By all rights, Steven Hawks should be the most popular man on the planet.

I'm creating my own home shrine to him. It will consist of a bust of Hawks fashioned from Twinkies and Godiva truffles, which I'll float in a tub full of hot fudge on a raft made of chocolate cake doughnuts.

These are things I want to eat but don’t because they're junk, which is defined as any food that's either made of chocolate or contains sufficient sugar, fat and calories to compensate for its lack of chocolate.

But Hawks, a health-sciences professor at Brigham Young University, says I can go right ahead and eat whatever I want whenever I want.

Professor Hawks, I think I speak for anyone who has ever eaten an entire bowl of raw cookie dough when I say that you are officially my very favorite person in the history of the world, and I will love you until the day I die, which I hope will be later rather than sooner.

The concept, known as intuitive eating, sounds simple enough: Listen to your body and eat what it tells you to eat whenever you're actually hungry.

"It's just a different way of relating to food," says Hawks, who used the method to lose 50 pounds and keep it off. "Rather than counting calories or carbs or thinking about good food and bad food or what you should and shouldn't eat, you relate to food by satisfying hunger."

But what if your body is telling you to eat a bucket of M&Ms?

"No food is taboo," Hawks says.

One moment, please, while I weep tears of joy.

Hawks is the anti-dieting guru of the moment, but the pioneers are Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, who wrote "Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works" 10 years ago. It was based on the idea that dieting does little except make people feel tremendously guilty about daring to eat something they might actually enjoy.

"God forbid you eat a doughnut or a Ding Dong -- you're a moral disaster," says Tribole, a nutrition therapist in California. "Food is more of a moral issue in this country than sex."

To make intuitive eating work, Tribole says, it's important to do two things:

1. Accept your body

2. Reject dieting

Drat. A catch. Make that two catches.

This isn't going to be easy. In fact, it may be downright impossible.

Dr. Jim Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, says it's true that dieting doesn’t work for the long term, but he also believes intuitive eating ignores certain realities.

"Wouldn't it be great if you only ate when your body tells you you're hungry? But we’re very complex organisms, and we get caught up in so many things that make us eat other than just a biological need for energy -- sight, smell, other kinds of things," says Hill, who created the Step Diet, which calls for eating just a little less and walking a little more.

"Listening to your body is fine, but I don’t think that's suddenly going to click into place and you're never going to overeat again. I just think that may be a little naive. Nobody's ever shown you can actually do that and get any results from it long-term."

Critics say intuitive eating won't work for people who are so out of touch with their bodies that they have no idea what signals they're getting. Tribole acknowledges that undoing the food dysfunction born of decades of dieting can seem daunting, and it's a slow process -- very slow.

"It's really getting to know your body again," she says. "You become so disconnected through dieting that I have patients who don't know if they're hungry or they're full. It's about getting in touch with your body's normal cues."

So how do you do that? Hawks suggests thinking about hunger and satiety on a 10-point scale, where 10 represents eating until your stomach explodes and 1 is being so hungry that you'd gnaw on last year's Christmas fruitcake. Intuitive eaters stay on an even keel at about 5, which means you're capable of resisting a bucket of M&Ms for a full 30 seconds. If you get hungry, eat just enough to get back to a 5 or a 6, then stop -- even if there are still some M&Ms left in the bucket.

"I don't let myself get too hungry, only down to about a 3," Hawks says. "I tend to eat more often during the day -- whatever is going to hit the spot is what I grab. It doesn't take a lot to get back up to 5."

The psychological piece, Tribole says, involves giving yourself permission to eat. Then a phenomenon known as "habituation" sets in: If you can actually eat a Twinkie or 10 whenever you want, the desire goes away.

"There's a misconception that we're promoting junk food, and that's not it at all," she says. "Once you can have whatever you want, you can decide: 'Do I really want it and do I want it now?' "

That means that, at first, some people gain weight before they lose weight. And thin people tend to gain weight until their bodies reach a more normal size. But ultimately, according to the concept, intuitive eating not only will help overweight people lose pounds and keep them off but might help keep them healthier overall.

Hawks and his fellow researchers found that college students identified as intuitive eaters had lower body-mass indexes, lower triglyceride levels, higher levels of "good" cholesterol and reduced risk of heart disease.

"I can be fit at any size," Hawks says. "I'm not doing it so much for my health as my desire to have a normal relationship with food. I eat a wider variety of food, I'm more likely to eat breakfast, I take pleasure in eating and I have less food anxiety. I love food and I love to eat, and I hate being overfull or deprived."

Kids are natural intuitive eaters, and they should be encouraged to listen to their bodies, Hawks says. A recent study in the International Journal of Eating Disorders found that chubby children were more likely than lean kids to have mothers who try to control what they eat.

Food restrictions for children can eventually lead to eating disorders, some of which are being treated with intuitive eating methods, Tribole says.

"The missing message is that having a healthy relationship with food is as important as the food you choose to put in your body," she says.

And if I choose Twinkies deep-fried in chocolate sauce, that's OK. I'm sure I'll get tired of them eventually.

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