Holiday Eating

The holidays seem to be a trying time for my friends who are still following conventional diets...Weight Watchers...Jenny Craig...NutriSystem...cutting back...whatever. What gets me is the sense of fear that they all seem to have about the holidays...the focus they have on food...and what they eat and don't eat. There seems to be an essence of white knuckled control...which strikes me as sad.

The recipes for banana bread that is made with "legal" ingredients...and the cookies that don't really taste like cookies...it all makes me very thankful for the "no diet" approach that I follow.

I love the smorgassboard of food choices at the holidays. Love that there are so many good things from which to choose.... And I find it joyous to choose the most tasty morsels to satisfy my hunger.

Food should be pleasurable. We should take pleasure in the foods we choose. The problem is when we allow food to become our only pleasure and our only respite from stress.

Intuitive eating is about learning to live better, to balance better, so that food is no longer our only pleasure and so that we have other means than food to deal with our stresses.