Introduction

Having recently read some fantastic blogs on intuitive eating I thought I would start my own. I guess I should start by introducing myself, so I am Nicola, a 21 year old mother of two boys - Toby, aged 3 and Leo, aged 8 months. I am around 3.5 stones overweight. I live in Nottingham with my husband who runs his own business as a computer engineer, and we have just bought our first house in a small town called Bingham.

Before having my second son, I lost 3 stones on the LighterLife meal replacement diet but then whilst pregnant I put on 9lbs in three weeks and decided to "sod it" and ended up 3.5 stones heavier when after I had my son than before I got pregnant.

It was back in March that I realised that I always ate, for any reason, whether I was hungry or not, and this is where my blog name comes from. It was a mystery to me at the time, I couldn't figure out why I always felt hungry, but my tummy never gave me hungry signals. It's only now that I realise that I was also hungry, but it wasn't food I was hungry for. It could have been anything - a hug, friends, my husband, something to alleviate the boredom, something to make me feel more successful or happy with my achievements... the list goes on. All of these hungers had been replaced by food so it was no wonder I was piling on weight.

I have found intuitive eating to be quite hard. It's similar to learning another language. A language that you have never even heard of. It goes against almost every "food rule" I have ever learned but I know that it is absolutely the right answer. It is very hard for me to lose my all-or-nothing approach when it comes to intuitive eating. I have this approach to most areas of my life, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I tend to do something perfectly or not at all. This doesn't work with intuitive eating. The all-or-nothing approach simply leads to binging.

I have just signed up to the Beyond Chocolate e-course and that starts next Wednesday. I have also applied for membership of the Peaches and Cream Intuitive Eating forum.

The recent discovery that I have made with intuitive eating and myself, is that I have been treating intuitive eating like a diet. I tell myself I must stick to the rules, or that I will follow the rules but adjust them slightly to make sure I don't gain weight, and I still struggle with "wasting" food, I still tend to eat at "normal" meal times and I am still quite caught up with my weight.

I am going to use the blog to keep a record and to explore myself and how I react to and cope with different situations and also to set my self little experiments. Not challenges, as there will be no win and no lose, just experiments so that I can see what works for me and what doesn't. Today I am trying to wait until I feel hungry before I eat. I find this step quite hard as I focus on feeling deprived and then end up eating something I don't really want just to stop the voice of deprivation in my head. I'm going to try and keep myself occupied today though. I have to take my eldest son to pre-school in half an hour, and then I'm going to explore the local market which is on til about 2pm.

Nicola x