If your wish is to:
 
Eat what you want,
Enjoy every guiltless bite,
and Be happy with
whatever way your body looks,

Intuitive Eating works flawlessly,
… but it stops at that point.

Intuitive Eating is letting your body tell you What, When, and How Much to eat.
                             It is NOT a weight-loss tool. 

Intuitive eating means making decisions based on what your body wants, rather than what your mind thinks it should eat. 

The body has a survival mechanism that determines the weight it wants to be. 

When a person who is currently at the weight that their body naturally wants to be, begins to successfully eat intuitively, that body weight will be "effortlessly" maintained.

However, almost every person who is under a “normal” weight, or who is at a “reduced obese” weight, weighs less … sometimes far less … than the higher number that their body’s survival mechanism considers optimal or “normal” for them. 

This means that when those people begin to successfully follow their body signals, they are going to gain weight.  "Reduced obese" people will usually re-gain ALL of their lost weight.

The practice of Intuitive Eating is sometimes called the “hunger and fullness diet”.

When you believe that you can only eat when you are hungry, and that you have done something wrong if you have eaten when you were full, you are using Intuitive Eating as a diet.

When a person feels like they’ve “fallen off the wagon” after choosing to eat according to their desires, instead of their biological cues, they are using Intutive Eating as a diet. 

A person can ONLY “fall off a wagon” when there’s a wagon to fall off of.  The term, “wagon” is a metaphor for "diet": meaning a set of rules, ideals or beliefs around food that we let determine how we feel about ourselves. 

Resisting whatever weight that your body considers to be your natural weight, makes it impossible to get to a “neutral and intuitive” place with food. 

Any Intuitive Eating guru who teaches normal eating, but also promises-or-implies a weight-loss result, raises a big red flag. 🚩 Lessons on listening to your hunger will fall short if you are unwilling to gain weight. That’s a diet masked as “intuitive eating”.

“Where the rubber hits the road” refers to the Moment of Truth of something.
The point at which the Theory is put into Practice. 
The point in a Process where there are Challenges, Issues, or Problems.

Most people understand that the process of Dieting to achieve a large weight-loss is difficult.  However, Long-term Maintenance of a large-weight loss is the real Point in the process of Dieting where the rubber hits the road.

26 years ago, (Dec. 1992) my weight was 271 lbs.  I’m 5’0” tall, so that’s a 52.9 BMI = Stage 4 obesity = Super-obese. After an open RNY gastric bypass which allows 100% of all calorie intake to still be absorbed, I lost down to 161 pounds, which is a 31.4 BMI = Stage 1 obesity, and maintained near there for a couple of years.

But then my weight began creeping up, and it became necessary for me to start dieting again to avoid a rapid regain. 10 years later, I was dieting to maintain my weight in the 190s, which is a 37 to 38 BMI = Stage 2 = Severe obesity, near the top border between Stages 2 & 3 = Morbid obesity. 

DietHobby’s “ABOUT ME” section provides a summary of my weight history details.   BLOG CATEGORIES, Status Updates contains many articles that share an ongoing record of my weight and calorie numbers.

13+ years ago (Sept. 2004)  I began logging ALL of my daily food intake into a computer food journal which provides me with a calorie count; and I used a scale daily to see my early morning weight, unclothed, immediately after urination, which I recorded immediately.  The chart below is a compilation of that data.

13 Years of Weight-Loss and Maintenance

The chart above shows my total daily calorie amount for an entire individual year, averaged out.  It also shows my total daily weight amount for an entire individual year, averaged out, and my corresponding BMI.  It also includes the lowest recorded weight for each individual year. 



This chart demonstrates that during the 16 month weight-loss phase, my body behaved just as one would expect.  My calorie average of around 1,200, led to a large weight-loss.

During the first two years of my maintenance phase, my body also behaved as one would expect.   A calorie average of around 1,400 resulted in a stable weight-maintenance.

However, during the third year of my maintenance phase the situation changed, and a new Pattern emerged.  I started re-gaining a bit of weight each year, even though I kept lowering my calories.

This pattern of an upward-weight-creep, despite consistent-very-low-calorie-intake, feels precarious. My Maintenance path has now narrowed to a point where sometimes I feel like I’m walking a tightrope, struggling to keep my balance in order to avoid falling all the way back into morbid obesity.

I’m growing weary of living at the place where the Rubber Hits the Road.  This is my current Reality, and the Truth about how maintenance is going for me at the start of 2018.

Many of my previous status update articles discuss details about my weight history, my food and dieting involvement, as well as specifics of this situation. For more detailed information about my current situation, see my recent status update: “Why Is This Happening? - October 2017” which goes into great depth about this issue, and provides many links to relevant articles posted here in DietHobby.