Hunger can feel like it’s tricking us, mainly because we’ve been taught that hunger might be boredom or thirst or a default state we revert to when we allow our willpower to slip, when actually, the regular switch between hunger and fullness is a healthy signal that our body and metabolism is working properly.
One of the most useful things I’ve learned only recently, is everyone has a unique hunger “setting”. Some of us genuinely don’t feel AS hungry AS much of the time, and others of us feel hunger MORE intensely MORE of the time. And this can change over time, day to day, year to year.
It’s very much like your sex drive. When you consider it that way, that’s your first step to connecting YOUR hunger to YOURSELF. It’s unique to you, your DNA, your metabolism, your emotional state, and it fluctuates over time. Therefore, all the tips and tricks and accepted wisdom about how hungry you should feel and how often and what it means and how to control it, apply to some imagined textbook human. Not you. You ARE a special snowflake in this case!
Another important thing to realise, is that we can feel hungry for different things.
If we don’t eat enough of one of the three main macronutrients (carbs, protein, fat) we’ll be hungrier more often because we’ll be craving more food generally, to account for the lack of one or more of those macros. Low fat, low carb, or low protein diets will mean that you never quite feel satisfied, and cravings will be a big feature of the diet (there will probably be dialogue along the lines of “how to beat xyz cravings” somewhere in what you read about the diet you’re following). Those cravings are not a weakness. They are a nutritional deficiency or blood sugar imbalance caused by not eating enough of what you need.
How much we need of each varies throughout weeks and months and years, but cutting one of them out is objectively NOT a health promoting choice (unless you have a diagnosed health condition making your body unable to digest protein or fat)
Often left out of the conversation or painted as another weakness when it comes to nutrition is “ “taste hunger”. It’s what happens when you’re not hungry/you’ve just eaten, but you fancy tasting something. It’s the “pudding stomach” you have after a meal. It’s seeing something delicious and fancying it. It’s a valid form of hunger and how we respond to it can tell us a lot about our relationship with eating. Ever tried not to eat chocolate and then binged on a giant bar without taking a breath? That’s a normal human response to deprivation. It’s not a lack of willpower. More about this in another blog.
And finally, psychologically and biologically, actively ignoring and undermining your hunger through dieting/with a view to not putting on weight, will make you hungrier short term and/or will dull your hunger signs long term. It can take a while for your body chemistry and psychology to return to your baseline levels, which they will, the better you get at hearing and responding to your hunger signs. Responding to hunger regularly and appropriately allows your hormones and brain to chill out and get back to baseline hunger fluctuations.
Actually, this one is finally and most important:
Hungry women are distracted women. It does not benefit us to be distracted, confused, and mistrustful of our bodies. Who DOES it benefit, though? Who wants us weak and not fully engaged with the world? We need to be fed, energised, focused, thriving, confident, strong and healthy.
We can’t do big things hungry.
Relearn Hunger
The first step to being able to make calm and confident choices about eating, is to get to know your hunger personality – who are you when you’re hungry?
You can learn your rhythms, your cues, how types of food and amounts affect how frequently you feel hungry, when hunger and emotion collide and what that means for you, and from there you can learn to feed yourself based on knowing and trusting yourself.
Underpinning all of this is: WHAT IS YOUR HUNGRY PERSONALITY?
I feel like we need one of those teen magazine quizzes from the 90s here, complete with flowchart!
Hunger manifests as more than just a rumbling stomach, and indeed the more a rumbling stomach is ignored long-term, the more hunger shows up in other places, like Sid demonstrates here:
So here is your Hunger Word Bank, a resource detailing some different ways that you might feel hunger.
Task: Which ones do you recognise immediately? Can you add to them? Can you keep adding to them as a dynamic process as you get to know your Hunger Personality?
Appropriately responding to hunger signs helps your body to regulate itself away from:
- binge-purge cycles,
- being someone who “forgets to eat”,
- being someone who “overeats”
- having a metabolism that struggles to find energy to exercise frequently,
- being a body that doesn’t recover from exercise easily,
- mindless eating,
- inability to feel fullness,
- struggling to balance choices between nutrition and emotion.
Knowing your Hunger Personality is going to be your blueprint to moving away from the above. Your Personality will be unique to you, made up of the intricacies and details of YOUR experience with YOUR hunger so that you can predict, and connect, with your hunger, and respond to it calmly and accordingly. This is something that you can only get better at with practice, so do not imagine that by reading this, you’ll be instantly transformed (although it might feel like a huge revelation). It’s a long-term trust building exercise, and trust takes time and repetition.
Your Hunger Personality
Your Hunger Personality is part of your identity. It’s: “this is me hungry” “I get xyz when I’m hungry” “I’m going to need to eat soon because otherwise I won’t be able to exercise/focus/be nice to you” etc.
NB: There is no “I don’t get hungry”. You’re human. You do. If you think you don’t get hungry, that means you need to spend more time doing the work inside this blog post.
For Your Hunger Personality, I want this to be a story about the different ways that hunger feels to you, and how it shows up in your body and brain. You can
- write it down,
- and/or you can have an ongoing conversation with yourself in your head,
- and/or find someone to talk to about it – (better yet, send them this blog and you can do it together),
- use the Hunger Word Bank and add your own words when they come up.
Some ideas and prompts you can use to help:
1) Set a timer for intervals throughout the day. What does hunger feel like when the timer goes off? Actively look for your signs and changes (we’re so used to suppressing them, this will be hard at first but like all skills it becomes second nature with practice and time).
2) Look for how hunger feels: before breakfast, before/after exercise, on long days when you are forced to go a longer time than normal before eating, on days when you eat more regularly, on holiday, around Christmas. Linking your hunger with experiences is all part of the data set you’re building.
3) Delve into your past: What “hunger memories” do you have?
– Do you remember how hungry you felt in the hour before school lunch when the smells from the canteen started wafting about?
– After playing outside with friends for HOURS lost in play and imagination, then coming inside, and realising you were starving?
– Remember how hungry you were as a growing teenager?
– What other memories do you have where pleasant* hunger was a main factor?
*by “pleasant” I mean hunger that was satiated satisfactorily – a hunger loop that was closed with eating.
Final Words
Expect to spend a lot of time on this project – knowing and owning your own hunger. It’s worth it; the more clearly you hear hunger, the more intuitively you’ll know what you’re hungry for, and the more appropriately you’ll be able to respond to hunger in amount that you eat.
Consider how many things you think you struggle with around eating that could be solved by this?
The next stage in the original Intuitive Eating is Body Neutrality.
I’m changing it slightly because this is my own take on IE – and so my next stage is called Know Your/You’re Wild. Being neutral about your body is difficult because there are so many social and cultural currents pushing us, but I’ve found this process easier to internalise the more we understand and appreciate how much of a wild animal our biology really is. The closer we can get to understanding our natural selves, the more we can respect and give our bodies what they need without the pressures of society and made-up trends influencing us away from our physical needs. Again; our bodies land within the boundaries of their natural sizes and shapes when they are being given what they need – food, movement, and rest-wise.
See you in the next post.
