?) You’ve probably trained yourself to believe that eating what you want is equal to eating only the things that you’ve been denying yourself all these years.

You’re so well trained that maybe you’re reading this and thinking, “What kind of a stupid person really believes that anyone should just eat whatever they want?” I expect some pretty strong responses to this post, because I know that the idea of trusting yourself and your body to just eat without all the rules and restrictions is terrifying. I went through it, too. But the end result was feeling mentally and physically better than I have in my entire adult life, having a stable body weight for the first time in at least a decade, and the end of things like binge eating, self-hatred, and wildly-swinging blood sugar.