Stefan:
>An additional indicator is satisfaction after meals. If there's perfect
>satisfaction I forget about food completely until the next meal. If not,
>the mind starts "cycling" around foods and thinks over a food that would
>probably give me the satisfaction I was missing.

This quite often happens to me too. I had an interesting experience along
that line a few days ago. I left home in the middle of the day, having
earlier eaten mostly fruits, as well as a few lettuce leaves. I took a
banana and an avocado with me (for convenience, as I was in a rush, even
though I knew that I had probably had enough fruit for the day), thinking
that they would keep me going for a while. I ate these at different times
in the afternoon when I became hungry.

After I had eaten both, I soon felt slightly hungry again. At the same
time, I was finding that my legs were feeling rather weak walking around
town, and I also had a mild abdominal pain. Now, muscle weakness and
indigestion can both be symptoms of excess potassium/insufficient sodium in
the body (see my previous post about Balanced Eating), and I knew that such
an imbalance was a likely outcome of eating a lot of fruit and not much
else. So I decided that it would be a good idea to have some celery (a high
sodium-residue food) to re-balance my Na/K levels, and the thought of
munching on a stick of celery seemed quite appealing. However, I thought
that it might be difficult to buy just a single stalk, and I really didn't
fancy the idea of carrying a whole bunch of celery around with me for the
rest of the day, so I decided to have a glass of celery juice instead.

The juice didn't taste particularly wonderful (the quality of the celery
probably wasn't like what I would normally buy), but I felt convinced that
it was what I needed at the time. (This was a purely intellectual decision,
of course). A short time afterwards, I found that my hunger and abdominal
pain had disappeared, and my legs were much happier to carry me around. I
continued to feel quite satisfied for some hours afterwards, despite the
fact that the celery juice presumably didn't contain many calories, and
certainly not a lot of bulk to fill an "empty stomach".

Barbara:
>>I am not an instinctive eater (at least not
>>yet - I am now in the process of reading through the Anopsology pages;
>>thanks, Mike, for posting the details), and so I have been particularly
>>bemused by

>You are more instinctive than you think, if you eat raw.

By "instinctive", here, I was only using the term in the sense that it is
used in the instincto context. Certainly, I have been aware for some time
that instinct plays a large part in my selection of foods, the timing of
meals, and knowing when to stop eating. And the instinctive messages become
progressively more sharpened and easier to heed the longer I have been
eating a predominantly raw diet.

And as I said, they are involved in _all_ the foods that I eat now,
including cooked and "junk" foods (in the sense that I often feel turned
off by these, when I would have welcomed them before). My interpretation of
Burger's writing is that he believes that eating any cooked food at all
destroys one's ability to apply instinct to eating. No doubt, the instinct
would be sharpest if all the food one eats is of "instinctive quality", but
it seems to me that any proportion of raw food in the diet assists that
instinct to develop to some degree, and to function, at least minimally, in
relation to everything one ingests.

>Even if you
>don't give it your attention you will never succeed in overeating the
>famous pineapple (or fresh figs, celery, wild mangos, etc.).

Actually, I think that I did experience a "taste change" recently, in
relation to eating oranges. Normally, I cut the orange into quarters and
suck out the juice and pulp. I did this as usual, but decided to eat some
of the skin as well, to get the benefit of the bioflavinoids in the pith.
Initially, it tasted quite mild, but I found that I could only eat about
1/8 of the whole skin before it was stinging my mouth and I didn't want any
more. On another day, I ate about 3/4 of a skin before it became unpleasant.

Regards,
Barbara