Think about it; in the U.S.A., most every adult, and increasing numbers of teenagers and children, either want to lose weight, think they should want to lose weight or are afraid of gaining weight. We undeniably live in a dieting and weight/size obsessed culture. This culture has messed up our thoughts about, our feelings toward, and our actions regarding our hunger.
Primal Hunger
“Our need for food (energy) is so essential and primal that if we are not getting enough energy, our bodies naturally compensate with powerful biological and psychological mechanisms.” Intuitive Eating, Pg 59
Our bodies have both physical and psychological signals that trigger our drive to eat. It’s been so drilled into our heads that willpower is what we need to control ourselves with food it that can be hard to remember what’s actually going on biologically in our bodies. Taking the willpower approach often fights our body’s instincts.
We have learned to trust so little in our body’s wisdom we often turn to things besides hunger to decide when, what, and how much to eat. We let our thoughts and emotions decide for us.
Does the clock say it’s time to eat?
Do I deserve to eat?
Have I exercised enough to have earned it?
My diet doesn’t allow those carbs (or whatever).
If we consistently deny our hunger, we set ourselves up for a couple of problems. We get so hungry we’re ready to eat everything in sight, and we end up overeating. Or we get so used to ignoring our body’s signals that we don’t notice them anymore or we only notice when we’re ravenous. When we’re in that state, again, it’s a safe bet we’re going to overeat once we get started. Both practices “prove” we can’t be trusted with food since we feel so out of control by the time we allow ourselves to eat.
Psychological experts C. Peter Herman and Janet Polivy have identified a state they call “biological indifference.” This simply means we so consistently ignore our body’s hunger cues that we can’t recognize cues for hunger or satiety (fullness) anymore.
So, how do we get away from that? How do we learn to trust our body’s hunger signals like we did when we were infants?
Listen for it.
That sounds pretty basic, but so many of us have devoted so many years trying to dictate to our body when and what it’s okay to eat that we need to practice some serious listening. Some common signals we may overlook are:
Mild gurgling or gnawing in your stomach
Growling noises from stomach
Light-headedness
Hard time concentrating
Slight stomach pain
Grouchiness, irritability
Feeling faint
Headache
Low energy
Check in.
Every couple of hours or so, ask yourself What’s my hunger level? By checking in before we’re recognizing hunger cues, we become more attuned to what’s going on in our body. One useful tool for this is called the Hunger Discovery Scale.
Recognize other voices of “hunger.” It’s okay to eat for reasons other than physical hunger. If we set a rule for ourselves that we’ll only eat when we’re physically hungry, we’re setting ourselves up for “failure” that pulls us right back into a dieting mentality. Let me give a few examples.
TASTE HUNGER – Sometimes something just sounds good or the occasion calls for it. Think wedding cake or grandma’s fudge at Christmas time. If we’re listening carefully to our body, we can satisfy this type of hunger reasonably and be happy with one or two pieces of fudge rather than eating the whole "forbidden" pan. When we believe (falsely) that it’s wrong to eat for this reason and continuously deny ourselves, we’re pushing ourselves to a breaking point that’s likely to end in overeating or bingeing.
PRACTICAL HUNGER – Planning Ahead – While it’s important to eat mostly according to our biological hunger, sometimes we have to be flexible. If we’ll be in a meeting from 6:00 to 9:00 at night and know we’d be ravenous by 9:00, then it’s pretty obvious we should have dinner before our meeting even if we’re not quite hungry yet.
EMOTIONAL HUNGER – When we learn to identify our biological hunger it gets easier to figure out when our emotions are triggering our drive to eat. A couple of clues come from realizing that emotional hunger usually comes on quickly and originates in our head, while physical hunger comes more slowly and from other parts of our body. Once we can recognize our hunger is emotionally based, it’s loads easier to stop and ask ourselves why we want to eat, identify what we’re really feeling, and recognize that food probably isn’t the best means for taking care of what we really need. That frees us up to handle the situation in a way that can be effective in the long run, not just for that moment we’re eating.
If your response to that is, “Blech! That sounds like so much work!” Well, yeah. It can be. But it’s work that needs to be done if we want to change. More importantly, it’s so worth the effort. I promise!
Remember, becoming an intuitive eater takes practice. We can’t just decide we want to do it and Bam! it’s done. It’s a process – just like repairing any relationship where trust has been broken. The more we practice listening and responding, the better we’ll get at it. We won’t be “perfect,” but a healthy relationship doesn’t require perfection from either party in it. It’s the same with us and our body.
THIS WEEK’S CHALLENGE – Play around with the Hunger Discovery Scale to see what you learn about yourself.