Intuitive Eating Principle 2: Honor Your Hunger

The second principle of Intuitive Eating is Honor Your Hunger. I feel like this is the principle most people think of when they first hear about intuitive eating, since a big component of this framework is honoring your body’s signals that it’s ready to eat. However, I’ve worked with many clients who don’t really know what hunger feels like anymore or how to honor it since they’ve been ignoring this signal for so long. Diet culture has convinced us that hunger is bad and something to fear – we’re constantly being told ways to avoid feeling hungry or distract ourselves rather than just fueling our bodies and giving them what they need!

Hunger is an extremely important signal from our bodies that lets us know when they need more energy. Without the sensation of hunger, we wouldn’t be driven to eat and we probably wouldn’t have survived as a species. I appreciate how the authors of Intuitive Eating, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, introduce this chapter in their book (affiliate link):

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 rebuilding trust with yourself and food.

– Intuitive Eating, Third Edition.

Maybe you’re someone who tries to push off eating, thinking that you’ll eat less throughout the day if you eat less often? However, you find that by the time you finally give in to your hunger and grab some food, you’re choosing the quickest and easiest option, while often ignoring your body’s other cues (like fullness or satisfaction). You’ve reached the stage of “primal hunger”, where your eating becomes out of control. This can also happen if you don’t know what hunger feels like in your body – you may be someone who doesn’t experience a growling stomach until you’re over-hungry.

What does hunger feel like?

Many of us associate hunger with a rumbling stomach, but that’s not the only hunger signal (and some people don’t experience that at all!). Hunger can feel like:

• Gurgling or a gnawing feeling in your stomach
• Stomach growling
• A feeling of “emptiness”
• Light-headedness
• Difficulty concentrating
• More frequent and persistent thoughts about food
• Stomach pain
• Irritability aka HANGER (I know I definitely experience this…)
• Feeling faint or weak
• Headache
• Mouth watering

Hunger is a spectrum and looks different for everyone, so you may not experience all of these sensations at once (or at all). There’s no right or wrong way to feel hunger. However, if you feel like you’re a bit out of touch with recognizing what hunger feels like for you, it’s time to tune in to what your body is trying to tell you. It can be helpful to think about what it feels like when you don’t eat for an extended period of time, let’s say five hours. If someone walks into the room with your favorite food, what does that feel like in your body?

The Hunger-Fullness Scale

Another way to get back in tune with your hunger signals is to check in with yourself every couple of hours and see where you fall on the Hunger-Fullness Scale. This can look different for everyone, but I’ve found it helpful to give examples when first helping clients interpret their hunger signals. As you practice, you’ll be able to fill in your own body’s signals for each level of hunger and what it feels like to you. Simply put, a 1 on the Hunger-Fullness Scale is when you are absolutely starving and need to eat RIGHT NOW. A 10 on the scale is when you are so stuffed that you feel like you might be sick.

Ideally, you want to keep your hunger levels between 3 and 7, or what I like to call the “Hunger-Fullness Sweet Spot”. If you start eating when you’re feeling hungry and ready to eat, you’re able to avoid primal hunger and the negative feelings that come along with it. Plus, you’re rebuilding trust with your body that when it’s hungry you’re going to feed it! (The same goes for stopping when you’re comfortably full, but we’ll get to that in a later post.)

If you’re still having a hard time feeling those hunger signals, it can be helpful to make it a goal to eat every 3-4 hours (think 3 meals per day and 1-2 snacks). This can help awaken hunger signals that have been ignored for an extended period of time due to dieting, stress, skipping meals, etc. Before eating, try and estimate where you are on the scale – eventually it will get easier over time.

How to Honor Your Hunger

Now that you’ve started recognizing your hunger, it’s important to start actually honoring it! Here are a few ways to do just that:

• Eat when you’re hungry. I know it sounds simple, but we’re so used to ignoring our hunger that we need to be reminded! Once you’re feeling hungry, find something to eat that will be satisfying to you.
• Ask yourself: “Am I meal or snack hungry?”. We have different levels of hunger (as you can see in the Hunger-Fullness Scale) and those different levels sometimes require different amounts of food. This can depend on when we last ate, how much we last ate, and when we’ll be able to eat again. Checking and asking yourself how much you need can help make sure you’re satisfied until the next time you’re hungry.
• Eat what you’re hungry for. Cravings get a bad reputation, but really they’re our body telling us what kind of food, experience, or energy we need. Part of honoring your hunger is also paying attention to what you want to eat. This will come up more later in Principle 6: Discover the Satisfaction Factor.
• Keep satisfying snacks on hand. Have a wide variety of tasty and nourishing foods at the ready so you can grab them quickly and avoid primal hunger. Pairing a source of carbohydrate with a protein or fat can be a great base for a satisfying snack!
• Take advantage of meal prep or leftovers. Preparing foods to eat ahead of time can make it easier to answer your hunger signals when they come calling without taking 30 minutes to an hour to prepare a meal. One of my favorite ways to meal prep is to have a couple of proteins, grains/potatoes, and vegetables ready in the fridge that I can easily combine to make a meal. Freezer meals and leftovers are a great way to have food ready too!

If you need help confidently recognizing and responding to your body’s hunger cues, I’ve got you! Apply for Intuitive Eating coaching or send me a message here. I’d also love to know how you honor your hunger in the comments below.

Mindfully yours,
Sam