“My tummy is full” Kate, my little niece, recently said to me with a smile. Not an earth-shattering statement, but coming from a three year old it was a nice change because this comment didn’t come filled with all the subtext that adult chit chat about hunger and fullness seems to teem with. Kate was simply telling me her experience. She didn’t puff out her cheeks, roll her eyes, look embarrassed, or make some kind of self-deprecating remark about eating ‘too much’ or the ‘wrong thing’. She simply seemed pleased that we had eaten and was letting us know that she was feeling good about having done so – she honoured her hunger as we are all intrinsically wired to do. It is how we survive.
For babies and toddlers like Kate this next principle in our #summerofintuitiveeating, Honouring our Hunger, is second nature. We all have the ability of appropriately responding to our hunger and fullness signals wired into us a birth. But, we grow, and sadly many of us lose our unselfconscious connection with hunger and fullness signals because we have other influences vying for our attention, demanding to be heard about when and how much, to eat.
Here is how this principle is described on the Intuitive Eating website.
2. Honor Your Hunger Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for re-building trust with yourself and food.
The big challenge for most of us whose relationship with food has been warped by the Diet Mentality is that we have become skilled at denying our hunger..at least for a while. But, as the principle reminds us, eating is a basic primal need that *must* be fulfilled for our very survival, and when we mess around with such a basic need (by learning to ignore our hunger in the name of dieting), we are setting ourselves up for some intense problems…and ironically often overeating. Think of other basic survival needs humans have….warmth, sleep, water, air. What happens when we are not getting enough sleep, or are feeling cold? The lack of that basic need becomes all we can think about, and when we have been deprived, we seek to overcompensate the next chance we get. Do you remember the last time you weren’t getting enough sleep? What did you do when you were able to sleep again…you made up for lost zzzz’s! Eating is just the same.
Honouring our hunger (eating when we are hungry, stopping when we are full) lets us be more relaxed with food. If we start to trust, on a deep level that we will consistently respond to feelings of hunger, we will be able to approach eating in a more relaxed and tuned-in way. We will also be more willing to respond to fullness signals (stop eating when we are full), because we know that we will be allowed to eat again when hunger reappears.
For me the great thing about becoming more aware and responsive to my hunger is that I also become more aware of the times when I engage in emotional eating. I may still eat for emotional reasons sometimes, but rarely do I do it mindlessly. I have found that when I recognize and acknowledge emotional eating, and offer myself understanding and compassion, rarely does it turn into a full-blown eating binge full filled with self-hate. If I find I am crying into my ice cream, I offer myself compassion, enjoy the ice cream and then move on. For those of us who are challenged with consistently overeating due to emotional eating, we are in a better position to recognize that perhaps we need to look to additional emotional supports, so that we don’t always rely on food for comfort which may compromise our health and well-being…not to mention our relationship with food.
The authors of Intuitive Eating offer tips for tuning into hunger and fullness signals including regular check ins…asking yourself if you are hungry and learning how to ask to yourself what kind of hunger you are experiencing (physical, emotional, taste). They also suggest a food/hunger journal and have a hunger scale which can be helpful, but I add the caution about turning this approach into yet another diet rule (“I only eat when my hunger is a level ___”). There are many folks out there who have co-opted the framework of Intuitive Eating and turned it into another diet, which is totally counter-productive to what we are trying to achieve.
Honouring your Hunger is a powerful step toward becoming an intuitive or mindful eater. It is a big shift to move from fearing and trying to control our hungers to instead embracing and honouring the signals our body give us. But it is well worth the effort, and hopefully the next time we notice we are full, we can react like Kate by taking notice, enjoying the sensation and getting on with our day.
Thank you for reading! I hope you will join us next week as we explore the next principle, Make Peace with Food which expands many of the concepts explored today, and will hopefully help you on your intuitive eating journey. You can keep in touch by following me here on my blog, or on social media, Twitter (twitter.com/bodyrespect) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/bodyrespectsaskatoon)