What Does it Mean to Honor Your Hunger?
Our bodies create a variety of cues and symptoms to get us to respond to our bodily needs. Every night, a deep sensation of tiredness overcomes us to encourage us to lie down and sleep. The symptom of thirst beckons us to drink some water to stay hydrated. In cold environments, our body shivers, and goosebumps appear on our skin, indicating that we should turn up the heat and grab a sweater.
These are all examples of how the body attempts to conserve itself by maintaining homeostasis or stability inside the body. Of course, it is possible to disregard these cues and simply deal with the symptoms of intense fatigue, dry mouth, and blue lips, but eventually, we will become sleep-deprived, dehydrated, and hypothermic, resulting in much more extreme and dangerous effects. It is healthiest for our bodies – and much more comfortable – to simply respond to our body’s needs.
So, why would we treat the symptom of hunger any differently?
Hunger is simply a request from your body that it needs more energy from food.
It’s that simple. When your body senses a decline in its energy source (blood glucose), it will respond by creating a symptom, namely hunger, to tell us to seek out some food. Emotionally and mentally we benefit by eating something nourishing and delicious, and physically we benefit by replenishing our energy source to continue our daily activities.
Of course, when we become hungry, we have the decision-making power to choose what types of foods to consume. The quality of our food choices significantly impacts our overall health.
However, if we choose to repetitively ignore our hunger, our bodies will respond in more extreme manners to compensate for our lack of action. We may find ourselves binging on foods high in fat and sugar. We may have a decreased desire to be physically active. And we may find that weight management becomes challenging because our body has become trained to lower its BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) and increase its storage reserves of calories (aka, body fat). What was once simply a request for some food has now become a battle to defend your body's energy stores.
Certainly, the opposite response is also damaging. Repetitively over-consuming food in the setting of satiety, or fullness cues, can lead to a lack of perceptiveness towards fullness and an unnecessary reserve of energy in the form of body fatness. This is the concept of a scarcity mindset around food.
What’s the solution? Tune in to your hunger cues and respond to them appropriately! Denying hunger does not result in sustained weight loss. That’s worth repeating, given that most people choose to ignore their hunger in an effort to eat fewer calories and lose weight. Choosing not to eat in response to hunger does not lead to long-term weight loss and may even result in unhealthy weight gain.
What does it look like to honor your hunger? This looks like having half of a peanut butter sandwich in the late afternoon when you’re hours past lunch and hungry before dinner. It looks like having some greek yogurt, whole grain cereal, and berries when you’re hungry before bedtime. Honoring your hunger is preparing balanced snacks ahead of time when you know you have a long day ahead of you. And it also looks like recognizing that you are comfortably full and putting the rest of your meal in the refrigerator, knowing you always have the opportunity to return to it later when you are hungry again.
If you have denied your hunger and fullness cues for some time now, allow yourself some time to practice tuning back into those cues. Recognizing hunger and fullness onset is a skill that can always be relearned with patience and time.
Working with a dietitian is a great way to relearn those hunger and fullness cues! Please schedule a FREE discovery call if you want to work with me.
Fun Fact: I featured photos of kids in this article to demonstrate the point that kids typically respond appropriately to their hunger and fullness cues — they eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full.