This week, we’ll continue our exploration of Intuitive Eating. We’ll be discussing two principles of Intuitive Eating: honor your hunger and feel your fullness. It’s important to keep your body fed with adequate energy and nutrients. Otherwise, you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. By learning to honor biological signals, you can hone into your hunger and fullness signals and build a healthier relationship with food.
Honor Your Hunger
Whether experiencing famine or intentional food deprivation, our body reacts in the same way: we become preoccupied with food. Fad diets can cause a vicious cycle - extreme hunger followed by overeating, resulting in uncomfortable fullness. We need to honor our hunger by paying attention to earlier hunger cues. Eating at this level of hunger allows you to mindfully eat, choose healthier options and manage portion sizes.
Mechanisms that Trigger Hunger
When your body does not get the energy from food it needs, powerful biological mechanisms are triggered. These include heightened digestion and carbohydrate cravings. Long periods of fasting increase Neuropeptide Y levels and that drives the body to seek more carbohydrates.
The Powerhouse Cell Theory
The hunger signal is generated by the overall energy need of the cell. When cellular power is low, it will produce a signal that triggers hunger. Consistently denying your hunger usually ends up in a period of overeating. Also, if ignored, hunger signals fade over time.
How to Honor Biological Hunger
Begin listening to your hunger signals. Each time you eat, ask yourself: Am I physically hungry? What’s my hunger level? Check in with your body at regular intervals to assess your hunger level.
Feel Your Fullness
On the other side of hunger is fullness. Listen for body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry and observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. So many of us are in the habit of cleaning our plate due to dinnertime rules from our childhood or as a result of dieting practices that only allow one meal. Here are some other factors that may drive us to lick our plate clean:
Fear of waste. Remember that eating more than your body needs may be respecting economics but is not respecting your body.
Eating to completion. You stop eating when the food is gone, regardless of the size of the initial portion.
Beginning a meal in an overly hungry state. In this situation, eating intensity is heightened and it’s easy to bypass normal satiety cues.
Food insecurity. Some people live paycheck to paycheck and are not sure when their next meal is going to be. This reaction can linger, even when someone is no longer food insecure.
One way to respect fullness is to stop classifying foods as good or bad or safe or forbidden. Learn what comfortable satiety feels like. If you start eating when you are not hungry, it’s hard to know when to stop out of fullness. Here are some strategies to become more aware of what you’re eating.
Taste check: how does the food taste? Is it worthy of your taste buds?
Satiety check: ask yourself what your hunger or fullness level is. There can be considerable fluctuation in your fullness level depending on the last time you ate and what you ate.
When you finish eating, ask yourself what the fullness level is now. How would you describe fullness – pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.
References:
1. Tribole E, Resch E. Principle 2: Honor Your Hunger. In: Tribole E, Resch E, 4th ed. Intuitive Eating; A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach. St. Martin’s Essentials; 2020:84-100.
2. Tribole E, Resch E. Principle 6: Feel Your Fullness. In: Tribole E, Resch E, 4th ed. Intuitive Eating; A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach. St. Martin’s Essentials; 2020:167-177.
