There’s no easy answer to this question, but I believe the answer is the same for everyone. When a person returns to eating when physically hungry, eating what one’s body really craves, and then ceasing to eat when hunger is satisfied, after about a year or so one’s true weight emerges. I was always yo-yo-ing and often 20 to 50 pounds overweight until I started realizing that diets were part of the problem rather than the answer and that our bodies were designed to tell us when we need to eat and when we need to stop eating and even what we need to eat. I also realized that our bodies give signals for when to drink water, when to get more active (I avoid using the term “exercise” because of negative associations) just like our bodies give signals about when to use the bathroom. In our culture, we are told to ignore (or “control”) these physical cues and force ourselves to mentally, rather than physically, determine when to eat and what to eat. This gets us away from the way we were as small children when we ate only when we were hungry. Naturally slim people don’t worry all the time about when to eat and how much and what. They just naturally respond to hunger cues and don’t eat for emotional reasons. I know several naturally slim people who wouldn’t even eat a piece of the yummiest cake if they were already full. In fact, I’m one of those people now. Once I discovered what the emotional reasons were for my eating and turned to God to help me resolve those issues (through living by the Spirit and renewing the mind) and once I relied on my body to tell me when I needed to eat (rather than relying on a diet or on my stress or depression), I turned from being a constantly struggling compulsive eater to a natural eater whose size has fluctuated very, very little since the fall of 1986. Going from a person whose weight changed constantly to a person whose weight is constant was a process that, for me, took about 18 months.
