How to Avoid Overeating, Curbing Sugar Cravings, and Losing Weight with the Hunger Scale – Thin Eater Kristine Kaliebe Interview
Hey Guys! Today we interviewed Thin Eater, Kristine Kaliebe. She has implemented many of the principles from Chantels Book “Waist Away” and we wanted to ask her a few questions! We talked about how she got into intermittent fasting, what she eats on a daily basis, how she transitioned into being sugar-free/grain-free, and everything in between!
Listen to the Episode HERE
Watch the episode HERE
Read the show notes below 👇👇
Aaron: So Kristine, super great to have you on the show. Tell us a little bit about your story and how you got into the whole intermittent fasting world?
Kristine: So, my name is Kristine [inaudible 00:00:10], and as far as the history of my weight and how I felt about my body goes, both of my sisters were naturally thin. My mother was naturally thin, and I was always the heavier sister. I wouldn’t say overweight, but definitely always chubby, and struggled with it. Tried every diet in the book. It wasn’t until I was dealing with health issues that I came across the lifestyle of intermittent fasting, and I incorporated that. Saw significant changes and then started doing grain free and sugar free to really just utilize the detoxification part of intermittent fasting.
Aaron: So, what has been your experience thus far with intermittent fasting?
Kristine: It was insane. I actually had to shorten those hours to eight at times because I would lose so much weight, uncontrollably losing weight, but still eating tons. It was just, my body was in fasting mode enough to deplete the fat cells.
Chantel: Awesome.
Kristine: Because, you’re either in fasting or fed. When you’re in constant fed mode, if we’re to go by the recommendations that they give us, you could only store so much glycogen in your liver. So, once that’s there, it’s converting it to fat. If you’re not going into fasting mode intermittently, then you’re going to constantly be in a process of storage and not depletion, which will then obviously lead to weight gain.
Aaron: So, in Chantel’s book Waist Away, she always refers back to the hunger scale. How do you think that incorporates into your life?
Kristine: Where I start eating on the hunger scale, for me, is obviously I do it by time. So when I wake up in the morning, 6:00 or 7:00, and my body is just automatically up at that time. Sometimes I don’t feel hungry, so I don’t eat until 11:00 or so, and even when doing that, I don’t extend my eating hours at night because when I eat carbs past 6:00 or 7:00, it’s just too much for me. So, I would say I don’t ever really get into that ravenous hungry mode. I don’t feel that. I don’t ever feel like I’m super hungry.
Chantel: So, would you say that when you’re hungry, just not ravenously hungry?
Kristine: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chantel: So, if you [crosstalk 00:02:30]-
Kristine: I would say I get to the hunger point.
Chantel: So, this says zero is ravenously hungry, one is you actually hear your stomach growl, two is you’re hungry.
Kristine: I would say I eat when the stomach growling happens. Sometimes I have to remind myself to eat because I think once you get in that mode, and you’re healthy, and you’re fueling your body with food and not eating food because it’s yummy or it’s fixing some sort of quick fix in the chemicals in your brain, so you’re getting those little boosts of energy, I don’t think you get to the point where you’re ravenously hungry. I would say stomach growling and hungry. One and two is always the extent of it.
Aaron: If you had to give me an estimate, a ballpark, when do you think you stop eating?
Kristine: I stop eating when I’m comfortable. I just want to feel satiated. I don’t want to feel uncomfortable and when I eat too much, I feel uncomfortable. When you’re paying attention what you’re eating, you can start noticing, “Okay, I’m getting slightly uncomfortable.” It’s just the most minute amount of discomfort. So, I feel like I can lengthen the hours of eating because I eat so clean. So, not only is it grain free and sugar free, it’s organic and that’s huge. People don’t consider the toxic factor of their food and why they’re retaining weight. I think that’s a huge portion of it, even if you can’t cut out grain and sugar, if that’s too hard for you. If you’re taking out the toxic load in the food that you put into your body, I think that that makes a huge difference in what your body hangs on to.
Aaron: Talking about the sugar free and grain free lifestyle, and inevitably people would probably think you have sugar cravings, what do you usually do when, let’s say, a sugar craving comes up?
Kristine: So, when I’m craving sugar, which I have to say is rare, I think initially it was hard and so in the initial period of avoiding sugar, the cravings, honest the best thing is cinnamon on an apple. There is something in that snack that cures a sugar craving for me like no other. It’s got all of the qualities of a cinnamon toast, but then you’ve got that filling fiber from the apple. So, I think that’s when I’m craving sugar. Now, I would consider an apple sugar. That’s how much I don’t crave sugar anymore is an apple, to me, would be sweet enough. A banana is what I used to consider ice cream.
Aaron: So, for the most part if you had to say, what does your diet usually consist of?
Kristine: My diet consists of unprocessed foods. So, if it’s gonna come in a box, it better only have two or three ingredients, and I need to know how they were put together. Ingredients that I can’t understand don’t go in my body. I literally put in my body the cleanest of foods, and the simplest way to describe it is the outside of the grocery store aisles. So, if you’re sticking to the outside, you really don’t need to go into the center aisles. I made a video of the grocery store and I went through the center aisles, and it was nothing but starch, and sugar, and processed foods, and foods I couldn’t understand, and chemicals my body doesn’t even recognize as food. So, let’s stick with fruits, vegetables. If I’m to eat any sort of grain, it will be the sprouted grain bread, and that’s the limit of my grain is sprouted grain.
Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative). What are you thoughts on consuming dairy?
Kristine: Dairy is something I love. Who doesn’t love dairy? But, I apply those same rules that I apply to the grocery store to dairy. So, it needs to be clean, it needs to be unprocessed which that’s the only thing that’s hard, is cheese. So, cheese is hard to find really clean. You have to qualify it, usually, with somebody who’s making their own cheese on a farm, goat cheese or something like that. Dairy needs to be, for me, grass fed cows because obviously if the cows are eating grain, then so am I. If I can get it from a local farmer, that’s what I prefer to do. When the milk started being pooled in our country, that’s when we started seeing the rise of inflammation and inflammatory diseases. There’s so much pooling of our milk.
So that, if you have diseased cow, it’s being pooled with almost our entire lot of dairy for the country. That’s crazy. That wasn’t what we were exposed to 20 years ago, 30 years ago. It’s different now, and our bodies are having trouble and they’re showing signs of it. Food for comfort that I would say I rely on, and along with that the dairy needs to be organic. I do feel that’s important, and antibiotic free, hormone free.
Aaron: This is a question we’ve gotten a couple times before. So, let’s just say living with your lifestyle. Do you ever find yourself wanting a little bit of comfort food?
Kristine: So, I wrestle with this because everybody wants to say, “We all need comfort food.” That’s a normal thing. I like to say you can get rid of that feeling, the feeling that you need comfort food doesn’t need to be there. The reason I think we call it comfort food, because it does feel comforting. Starchy foods, carbohydrates, sweets. When I think comfort food I think of mashed potatoes, or a donut. Something like that. Those foods are yeast feeders. If you could get rid of the yeast in your body, you can get rid of the call for the food for it. My dad and I had a conversation recently, and we were talking about, who knew sugar and yeast had such a voice? Who knew? When you can beat the candida in your body, you can beat a myriad of issues on top of the call for comfort food, that call that’s like, “That would be so good. I’d love to just wrap up in a blanket and eat it.” That feeling is strong because without it, the yeast dies.
Without the food for itself, it dies. So, when you can starve it out by your own demand, by your own control, you can literally quiet the voice. So, that’s my answer for comfort food.
Aaron:Really quick, Kristine, do you eat meat?
Kristine: I do eat meat. I spent a long time being a vegan and the veganism actually, I will say, was a huge catalyst for this lifestyle because veganism included clean eating and not subjecting myself to the other diseases and chemicals that other animals were exposed to. So, when you incorporate what other beings are exposed to, you’re essentially bringing that on yourself. So, now I do eat meat. What I love to do is get in with another family and purchase part of a cow. Go in and let’s purchase a cow together, and then you have your meat for the year, or for the half year. Whatever you decide to do, but organic, grass fed, and most importantly the part where everyone’s gonna think I’m crazy, is handled. Handled with care. The animals I eat and put into my body should not have existed only to feed me. I feel that they should exist to live the life they were created to live, and when that happens, something magical happens that is almost of the godly realm and not explainable with words because meat has a different purpose.
Aaron: I know we just passed the holidays, but I guess for future reference, what are your thoughts on binge eating during those holidays?
Kristine: For instance, I’m grain free, sugar free, I only eat in certain time windows and like I said, I’m not ravenously hungry. Who doesn’t want Thanksgiving? I mean, the thought of dressing, and stuffing, and sweet cranberry sauce and all of those things are awesome but I also don’t like to feel bad. So, I eat like everybody else on Thanksgiving, and don’t pay a price afterwards because I’m not gluttonously piling it in. I like to enjoy it if it’s there the next day, I’ll have some the next day. Whatever really feels intuitive, and I think that when you start eating this way and you’re eating clean, and you’re feeding your body, and fueling the vessel you’ve been given, you literally start to have an intuition, a discernment that’s given. I mean, I do pray for that too. We’ll put that in there. I do pray for discernment often, but I think it also comes with being a fully functioning being.
Now all of a sudden, I have this intuition about what I should be eating and it’s easy to say, “I’m good. I got my little fill.” It’s, I swear to you, not a struggle. I don’t ever once feel like I’m missing anything, and it’s not a struggle ever.
Aaron: With all that being said, can you give us a few tips that people can implement to make sure that they don’t overeat, whether it’s during the holidays, or they don’t go back for that second piece of cake? Any tips from you?
Kristine:So, let’s say you are going into the holidays and you’re either new to trying to get on top of the way that you handle food going into your body, or you’re wanting to incorporate this season in your new mind frame, whatever the case may be, I feel like we all have that ability to discern. We all have that ability to say, “Hey, I’m going to go into this with open eyes. I’m going to go into this with an open mind and an open heart, and I have a goal that I want to meet. So, let’s reverse engineer that goal and say after Thanksgiving, I’d like to feel good about myself. I’d like to feel good about myself, and I’d like to feel good in my skin.” What does that look like? Well if you reverse engineer that, that looks like not stuffing yourself to the point where you have to unbutton your pants. Recognizing those first cues of, “I’m full.” Giving yourself 20 minutes after a normal plate to see if you want a second plate.
Those little things are something anybody can do. It’s the little extra steps, the little details, that give you that boost of confidence that will then come into play in the next week, and the next week, and the next week because your daily goal, and your hourly goal. You’re reverse engineering it and you’re figuring out, “How does this work? How does this fit into my holiday plan?” You can still sit there with uncle Joe and have your stuffing. You just don’t have to out eat uncle Joe. It still tastes good, and you can eat slower, and a huge thing is chew your food. Chew every single bite of food, and if you don’t have time to give thanks for every bite, give thanks for every other bite and, “Wow, I’m so grateful that I’m being fed, number one, and I’m sitting here with family, number two.” There are so many other ways to satiate those chemicals in the brain. It doesn’t need to be rawr rawr, rawr rawr, stuffing. Or rawr, rawr, rawr turkey and dressing.
It can be, “I am grateful that I’m putting this food in my mouth and I have food to eat.” It sounds crazy, that eliminates the struggle. When you’re mindful about the way that you eat, when you’re mindful about the chewing you do, when you’re mindful about the food you’re putting in your body and how you may have it and another may not, those bites become longer, and you feel fuller, and it’s like magic. It just works like magic, it does.