One of the fundamental practices in Intuitive Eating is honoring your hunger and fullness cues. However, most people have a pretty difficult time understanding, or even feeling, their hunger cues.
Honing in on your hunger and fullness cues is how you nourish and fuel in a way that honors and connects with your body. As a certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, I am often told by clients that they just don’t experience hunger and feel confused on when to eat. This gets tricky because it raises the concern, “Well if I don’t feel hungry, I shouldn’t eat…right?”.
In this scenario, if a person is a chronic dieter, under-fueled, and/or carrying a lot of guilt and shame around food and their body- hunger cues will usually be missing or skewed. This is because each of these things impacts our ability to trust, notice, and feel the cues our body creates. If a person is not eating consistently and adequately, they cannot relearn hunger and fullness.
Long-term dieting can significantly impact hunger cues. Restrictive diets often teach us to override our body’s signals, leading to a distrust of hunger and an increased reliance on external rules to dictate our eating patterns. External rules include calorie goals, workout requirements to earn food, what other people are eating, or if a food is deemed as “good” or “bad”. Over time, this can dull our ability to recognize true hunger, making it harder to know when we genuinely need nourishment.
Chronic dieting can alter our body’s metabolism and hormone levels, further complicating our hunger signals. Research shows that repeated cycles of weight loss and regain (yo-yo dieting) can disrupt hunger hormones like leptin and ghrelin, making it challenging to accurately interpret hunger and fullness cues.
If you currently do not experience noticeable hunger cues, here are ways to reconnect with your body:
- Begin by consistently fueling every 3-4, but going no more than 5 hours without eating.
- Build your plates using the plate by plate approach, developed by dietitians Casey Crosbie and Wendy Sterling. Below are example plates, both of which ensure you get adequate amounts of each food group.
3. Slow down at meals! It is very important to minimize distractions. The current research shows us that eating in a distracted state (scrolling on your phone, working, watching TV, etc) causes us to feel less satisfied and less full after eating.
4. Reflect on what hunger feels like to you. Often times, people associate hunger with stomach growling, painful stomach emptiness, and feeling like you’re on the verge of passing out. However, these would be considered extreme hunger cues that result in ignoring our more subtle, initial cues. Here are some ways you may experience hunger:
- Increased thoughts about food
- Drowsiness
- Headaches
- Energy decrease
- Mood
Next steps: Try the above list and see if you begin to feel more in tune with your hunger cues. Here is a hunger and fullness scale that can further guide you! This image is from Sarah Gold Nutrition.
