3 know your hunger

I can’t believe I’m even saying this, but hunger has become a battlefield as of late. Some people deny their hunger in the name of weight loss. Others think of hunger as a sign of weakness. Me? I see hunger throwing people into a tormenting spin: “What do I eat? What should I not eat? How much? How often?”

Eating is something we do every day. It should be second nature, but unfortunately for many people, it’s not. The very act of choosing food has become a war zone within ourselves. And the truth is, true hunger is a cue that our body throws us when it needs food. And like other internal cues, it should be listened and attended to. In this chapter we’re going to walk through normal eating, fullness, satisfaction, and the different types of hunger.

WHAT IS NORMAL EATING?

We all know how to eat, but eating and normal eating aren’t the same thing and many of us have forgotten what the latter feels like. We often mistake normal eating with choosing the “right” foods. But as you know by now, there are no right and wrong food choices. It’s entirely “normal” to occasionally overeat or to choose foods that are highly pleasurable to most of us, but not the most nutritious. In other words, it’s normal for us to sometimes choose chocolate over salad, and that’s okay.

Normal eating looks like this:

Those are my guidelines for normal eating and they promote not only physical, but emotional wellness. Now, for contrast, let’s talk about what normal eating is not:

Whoa, that’s a long list! Sadly, I see people doing these things on a daily basis.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you found yourself identifying with a bunch of things on both lists. Or thinking that normal eating is actually harder than you thought it would be. It is harder, and that’s because we’ve become so accustomed to eating with an agenda. An agenda has infiltrated our culture with constant messaging: Eat this, don’t eat that. Eat to be thin. Don’t gain weight. There’s something wrong with your body. Starving yourself is a badge of honor. Listen to this unqualified, full-of-shit “health guru.” It’s all garbage diet culture talk, and it’s the end of the road for that crap.

Diet culture has changed our perception of what eating should look like. It has led us away from picking up on our body’s natural cues and instead made us reliant on external cues to tell us when and what to eat. But only your body can tell you what it needs. No diet program, algorithm, or app can accurately predict how many calories you need in a day, how you process those calories, or when your body really needs to eat. We don’t have the capacity to figure out our exact daily nutrient requirements, which can shift from day to day depending on our level of activity, hormones, environment, and myriad other factors. So when you’re following that 1,200-calorie meal plan that your trainer or some diet app gave to you, you’re not acting in tune with your body. You’re using an external cue to give you information your body inherently already has. We need to listen to our bodies, not to our external cues, more often.

Here’s the ugly truth: Diets oppose the natural forces at play in our bodies, and anyone who has been on a diet can attest to how bad—physically and emotionally—that can feel. Physically, you feel hungry and unsatisfied. Emotionally, you’re cranky, frustrated, and fragile. Think about the last time you were on a diet.

My bet is that you pretty much ate the food you were told to eat, at the times and in the quantities you were allowed to. You looked to the diet for cues about when and what to eat rather than tuning in to what your body was trying to say to you.

If you let it, diet culture will take away your power when it comes to food. It will convince you that your body can’t be trusted, and that you’re incapable of managing your eating on your own. It uses fear to reinforce those assertions, because there’s big money to be made in convincing you to give over your power in order to be a loyal lifetime follower.

I want you to be able to step away from controlling diets and toward a more balanced way of eating. Normalizing your eating habits by listening to what your body needs can bring you emotional peace and physical satisfaction, and help repair your relationship with food by putting the responsibility for your choices squarely in your own hands.

If you’ve been dieting and restricting the amounts and types of food you eat for a while, you might not remember what hunger feels like. It’s completely normal (although not necessarily a good thing) to lose your internal cues when you’ve been overriding them with random calorie and macro allowances, an eating schedule, prescriptive food lists, and everything else that diets are about. Basically, you’ve been following everyone else’s rules but your own! So when it comes to nutrition and eating, we need to get you back in touch with your body so you’re listening to nobody else but you.

Let’s start by learning about hunger.

TRUE HUNGER

Babies eat when they’re hungry and stop eating when they’re full. This is true hunger and it’s a physical feeling, not an emotional one. Hunger and fullness are innate cues that we’re born with. Just like you wouldn’t ignore the urge to pee, you shouldn’t be ignoring your true hunger. We need to nurture those cues and listen to them.

Eating when you’re truly hungry can help stabilize your weight, mood, and hormones. And while emotional eating may be used to satisfy other needs, only the eating we do in response to true hunger can result in both physical and emotional satisfaction.

FALSE HUNGER

So what happens to that intuition? As we grow, outside influences sometimes override our natural instincts. For example, if my stomach grumbles but my diet tells me that I’m not allowed to eat yet, I’m going to wait to have lunch. This kind of conditioning can lead to false hunger, eating when we’re not truly hungry.

Sometimes, our brains tell us to eat even if we’re not hungry. For instance, if you put a piece of chocolate cake in front of me, I’m probably going to eat it because it looks good, even if I’m not hungry for it. This is called visual hunger. Visual hunger is wanting to eat not because you’re hungry, but because you see food that looks good. It could be donuts in the break room after lunch at work or fries on your friend’s plate after you’ve finished your own meal. Visual hunger can also be associated with situations that remind you of food, like watching a cooking show on TV, smelling popcorn at the movies, or seeing an ad for a delicious-looking burger.

Cravings are completely separate from hunger. They’re classified as “hedonic responses to food,” meaning that we crave something that is pleasurable and fun. This is why we generally end up craving chips or cupcakes versus salad and chicken breasts. We also tend to crave things that we’re restricting or that we believe are off-limits to us. Which means, when we are on a restrictive diet, we tend to crave the foods we aren’t allowed to eat. And we have plenty of research to confirm it.1, 2, 3

There’s a school of thought that our bodies crave what we need, but research doesn’t confirm this theory, except in the case of pica, in which pregnant women in need of minerals eat clay, chalk, and other inedible things. What’s more likely is that our cravings result from emotional or hormonal triggers, which we’ll cover more in Chapter 5. Some research has attempted to pin our cravings on our gut bacteria, but we still have very limited knowledge about this theory.4

A few things do diminish cravings. First, letting yourself have what you’re craving eliminates that forbidden fruit syndrome of wanting what you can’t have. You may initially overeat what you’ve been withholding, but eventually, it will become another food to you.

Some people aren’t comfortable having certain foods hanging around their house, and I get it. There are some foods that I know I’m going to overeat, plain and simple. So, I limit the times that I have them in the house, which are few and far between. Do I let myself eat them without guilt and shame? For sure I do. If I want them, do I go and get them? Yup. But I find that having them in my face is sometimes just too much.

I don’t look at this as a form of restriction but rather as a form of awareness. Science shows that some of us respond to external cues to eat more than others. Again, this is normal, but not ideal. I want you to enjoy these foods because you’re truly hungry, not because of an outside influence. Recognizing visual triggers and removing them is one way to help accomplish that.

There’s also emotional hunger, which is related to emotional eating. Many of us picture emotional eating as the quintessential pint of ice cream to nurse ourselves through a bad breakup, but in fact, emotional eating can be in response to all emotions—happiness, anger, sadness, anxiety, excitement. It’s not necessarily associated with only bad emotions.

I’ve had plenty of clients who have struggled with visual or emotional hunger and didn’t even know that they were being influenced by outside cues.

CASE STUDY: THE EMOTIONAL EATER

Paul had a pretty stressful life. He was the VP of a large company and under a lot of pressure to keep everything running smoothly. He traveled a lot for work and had a brutal commute, but the highlight of his day was coming home to his family.

“I love coming home to my kids and my wife,” he told me. “But I literally eat all night long, starting from about half an hour after I walk through the door.”

He couldn’t understand it—he didn’t overeat or even have the urge to during the workday.

“Can you walk me through a typical evening at home?” I asked.

“When I get home, my wife is starting to make dinner. She’s managed two of the three kids all day, sent the other off to school, then picked him up after, given them all snacks, and gotten groceries, so I take the kids while she finishes cooking. We eat as a family, and we generally enjoy that. But after, not surprisingly, my wife is exhausted. I take over caring for the kids at that point, playing with them and then putting them to bed while she has some time to herself.

“I guess when I cross through the front door each evening, I feel like my day just goes on and on. I don’t get a real break between work and being with the kids, which I love, but it can be exhausting, too. To keep myself going, I pick at whatever is lying out on the counters, I go into the candy jar we have in our living room, and I finish the kids’ dinner plates and bedtime snacks. I know I’m not hungry and yet I can’t seem to stop putting food in my mouth all night long.”

“Sounds to me like you’re emotionally eating,” I say. “You’ve got a lot of responsibilities once you get home, and you’re looking to food to give you the energy to keep going. Is it working?”

Paul sighs. “Not really. If anything, I feel lethargic, bloated, and burned out by about 9 p.m., probably from eating too much sugar after dinner. It feels like I’m filling up on junk when I should be trying to enjoy my family.”

Paul had an important realization, so I let it sink in. He really was going from one stressful situation at work into another at home. He wanted to give his wife some well-deserved rest time, but that meant he didn’t have any for himself. And to compensate, he was eating out of stress.

Once Paul was aware of his own stress triggers and why he was overeating, he talked with his wife, and together they rearranged evening chores so that they both got a bit of individual time for peace and relaxation. With their new arrangement in place, he was able to name his feelings and filled the void not with empty consumption but with some “me time.”

What can we learn from Paul? His pattern of mindless eating was unrelated to hunger; it was a result of emotional hunger. He was filling himself with food instead of what he really needed—a little bit of time to himself to de-stress and regroup. Once he became aware of this, it was easier to change his behavior and to start listening to true physical cues of hunger.

Paul’s issue isn’t uncommon. We all eat emotionally sometimes. If it happens often—several times a week or more—and you’re using food as your primary coping mechanism, this can have a negative impact on your emotional and physical health. It’s important to get to the reasons why you’re using food to cope and then find other coping methods. Whether that’s getting out and moving your body, talking to someone, writing, or creating art, there are other options. I personally find it tough to exercise when I’m anxious because my anxiety is so distracting. But walking does help me sort out my feelings because it gets me outside, which decreases my stress. Everybody’s different, so you’ll need to find what nonfood coping mechanism works best for you.

I’m here to help you do all of that. One of the first things we need to do is learn how to recognize the difference between true hunger and false hunger.

THE HUNGER AND FULLNESS SCALE

When you’re learning (or relearning) what true hunger feels like, it can be helpful to use a scale to score your hunger levels. Over time, doing this can tell you important things about your true hunger, such as:

Think of the hunger and fullness scale as numbers from 1 to 10.

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1 = Famished. This is the hungriest you can get. You’re jittery, sweaty, probably faint, and your energy is flagging. You don’t want to do much of anything except find food.

2 = Starving. You’re having trouble concentrating and you feel weak. You’re irritated or hangry. Your stomach is empty and growling. If you’re a chronic dieter, you might be very familiar with how it feels to be a 2 on the hunger and fullness scale.

3 = Hungry. Your stomach is starting to growl. You might feel tired and less energetic. You should think about eating.

4 = Peckish. You’re getting hungry.

5 = Neutral. The sensations of hunger are abating and you’re in the middle of hungry and full. If you’re a chronic dieter, you’ll be used to stopping eating here.

6 = Satisfied. You’re beginning to feel satisfaction in the form of warmth and fullness. You could eat more, but you’re also fine as is. If you stopped now, you might be hungry in a couple of hours.

7 = Full. You’re comfortably full and you feel expansion in your belly. You could probably eat more, but you don’t need to. Your energy is up, and you’re mentally sharp. You’re satisfied and there are no signs of hunger to be found. This is when you should stop eating.

8 = Too Full. You’re slightly uncomfortable; you could have eaten less. If you often withhold food from yourself or skip meals, when you do eat, you might find yourself coasting right by an 8 and into uncomfortable 9 or 10. This happens simply because you’re so hungry, you’re probably eating fast, and you may be in feast versus famine mode.

9 = Overfull. You’re not feeling too good. Your stomach is bloated and achy, and your clothes feel a bit tight.

10 = Stuffed. This is the fullest you can be without actually throwing up. Your stomach feels painful and stretched, and you feel nauseous and sick. You probably don’t want to do anything but lie down.

Ideally, you’d eat when you’re between a 3 and 4 on the hunger scale, and stop when you’re between 6 and 7. But some days you might be in a meeting and unable to get to lunch until late. Maybe you’re traveling and you’re stuck on a plane without anything to eat and there’s no food in sight. You might overeat if you’ve let yourself get too hungry before your next meal or you’re at a family celebration. The ideal isn’t always possible—shit happens!—but the purpose of the hunger and fullness scale is to learn to recognize when you’re truly hungry.

DEALING WITH VISUAL HUNGER

If you’re not truly hungry but feel the need to eat because of a visual cue, acknowledge the feeling. If you really want what you’re seeing, eat it and get over it. Obsessing over your choice isn’t going to help you, and in fact, it could lead you down the path of overeating out of guilt. Repeat after me: Guilt and shame don’t play nice with food and eating!

The best way to remedy visual hunger is to anticipate it and eat a nourishing meal beforehand. Ever hear the saying “Never go to the supermarket hungry”? This is the same idea. For example, if you know that you’re going to the movies at dinnertime, have dinner first, and if you still want popcorn, order it. Don’t sit through the movie salivating and distracted because you’ve told yourself that popcorn is off-limits.

Anticipate your visual hunger beforehand and manage it by eating a balanced meal and not making anything off-limits.

CASE STUDY: THE SNACKER

I had a client whose desk was in front of the office snack table, which led her to have snacks on the brain all day long. She told herself that she wasn’t allowed any sweets at all, but she always ended up eating them anyway. This was disrupting her health because she was eating a lot of sweets and had gained a significant amount of weight just from that behavior.

The solution? Multipronged.

She started eating protein-rich meals and snacks to help curb her hunger, and got permission to move her desk away from the snack table. She also gave herself the go-ahead to eat snacks, so they weren’t off-limits. This immediately made them less attractive to her.

But because life isn’t always predictable, sometimes anticipating visual hunger will be impossible. That’s totally fine! Do your best. You’ll eat out of visual hunger sometimes, and that’s totally okay. But if you’re finding that visual cues are frequently influencing your choices over your true hunger, you may want to ask yourself the emotional hunger questions below. And if you need more help around the psychological triggers you have related to eating, a professional therapist can help.

DEALING WITH EMOTIONAL HUNGER

You might find it helpful to make a hunger journal. Grab a notebook and use it to track your hunger to get a better handle on when you’re eating and why. When you feel like you want to eat, score your hunger on the hunger and fullness scale, and jot it down in the journal. Include the time of day and any emotions you may be feeling at the time. If you score between 7 and 10 on the hunger and fullness scale but you still feel like eating, explore what you’re really feeling at the time in your journal. Are you stressed? Sad? Happy? Anxious? Nostalgic? Afraid?

When we eat because of emotional hunger, we’re merely putting a Band-Aid on our feelings. This can feel good at the time if you’re distracting yourself from something unhappy, but when the high of eating wears off, you’re in the same place as before. As we discussed back in Chapter 2, getting to the bottom of our feelings can be tough and shitty, but it helps us move forward.

When you identify that you are emotionally hungry, ask yourself these questions:

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SATISFIED AND FULL

As you listen to your body more, you’ll recognize your real hunger cues. Once you have a sense of what true hunger feels like, you can start to differentiate between feeling full and feeling satisfied after a meal.

While there are different degrees of fullness, as you saw with the hunger and fullness scale, in general, fullness is the sensation of having eaten enough or more than enough. If you’re a chronic dieter, feeling full might make you feel guilty and feeling hungry might make you feel like you’re accomplishing something. This is diet culture knocking, so don’t answer the door. Feeling full is a good thing; there’s nothing wrong with it.

Sometimes, though, you can be full but not satisfied after a meal. Satisfaction is not only physical, it’s also psychological. Satisfaction comes from eating foods we enjoy. A lot of us feel as though we aren’t supposed to enjoy food, but this is just more diet culture bullshittery. Of course we’re supposed to enjoy food! While some of us will find more pleasure in eating than others—where are my foodies at?—overall, eating should never be a negative experience. If a diet is too restrictive, our meals won’t feel satisfying and we may find ourselves feeling deprived, thinking about food all the time, and foraging around for more.

We’ve all been there. In the 1990s, I was obsessed with eating everything fat-free or low-fat. When low-fat Oreos came out, I ran to the store to get them. I ate a ton of them, but still wanted more. They were so unsatisfying, I might as well have been eating sugared cardboard (actually, that’s what they tasted like, too). I should have just eaten the whole-fat ones, which would have satisfied me more. Eating to feel satisfied means choosing and enjoying foods we like without guilt.

Above all else, meals should be nourishing and satisfying. This is normal eating and it takes care of our physical and emotional health.

WILLPOWER AND PERFECTION ARE MYTHS

The word “willpower” often comes up in diet culture, and the very word and what it represents in dieting makes me want to scream. The prevailing belief is that if you can’t follow a diet, it’s not the diet’s fault: It’s yours. You’re weak, you’re flawed. On the flip side, someone who is able to abstain from eating the wrong foods is strong. They are worthy of praise and recognition. They have willpower.

The perception that willpower has anything to do with eating and weight loss is not only preposterous, it’s also physiologically unsound. In order to embrace a new view of normal eating, we have to let go of the idea that willpower has anything to do with healthy eating habits.

You see, when we’re dieting, the drive to eat is mostly mediated by hormones, which are triggered by restriction and undereating. We are powerless when faced with our biological mechanisms. In other words, when you restrict your food intake, your body goes into red-alert mode. It doesn’t like to be starved, and will do basically everything it can to get you to eat. There is no amount of willpower that can stand up to that natural force, so when we obey that call for food, nutrients, and energy, then feel guilt afterward because we lacked willpower, the diet industry wins. The truth? We never stood a chance.

Here’s how it works.

Ghrelin, which is made in our stomach, is sometimes called the hunger hormone because it drives our appetite. When your body needs fuel, your ghrelin levels rise, and you can’t focus on anything else but what you want to eat. You know the feeling: You’ve been on a diet for a few days, and everything looks delicious? That’s the ghrelin talking, telling you to eat something already! Lack of sleep can also spike ghrelin levels, which accounts in part for that carb craving many of us have after we pull an all-nighter. Let’s just say that when my daughter was born, I ate a lot of Starbucks apple fritters. My ghrelin was probably off the charts from lack of sleep and from exertion. Once you eat and your body no longer thinks it’s in starvation mode, your ghrelin levels drop.

Leptin is a hormone produced by fat cells, and it keeps your brain up-to-date on your body fat reserves by telling your central nervous system if you need to eat more or less. There are theories that say that leptin helps burn fat, but this has never been proven in humans. In fact, when anyone starts talking about “fat-burning hormones,” I know they’re full of shit. If any hormones burned fat the way these people say they do, don’t you think we’d be injecting them all over the place?

If you have enough body fat, your leptin levels stay the same or rise, causing you to eat less. If you go on a diet and lose body fat, leptin levels fall, increasing your appetite. What’s that about willpower again? You’re pretty much powerless against leptin.

But wait! If someone has a lot of body fat, wouldn’t their leptin levels be higher? And if so, wouldn’t those high leptin levels result in a lower appetite? Unfortunately, no. When we reach a certain level of body fat, signals from both leptin and ghrelin get messed up. Our leptin levels are high, but the brain becomes resistant to leptin and doesn’t hear it anymore when it tells our body to eat less. Instead, the brain thinks we’re not getting enough food because it’s not getting the signals from our circulating leptin, and our appetite is stimulated, causing us to eat more than we need to. As we gain more fat, more leptin is produced, but again, the signal is blocked. It’s a vicious cycle. Meanwhile, in the same situation, it doesn’t take as much ghrelin to spark hunger, so we get an appetite more easily that way, too.

The overall message? Cheating your body out of adequate calories will backfire each and every time, no matter how dedicated you are to a diet.

Here’s another example. I see a lot of clients with an all-or-nothing mentality, and when they restrict their food, it always causes more damage because their bodies come up with ways to get them to eat—through visual hunger, cravings, or emotional hunger. Then this happens: “I ate one piece of cake, so now that I’ve blown it, I might as well eat the whole cake, and whatever else I’m normally not allowed to eat.” They binge and their eating gets out of control—that’s not normal eating. This all-or-nothing thinking is the supreme saboteur of happiness and a nourishing diet, and it stems from the pressure of diet culture to be perfect.

Even if you think you can achieve what you believe to be the perfect diet, which would lead you to the perfect weight, consider the consequences. Will that process be miserable? Will it be sustainable? And consider the reason why you even believe that perfection is possible. Is diet culture telling you what you should be thinking, eating, and weighing?

Whatever your version of a perfect diet is, you’ll be better releasing it into the universe, and instead adopting my philosophy that in nutrition, there is no such thing as perfection. Trying to achieve it can take years of happiness away from you for no return whatsoever. Accepting that perfection is not possible can defuse a tremendous amount of the pressure we put onto ourselves to eat or look a certain way—let’s face it, it’s usually both. Make peace with it: You’ll never be perfect, nor should you want to be.

There are always outliers who can restrict food and lose weight for the long term, but in general, it’s a miserable existence. These people give up a lot socially, emotionally, and physically to achieve this, and very few of us would find those sacrifices worth the outcome. You want to live your best life because life is short. That doesn’t necessarily mean overeating every day, but it does mean feeling full and satisfied and enjoying food, friends, family, and all of the other things we lose when we diet.

Remember, normal eating is not about willpower or perfection, it’s about listening to your body. Our bodies are a lot smarter than we often give them credit for. Willpower is no match for biology. And anyone who tells you different is wrong.

TRUST YOURSELF, TRUST YOUR BODY

As we saw in Chapter 2, many chronic dieters don’t trust themselves around food. Food is the enemy that’s out to tempt them, and they need to restrict how much and which foods they eat so they don’t lose control. But by now we know that the tighter we hold on to that control, the less control we actually have and the worse we feel.

It’s time to learn to trust yourself around food. This is an important step to healing your body. Here are some exercises you can do to build trust in yourself:

Emotionally, this exercise might be tough for some people. But what I’m trying to do is give you permission to enjoy a food that you’ve told yourself you have no right to enjoy. That alone may be enough for you to reawaken your body’s physical sensations about when you’re satisfied and normalize your eating. It may take a few tries, but over time, you’ll likely find that your cravings toward a single food diminish once you allow yourself to have it. Eventually you might not even crave this food anymore.

I hope this chapter has helped you learn what it truly means and feels like to be hungry, full, and satisfied, and rethink your relationship with food, eating, and your body. This is all part of learning how to eat normally. It isn’t easy, but it’s the first step to finding peace. Go over the questions and exercises in this chapter as often as you need to. Do the hunger journal. Remember to ask yourself where your feelings are coming from. Talk about food and eating in positive terms only. Imagine a life where you don’t feel guilty about food or strive for perfection.

You’ll get there, and once you do, you’ll be able to turn your back on diets forever.