Should Restaurants be Required to Post Nutritional Information on Menus?

I came across this New York Times article yesterday about requiring restaurants to post the calorie counts for all of their menu offerings. This article brought up a lot of ambivalent feelings in me. Back in my dieting days, I was very much for this idea. It drove me crazy that I didn’t know how many calories and fat grams were in what I wanted to order at a restaurant. Then I learned about intuitive eating, and I stopped caring about how many calories food had. I haven’t given this issue any thought since I quit dieting.

On a personal level, I do not want to be forced to read the calorie count for everything on a menu every time I go to a restaurant. I’m pretty well established in this whole non-dieting thing, but I think it would be hard for me to order exactly what I wanted if the calorie count was staring me in the face. What if the thing I wanted had 1200 calories in it? If I didn’t know that, I would order it without giving it much thought, but I would certainly be satisfied after eating just part of it. A couple of weeks ago, I ordered pasta with grilled vegetables in a cream sauce. I’m sure there was an outrageous amount of calories in it, and I’m really glad that I didn’t have to deal with that knowledge. Instead, I ordered it and enjoyed it immensely. By the time I had eaten to satisfaction, it looked like I had barely made a dent in it. I took it home and got three more meals out of it, and I thoroughly enjoyed every one of them. I know that if the calories and fat had been listed next to the entrée, I would not have been able to enjoy it without feeling at least a little bad about it. I’m really glad that restaurant doesn’t post that information.

I honestly believe that this information won’t help anyone. Knowing the calories and fat grams will bring people into diet thinking. This diet mentality is one of the main contributors to obesity. As Geneen Roth says, every diet brings on an equal and opposite binge. So what would happen if people had this information? I can see it playing out in a couple of ways.

Scenario 1: Mary joined Weight Watchers three weeks ago. She has lost count of how many times she has joined, but she knows that this time she will stick with it and finally make lifetime. She goes to one of her favorite restaurants. Mary loves their grilled vegetable tostada. She looked up the ingredients beforehand, and figured that it must be about 12 points. That’s a lot for one meal, but she can afford to spend the points because she has been really good lately. She gets to the restaurant, looks at the menu and notices that the restaurant has added the calorie and fat information for all of their items. At first she is excited, but then she sees that her tostada has a whopping 1600 calories and 28 grams of fat. That’s a lot more than 12 points! She doesn’t know what to do. She really wants that tostada. She has been looking forward to it all week. She looks over the menu and can’t find anything else she wants, so she decides to just order the dang tostada. She eats the whole thing because she already screwed up anyway. She goes home feeling awful because she is so overly full. Over the next week she gorges herself on sweets and fried foods. She feels like a failure. Then one morning she wakes up resolved to get back on the wagon, and the whole cycle starts over again.

Scenario 2: (Let’s see what would have happened if Mary decided not to order the tostada.) She scours the menu for something that she could order that would be on plan, and finally settles on a green salad with a little grilled salmon on top. She isn’t a huge fan of salmon and doesn't feel like salad, but it is the best choice. She eats it, but feels very unsatisfied at the end of the meal. Once she gets home, she really wants to eat even though she isn’t hungry anymore. She just can’t stop herself and proceeds to binge on chocolate and bon bons. Mary goes to bed feeling horribly guilty. (Refer to scenario one to see how the rest of her week turns out.)

That pretty much sums up why I think posting this information on menus is a bad idea. I don’t believe that it will make people slimmer or healthier. Instead, I fear that this information with perpetuate the diet cycle and possibly contribute to an increase in obesity.

But people want this, and that should mean something. According to one study sited in the article, 83% of the adults interviewed were in favor of putting calorie counts on menus. I have to admit that it wouldn’t be fair to ignore that, so I propose a compromise. Let’s not put calories and fat grams on menus. Instead, let’s put the following: “Nutritional information available upon request.” Every restaurant would be required to have nutritional information for all of their entrees in an easy to read, accessible format. That way the calorie counts and fat grams would be available to anyone who wanted it, but it wouldn’t be forced upon people who didn’t want to see it.

Is Intuitive Eating Just Another Diet?

It can be. I spent my first two months of this journey treating intuitive eating like just another diet. I know I am not alone on this one. I have read many posts on several different forums from people who are obviously approaching intuitive eating in the same way one would approach a diet. It makes sense that people do this. For most of us the only way we have ever approached changing our eating habits is to diet. As a result, the diet mentality is fully ingrained in us. I decided to post about my experience with treating intuitive eating like a diet in the hopes that it may help others navigate through this common obstacle.

I was beyond excited when I first learned about intuitive eating. I rushed out and bought Breaking Free from Emotional Eating by Geneen Roth, and I devoured it. I had never heard of this non-dieting approach before. I dived in headfirst and lost ten pounds in two months, which is about the same rate I lost weight when I was following Weight Watchers very closely. Then I hit a wall. I just couldn’t do it anymore, and I couldn’t figure out what went wrong. Wasn’t intuitive eating the solution to all of my food related problems? I have since realized where I went wrong. I was approaching intuitive eating in the same way that I have approached every diet I have ever been on.

I was using Geneen Roth's eating guidelines like a set of rules. I was religious about following them, much in the same way I had been religious about counting points when I was on Weight Watchers. I approached her hunger scale in the same way. Every time I ate, I would check in with the hunger scale every few bites. I had to make sure that I never ate past satisfaction! I had to make sure that I was eating intuitively correctly at all times because I really wanted it to work for me.

I was also very excited about intuitive eating. I still am but in a totally different way. My excitement at first was the same excitement I felt every time I started a new diet. I felt like finally I had found that magic pill. This time I was going to be able to lose the weight and keep it off forever. Incidentally, I was ignoring one very important piece of advice from Geneen Roth. I was still weighing myself almost every day. I couldn’t see the harm in it. I was losing weight! Wouldn’t weighing myself just motivate me to continue with intuitive eating?

I never messed up. I ate intuitively perfectly for almost two months. That's how I typically am when I start a new diet. On my last stint with Weight Watchers, I never went over my points for even one day for the first four months. I have been deeply entrenched in the all or nothing diet mentality for a long time. In my first two months of intuitive eating, I was completely oblivious to this fact. When I started to not be able to eat intuitively every time I ate, I started to feel guilty that I couldn’t stick to it. I started to feel like a failure. I found myself binging and overeating more and more often. Sound familiar? I was following intuitive eating, but I was still firmly entrenched in the diet cycle.

If you are worried that you might be using intuitive eating like a diet, there are a few questions you can ask yourself. Think back to how you felt when starting new diets in the past. How do they compare to how you feel about intuitive eating? Is your approach the same or is it different? What about that all or nothing diet mentality? When you overeat or eat when you aren’t hungry, what goes through your head? Do you feel guilty? Guilt is a telltale sign that you are wrapped up in diet thinking.

What do you do if you realize that you are treating intuitive eating like diet? First, I would like to say congratulations! You have just taken a major step in your intuitive eating journey just by realizing that. Everyone is different, so this is a very individual process. I can share what has helped me move out of the diet cycle.

I don't care about eating intuitively perfectly anymore. If I overeat or eat when I'm not hungry, I don't get mad at myself. When I start to think about a time I "messed up," I immediately think about the last time I ate intuitively. I focus on the positive, not the negative.

I have also realized that I eat as a way to avoid emotions, so I have been working on letting myself feel my emotions and getting comfortable with them. I never thought that I ate for emotional reasons because I thought I was eating out of boredom most of the time. I have since discovered that eating out of boredom is a form of emotional eating. I was turning to food because I wasn't comfortable just being with myself. Eating was a way for me to prevent the emotions from coming up at all.

I am active in online intuitive eating communities. This has been an essential part of my journey. I am fairly certain that I would have given up after those first two months if I hadn’t had the support and advice from other people who were further along on the intuitive eating path.

I know this doesn’t apply to all intuitive eaters. I have read blog posts from people who have been doing this for only a few weeks, obviously really understand intuitive eating and are clearly moving out of the diet cycle. Maybe you are one of those people. Or maybe you are like me. It doesn’t really matter either way. The only thing that matters is that you recognize where you are at and move through this process in whichever way is best for you.

Introduction

Last July I discovered intuitive eating after living in the diet cycle for the last decade. I learned that eating consciously is actually much harder than dieting, but the results are worth it. I desperately want to have a normal relationship with food. I am not willing to spend the rest of my life in the diet cycle. Through this journey I have also realized that there is no conscious eating without conscious living. Conscious living has added so much meaning to my life. I have even found myself being thankful for my food issues because they brought me to conscious living.

I decided to start this blog for a couple of reasons.

Most of the stuff I have read about intuitive eating focuses on the food. There is some information about emotional eating, but it doesn’t go much beyond that. I wanted to create a place that talks about conscious eating within the context of conscious living.

I am tired of hearing people say that they tried intuitive eating, but it didn’t work for them. Here is an excerpt from a post on a conscious eating site that I frequent.

“It's very tempting to try to follow this, to be free of constant monitoring, but I have to confess that I've tried it and it hasn't worked for me…It was a few months- maybe 4 months- over which I did not weigh myself, and tried to practice intuitive eating, and when my clothes started to feel and look tight, I got on the scale and was shocked to see myself 10 lbs up.”

What frustrates me about reading posts like that is that this is exactly how intuitive eating is supposed to work. In Breaking Free from Emotional Eating, Geneen Roth wrote that she gained 15 pounds over her first six months of intuitive eating. For the next five months she maintained that weight. It was almost a year before she started to lose weight, and it took her two years of eating intuitively for her to lose 30 pounds to reach her natural healthy weight.

Intuitive eating isn’t a quick fix. It takes an amazing amount of dedication. It’s not a diet. It’s a process of learning how to have a normal relationship with food. Losing weight may be a byproduct of that, but it isn’t the main point. It will only work if you make a firm commitment to eating consciously. If you view it as a way to lose weight, as another diet, it won’t work for you. You need to be able to accept the initial weight gain. You need to be able to accept that you might not start losing weight for a year or maybe longer. If you can’t do that, intuitive eating won’t work for you. It will just become another diet that you will “fail” at.

I have decided that conscious eating / conscious living is worth it. I have decided that I am worth it. I am not willing to struggle with food for the rest of my life. I want to enjoy my life and be free from food obsessions, and I’m willing to do what it takes for me to get there.