Amp Up the Intuition

by Leslie Aronson — April 24, 2008

The May edition of Shape magazine reports that scientists at Cornell University have, perhaps, found the reason why French women don't get fat. It's not genetics but rather the fact that French women are more in tune with their bodies' hunger cues. Where French women pay more attention to internal cues (like whether or not they're hungry), American women use external cues, like how much food is on the plate or when the TV show ends, to indicate when they should stop eating. Although it might seem obvious that you should stop eating when you're no longer hungry, or stop an exercise when you're body's telling you to, or start exercising when your body wants it, our culture is surprisingly out of tune with itself. Learning to listen to what your body wants can feel strange at first, but once you find the rhythm, it's difficult to drown it out. Americans often mistake boredom, anxiety, stress, or thirst for hunger. I have heard people say they can't watch a movie or even TV without munching on something - but this is a learned behavior that can be counteracted by simply not doing it. If you learned it, you can unlearn it. Just like you can learn to enjoy exercise and healthy food, and learn to listen to whether or not your body is actually hungry.