If the mouth is hungry, feed the mouth; if the belly is hungry, feed the belly
During the first few months of this way of living, people would ask: "Don't you feel hungry all the time?" I would always answer "no" because the Sugar Busters diet offers plenty of ways to keep you busy eating. It took a while for me to learn that I spend a lot of my down time staying busy eating--because my mouth was telling me that I was hungry.
Do you ever have that feeling of really wanting to eat a lot of things even though your stomach feels sort of full? This happens to me mostly around the holidays or while I enjoy one of my favorite pasttimes: watching the PBS cooking shows on Saturday afternoon. This is particularly dangerous because I love to cook, I love to eat, and my couch is pretty close to the kitchen. (In fact, as I write this, I've just finished watching those very shows and eating a little more than I should have!)
I've learned that whenever I feel hungry, I stop, take a few seconds and decide how my belly feels. If I've not eaten in a while and it seems reasonable that my body needs some fuel, then I either eat something healthy or, if it's close to a meal time, I wait until everyone else will be eating. However, if I feel hungry, and my stomach feels sort of full, I realize that it's my mouth, and not my belly, that's hungry. THIS IS NOT BAD! It took me a while to not want to punish my mouth for sending my body hungry signals. I've come to realize that I can feed my mouth, without fueling my system.
Here's are some of the things I do to feed my hungry mouth when my belly is full:
1. Eat sugar-free hard candies; especially mints or other candies with lots of flavor. (Keep in mind that these aren't totally calorie free and eating too many of them can cause you a belly ache.)
2. Eat negative calorie foods. My favorite is celery with just a little ranch dip. The idea behind a negative calorie food is that you burn more calories in eating the food than the food provides. The ranch kind of kills this theory but, so far, it's working for me.
3. Sugar-free Jello (or other sugar-free gelatin snacks) have very few calories, lots of flavor and are cool and soothing. Eat this stuff late at night or when you're just hungry in the mouth.
4. If all else fails, punish your mouth (see next rule: punish your mouth)
So, if the mouth is hungry, feed the mouth; if the belly is hungry, feed the belly.
