Trust Your Gut - Eat for Satisfaction Honoring Your Hunger and Feeling Your Fullness

Principles 2 and 6 of Intuitive Eating are Honor your Hunger and Feel your Fullness. If they are a few principles apart (at 2 and 6), then why are we talking about them together? Because both of these principles involve interoceptive awareness to understand our body’s cues. Both of these principles urge us to check in with our bodies and make our food decisions based on how our bodies feel, not what diet culture says.

Honor Your Hunger

Quick Disclaimer: This series explores Intuitive Eating from a chef’s perspective. This is not meant to provide specific medical advice. If these topics interest you, please consult a registered dietitian and/or healthcare provider for personalized guidance and education.

Let’s start with Honor your Hunger.  Stay in tune with your body - listen for those hunger cues and satiate them when possible. At times we may not have immediate access to food when we begin feeling hungry. Consider carrying snacks, especially if it’s a busy day ahead.  When we feel hungry, we satisfy our hunger with food. A glass of water or another coffee isn’t enough to fuel our bodies.  When possible, we eat when we first feel those hunger cues and we don’t intentionally wait until starvation. So what are these hunger cues? It’s possible to feel hunger as different sensations in the body and some days these cues can feel different than other days.

Keep in mind, if we’ve been dieting for a long time, it could be difficult to identify these hunger cues. Practice makes permanent and if we begin to practice checking in with our bodies often to search for these cues, we will be able to feel them with more ease. The more often we can identify and satisfy our hunger cues in a timely manner, the more we reestablish a trust within our bodies.

Feeling Your Fullness

Next, Feel your Fullness. So, on the other side of eating is the sensation of fullness. Stay in tune with your body - check in with yourself and your body sensations while eating. We may have portioned more on our plates than our bodies are hungry for. We may not have portioned enough and a second helping would be nice. We want to allow our bodies’ wisdom to guide us to feelings of fullness. We don’t want a diet culture expectation to dictate we are full. Using an arbitrary measure or assumption for restricting how much we eat would be like only applying a pea-sized amount of sunscreen for each leg. Once applied, it’s easy to see that the sunscreen isn’t protecting the whole leg. Instead of using more sunscreen if we just say ‘good enough’, what’s going to happen? We’ll probably find out later that we didn’t use enough and are unfulfilled. If we base the amount we eat off an external rule and we don’t check in to figure out what our body actually needs, we can be left unsatisfied and unfulfilled.  When we feel our fullness and check in with ourselves as we eat, we can eat to our bodies’ and hearts’ content. So, what are these fullness cues that we are looking for?

Utilizing Mindful Eating can help us tune into our bodies and connect with our hunger cues and our fullness cues. As a form of meditation, mindfulness leads us to focus our attention on just the one activity, eating. By cutting out distractions and becoming more in tune with our bodies, we will begin to feel sensations that went unnoticed before. When we are eating mindfully we notice each texture, appreciate all the aromas, and explore each flavor as we chew and interact with our food. We also give ourselves the space to connect with our true feelings and opinions of the food we are eating.

Nutritional Science

And now, the scientific foundation behind our hunger and fullness cues.  Our hypothalamus regulates our appetite in response to our energy needs. Our metabolism changes day to day based on hormonal changes, amount of sleep, amount of physical activity, among other factors. Our hypothalamus is able to sense all those changes and reacts by sending us appropriate hunger and fullness cues. From the time we begin to feel hunger to eating to digesting to feeling fullness, there are a multitude of hormonal changes happening. The time it takes our bodies to digest food varies from person to person. As with everything else in health, it is super individualized and will look a little different for everyone.  As our digestive system processes food, our hypothalamus keeps tabs on the processes and initiates our bodies reactions. On average, it takes about 6 to 8 hours for food to move from our stomach to our small intestine.  It takes time for our brains to process messages from our body.  This is why we may begin feeling full, stop eating, and then feel uncomfortably full later. Or vice-versa. We may feel full, stop eating, then feel some subtle signs of hunger again in less than an hour. This is our hypothalamus realizing that we didn’t load enough fuel and signaling to our body that we want more food. Remember each day can have different nutrition and metabolism demands, so we shouldn’t get discouraged when our body doesn’t act according to our expectations. We can listen for our bodies cues and make food choices without judgement.

A helpful tool is the Hunger Fullness Scale. Here is a link! https://alissarumsey.com/hunger-fullness-scale/ This scale can help us identify our hunger cues and fullness cues and eat accordingly. However, it’s very important that we don’t confuse this with a hunger/fullness diet. We have full permission to eat anytime we want, not just when we feel hunger cues. Listening to our bodies hunger cues can be a tool we use, but it is not a rule. Sometimes we may eat simply because there is food in front of us that looks delicious. As with everything Intuitive Eating, there is no perfection here. There will be times when we ignore our hunger cues and our bodies may become uncomfortably hungry or starving. There may be times when we feel our fullness, choose to eat past it, and become uncomfortably full. There may be times when we are finished eating but we still feel some sensations of hunger however there is no more food available. None of these scenarios are failures, they are learning opportunities. They are opportunities for us to learn more about our bodies and our hunger and fullness cues. These are opportunities to analyze how we feel. If we want to avoid this in the future, we can identify ways to prepare ourselves and prevent uncomfortable feelings around eating. Should we carry snacks with us? Should we plan opportunities throughout the day to check in with our bodies? Do we want to find a quiet, peaceful place where we can listen for our cues? Do we want to turn off the TV when we eat and feel into our bodies? And there’s no right or wrong answers to any of these questions. We are all unique!