I have spent time monitoring the eating behavior of people who appear to be naturally slim and healthy. The results are surprising and I invite you to try them. Over the next few days Im going to post details about all these six new eating habits that will transform your relationship with food and with yourself.

Habit 1: Eat What Your Body Asks For

Slim people who say they can eat any thing they want to without putting on weight often do just that. They truly do feel a complete freedom in their choices of foods. However, even though most of them include fast food, chocolate and suchlike in their diet, on investigation I have discovered that many people have a very inaccurate picture of the amount of food they eat, often consuming much less than they think they do, and even forgetting to eat for long periods.

Some people immensely exaggerate the amount they have eaten, almost as if they wished they had been able to eat as much as they said they had! (This suggests that when they were young children they had to develop a successful strategy to convince Mum or Dad that they had eaten loads of food so they could leave the table to play.) Food is not the main focus of their attention, though they often thoroughly enjoy eating it. Enjoyment is more likely to be focused around the quality or type of food rather than the quantity.

Habit 1 In Action

When I first adopted this strategy I had great difficulty letting go of my old thought habits. I had always believed that in order to lose weight, I had to eat nothing but lettuce leaves.

Surely if I were to eat what I wanted to eat, Id be eating biscuit sandwiches or chocolate casseroles, leading to an even greater calorie consumption than ever. Id be sure to pile on the weight! In fact, the opposite turned out to be true.

The problem is that when you dont have the foods you really want to eat, you dont feel satisfied, even when your stomach is fit to burst, so you will continue to eat until you have the favored food.

A meal of steamed broccoli might fill my stomach, but I would continue to crave more food because I still wasnt satisfied. This would send me running to the fridge again, but since I knew I shouldnt eat what I really wanted, I ate something else instead, which didnt satisfy me and so on, until I had eaten many more calories in total than if Id just eaten what I wanted in the first place.

Once I started asking my body what it fancied, it began to request fresh salads and vegetables, fish and sometimes red meat, instead of asking for chocolate cake at every meal. Even when it did request chocolate, it needed only the smallest amount to feel satisfied. It surprised me that my body instinctively knew to ask for a balanced diet!

What I discovered is that once you allow yourself this freedom, the novelty wears off and once-forbidden foods become quite dull. Your body knows what nutrients it needs and remembers the tastes associated with these nutrients.

It will then send cravings to you to provide the tastes associated with those foods. It will instinctively crave a balanced diet. At first, even if you do eat cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner, youll soon be craving fresh salads, and if you follow the rest of the habits that are coming over the next few days, youll still be OK.

Youll be happier because you ate what you wanted and wont feel the need to snack between meals. I dreamt of being the kind of person who could have a chocolate bar in the fridge and leave it there for days without thinking about it or eating it.

Now I know I can have it if I really want it, Ill leave it there. The point is that it doesnt matter what you eat as long as you dont eat more than you need. You just need to focus on becoming properly tuned in to what your body is telling you.

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