How do we know when to stop?
Eating, that is.
A tricky conundrum. One which many of us have obviously not been able to crack.
Now, I am no scientist. Extensive personal experience aside, my knowledge comes from 15 years of reading Cosmo, supplemented by a 10-minute trawl through an online textbook 
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That said, the way I see it, there are two main ways people know when to stop eating:
1. When they feel full
This is how those fabled 'naturally slim people' know when to stop eating. Presumably, anyway. I wouldn't know 
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Bit of a no-brainer, in theory. You feel hungry. You eat. You feel full. You stop.
Obviously there are brain signals and hormones and whatnot involved. Somehow. (I didn't read that bit). There are complications I shall go into later. But, in general, it seems to work pretty well for a lot of people.
2. When they reach a pre-set limit
However, most dieters have scrapped the hungry/full part of the eating equation. Instead, they usually choose to set their own limits on what they will and will not eat. For example, a dieter might set a daily consumption limit of 1500 calories.
From then on, hunger doesn't play much of a role in their eating. They wake up in the morning, thrilled to have a full complement of calories to play with. They eat them when they like, whether or not their stomach is growling. When they reach 1500 calories, they stop, whether or not they are still hungry.
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Now, no one is born counting calories. So how on earth have so many people moved from eating according to hunger to eating according to a diet plan?
Well, here's how it happened to me:
It is 5 or 6 pm on an evening in late August. I am 11 years old. Preparing for the new school year, I am trying on my uniforms.
Me: Mum, my skirt's too small.
Mum: I'm not surprised, the amount you've eaten this summer.
Me: What?
Mum: All the snacks. It's got to stop, or you'll be huge.
Later the same evening. I sit at the kitchen table, under the light, studying my reflection in the dark window. I pinch repeatedly and frantically at the skin under my chin. For the first time in my life, I feel fat. Huge. Gross. I resolve to cut out all biscuits and crisps.
Bam! There you go! From eating when I felt like it, to restricting my intake, in one surprisingly quick and simple step.
I'm sure we all have our own stories. The important thing is, it doesn't really matter whether we control our eating using hunger or a diet plan, does it? The end result will be the same. In fact, for losing weight, dieting's actually got to be better, right?
Well, no. Because restricting our food intake doesn't seem to work that well with the way humans think.
All human beings are sometimes going to overeat. Even naturally slim people occasionally eat for comfort or simply for enjoyment. A friend might cook us a three-course meal. We might forget something we ate earlier in the day.
So what happens when we overeat?
If we tend to regulate our eating using hunger, we just feel really, really full. We unbutton our trousers. We make a mental note that two chocolate brownies is one too many.
But if we tend to control our eating using a diet plan, the response is different.
We keep eating.
Once we have passed our chosen calorie limit, we just keep going and going, often until we are painfully full.
Why? Because with our usual food limit obsolete, we don't know when to stop. As dieters, eating has stopped being about fuelling the body and started being about how we look. We aren't used to recognising feelings of fullness, let alone using them as a reason to stop eating - we stop eating only because we don't want to be fat.
We tend to think if we have exceeded our set food limit, we have 'failed'. We are going to put on weight anyway, so we may as well keep eating. We find it difficult to grasp the idea that one extra brownie won't make as much difference as a plateful.
Our self-imposed eating restrictions have left us feeling deprived - after all, the natural human drive is to eat - so we want to eat lots to make up for it. And, somehow, overeating makes us feel better about...overeating.
This brings us back to something we have all been told many times.
Yep. Dieting can make you fat.
That August night when I tried on my school uniform, I wasn't fat. If anything, I was slightly underweight.
Who is to say if my mum was right? Perhaps I would have become overweight if I kept eating so many snacks. No one knows. What is clear, though, is that trying to restrict food intake can lead to disordered eating.
Scientists have found the response of extreme overeating when a diet is 'broken' occurs almost universally. It doesn't happen because there is something 'wrong' with overweight people. Studies have shown the response even in test subjects who are not overweight and have never previously dieted.
More studies have revealed dieting is intrinsically linked to the development of eating disorders. In those - rapidly disappearing - areas of the world where beauty isn't strongly associated with thinness, people don't go on diets. In those areas, eating disorders as we know them simply do not exist. Period. I am not just talking about anorexia, bulimia. I am talking about plain, old-fashioned comfort binges, too.
Clearly dieting can be very bad for us. So this brings us to the question...how do we go back from unhelpful food restriction to controlling food intake using normal hunger signals?
I hope you aren't expecting a good answer here. Because for those of us who are firmly stuck in the dieting cycle, it is easier said than done. I am sure we have all tried it. Fed up with the failure of so many 'new starts', we throw up our hands. 'Humans weren't meant to diet,' we cry. 'From now on, I'm just going to eat when I'm hungry.'
Sounds great, doesn't it? And it all goes OK. Until lunchtime. Then the worry sets in. Did we eat too much? Or maybe too little? What did our co-workers eat? Cakes? That can't be right.
We get so stressed we eat two cakes. But it's OK. We remind ourselves two cakes is not as much as a plateful. And we keep going. Maybe even for a few days. But then? Binge City.
The sudden change is too much. We don't know how much we should be eating. We don't understand when we are hungry or full - guilt, deprivation and long habit have muddied the waters. We are worried weight loss will be non-existent, or just too slow.
And without our familiar restrictions in place, we just can't stop eating.
So what do we do?
As dieters, we are rigid, all-or-nothing, perfectionistic. And that just doesn't fit with the world we live in - or our natural state as human beings.
So perhaps, to meet our goals, we need to move, slowly, towards a different approach.
Whether we choose to manage our eating using a diet plan, our hunger cues, or something in between, we can all take small steps towards being more realistic, willing to compromise and flexible. Towards making decisions about what we will eat from hour to hour, not weeks in advance. These are the things that will help us make rational decisions about food.
It will take a long time, but hopefully in the end we can all learn to see food as fuel, to be topped up according to our bodies' signals - and, occasionally, just because our friend bought cake. We can learn to be less focused on our weights and more on our lifestyles. We can learn to make eating less prescriptive and more instinctive.
In short, we can learn to eat like we were meant to.
Love Rach xxx 
