I have another one of those dumb questions

[Sunny]

To me eating till you are "Full" is satisfied, if you are "too full" then you have eaten too much ( this falls under the could I eat more ? Yep...catagory). I think the key is eating slowly so that the food has time to reach the stomach.

[slugmom]

What does it mean to be satisfied with your food. I mean Dr McDougall talks about eating till your satisfied in all his books. But how full is too full?? I mean I can eat a meal and I ask myself am I full?, yep. But then the next question is could I eat more? yep.

I try to think of it as a "just barely satisfied" -- not in the sense of NOT satisfied, but in just coming up to that goal. Usually I find, after I walk away, that I am not feeling hungry anymore, and I'm trying to remind myself that's what "full" is. Not *filled* because yes, I could certainly eat more. But "ahhh, that took the hunger away"

I have trouble with that, too. I've taught myself not to stop at my satisfied signals over the years -- especially when the food is exciting and tasty.

I find, in keeping with the Mary Mini idea, that if my food is kind of boring and the same, I'm much less tempted to keep stuffing. Yesterday at lunch I was eating an asian brown rice and cabbage salad mixture and thought to myself, "I'm allowed to eat more" but since I had it for lunch and dinner the day before, too, I was sort of "whatever" about stuffing myself. LOL. I mean, the food was good, but not so new and exciting that I wanted to gorge. So that's helped me.

[prairiedream]

I was thinking about this the other day! I feel like I'm never "full" -- I could always eat more! I do sometimes feel something, like a little switch goes off when I'm eating and I know that's the full switch and when I should stop, but I almost always continue eating.

I think it's because the switch-going-off feeling doesn't correspond to a feeling of fullness in my stomach, it's almost a mental thing.

At any rate, I definitely have a problem with listening to myself and getting myself to stop eating!

[Lin]

Yep, I have the same problem. I'm a volume eater and
I never know when to stop! I think my full switch is broken!

The only way I can control not gaining weight is to limit my starch intake. SB has some really good suggestions for volume eaters and I've been following them and they are working for me. If you look under the MWL category, there is a topic called "How I lose weight with volume eating tendencies."
I've been experimenting with this since Nov. 1st and plan to continue my experiment through most of this month because I've finally lost some weight in the past month after having been stalled for months and months.

[stephanie]

I'm not super familiar with the details, but I do know that in his book Eat to Live, Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about "toxic hunger," which is the way that most people on SAD experience hunger: headaches, cravings, etc. He also talks about hunger really being something that you feel in your mouth, throat, and upper chest rather than your stomach.

Up until recently, I never understood this. But over Thanksgiving weekend, after several months of 100% McDougall weight loss program, I ate a lot of junk food, and I really felt the difference. It was like no matter how much junk food I ate, I felt "hunger" in the sense that I never felt like I could satisfy my stomach. It almost felt like the more junk I ate, the hungrier I was.

Now that I'm back to McDougall, I feel good again, and I've noticed that I can judge my hunger by the way my throat and chest feel. It's a really weird sensation, as I've never paid attention to it before, but I'm finding it's a more reliable indicator of hunger than the way my stomach feels. And if I'm eating McDougall style, I don't have the problem of my stomach feeling empty the way I did with the weekend junk food binge. Granted, I never feel like my stomach is stuffed on McDougall, but it's definitely not the empty feeling from unhealthy, processed foods.

If you're curious about this, you can go to Dr. Fuhrman's website (drfuhrman.com) and do a search for "toxic hunger," and you'll get a couple of hits. I think I'm going to read "Eat to Live" as well, since I know that most of what Dr. Fuhrman says is in line with McDougall.

I guess this is really more in reference to knowing when to START eating, not when to STOP, but I hope it's still a little helpful.

[funcrunch]

One of the best bits of advice I read in McDougall's books was this: Fill your plate with a reasonable amount of food. After eating, wait 10 minutes. You should find your appetite rapidly diminishing. If you are still hungry, then go back for seconds and again wait.

I often find that if I am still a bit hungry after the first serving, if I just wait at least 10 minutes I am then comfortably full and don't need to eat any more.

[Jeanie]

"Eight tenths of a meal feeds the person, the other two tenths feed the doctors"
So, I try to stop a little short of what my eyes and habit tell me I should put on the plate, eat that much and then wait to see how I feel like the previous post suggested.
I find though that I have a tendency to get "hungry" in about 3 hours so I have noticed that I am grazing more on little bits of this and that during the day and not doing the 3 main meals thing so much.
Except breakfast - that's standard - Oatmeal

[NancyG]

There are some things I definitely eat beyond the point of satisfaction. A few of the McDougall dishes - pasta - but the real problem is/was the junk food. I know I can eat cookies almost to the point of nausea - part of me is saying that I'm way over the full mark, but another part won't stop. Deadly!

My awareness of feeling satisfied is something I'm learning at this point. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've felt truly hungry in the last year - generally when we've been out and get to a meal much later than usual. Even then, the feeling passes. I don't know if I'm so much a volume eater as an automatic eater.