113. Back to Basics - Principle 2, Honour your hunger

Today in my back to basics series I’m talking about intuitive eating principle 2, honour your hunger. 

I’m going to explain how hunger works in the body, and give you some tips of feelings you can look for to decide what hunger feels like for you.

I’m going to explain what hunger does for you, and why it’s important.

And I’ll be asking, “would you leave your neighbour stood on the doorstep”? 

Want to know why? Take a listen.

Transcript

 A quick heads up before you start reading..... My transcriptions are automatically generated. I do not type them manually. For this reason there may be errors, incorrect words, bad spelling, bad grammar, and other things that just seem a little 'off'. You'll still be able to understand what is being said though, so please just ignore that and enjoy the episode. 


[00:00:00] 

Hello, welcome to my intuitive eating back to basics series. In each episode, I'm walking you through one of the 10 principles of intuitive eating. I'm helping you understand them a little bit more. I'm giving you a couple of questions that you can take away and think about so you can figure out how these principles apply to you.

You may or may not know that this is a series. So if you've just stumbled across this episode, you're welcome to keep listening. But to get the most out of it, I'd suggest you go back and you start at the beginning of the series. It all makes a bit more sense when you follow it in order. Today we're talking about principle two, Honor Your Hunger.

This is all about recognizing when you are hungry and acting upon it, not just ignoring it. People often think that hunger is about a feeling in the stomach, but it's actually much more than that. [00:01:00] And understanding what that feels like to you is really important if you want to be an intuitive eater.

Hunger's got a really important function in the body. Everything you do relies on energy. Every movement, every thought. And we get this energy from food. We eat it. If it doesn't all get used, we store it in our muscles, in our liver. And for that reason, your body drives you to eat. That's hunger. 

So let's do a little bit of biology. Just a little bit though, so that you can understand the body a little bit better.

Energy mainly comes from carbs. Everything is broken down into its simplest form of sugar, which is why we crave carbs when we're tired. For example, if we're feeling a bit lethargic, if we've had a busy day, certain times of the month, we crave carbs. 

It's your body asking for the sugars. It is the easiest thing for your body to use to produce energy. And so, that's why you crave it. [00:02:00] 

Now there are two main hormones that control your hunger. One is ghrelin and one is leptin. And there are others like insulin and cortisol, but we'll focus on just these two for now.

Because we're not going deep in biology here. When you have not eaten for a while, your stomach produces grehlin. It's saying the stores are empty. It gives you appetite, it gets your gastric juices flowing, it gets you ready to eat. 

And then when you're full, fat cells release leptin and that tells your brain, you've got enough calories on board now, you've got enough food coming in, stop the hunger signals, don't need to eat anymore.

There are things that can upset that, like if you're unwell, for example, but on an average, normal, functioning day, That's the basics of how it works, right? 

So your hunger [00:03:00] is there to encourage you to take in more energy. And this is why we want to acknowledge it and work with it, not ignore it. We function better when we have energy on board.

So if you listen to your hunger, if you honor your hunger, it will help you to provide energy for yourself when it's needed. And then you feel much better. 

When we learn to eat intuitively, honouring the hunger and eating, we're teaching the body that it can trust us again. It's telling the body, it's telling your mind that we will not put it into a state of famine anymore and that we will have food available when it's ready for it, when it wants it, when it needs it.

Diets are just a form of famine as far as your body's concerned. It does not know that you are trying to lose weight for a wedding or that you're trying to get a beach body ready for your summer holiday. [00:04:00] Your body just knows that you're cutting energy. You are restricting the amount that it has to work with, and it puts protective measures in place for you.

And you have to build that trust up again. If you want to know more about how restriction affects the drive to eat, then go back, go and find my episode on the binge restrict pendulum. Uh, I'm not going to go into that here because we're just focusing on the principle, but go find the binge restrict pendulum episode and it will explain why if you let yourself get too hungry, all of a sudden you want to eat a lot more food.

There are lots of very valid reasons why you might be letting yourself get too hungry. It's all about the rules that we set for ourselves. 

Through our time of dieting, through our time of listening to all that dieting messages that we rejected in principle one.[00:05:00] 

Believing that hungry is good. Believing that some foods are bad for you. Thinking that food isn't healthy or hearing messages like, "should you eat that?" Restriction, only having small amounts. Calorie control, calorie restriction. Shakes diets, they are serious calorie restriction. Eating at set times or to a set routine.

Intermittent fasting, for example, restricting the window that you're allowed to eat in. 

Or simply out of habit, 

Maybe because of man made rules. 

Timings of meals, how long you have to leave between meals. Only eating when you're hungry and stopping when you are full. All messages that we get taught are the right way to eat. 

And for your information, there is nothing wrong with grazing. You do not have to stick to this [00:06:00] idea that you have to have three meals a day. Your body might just naturally be more geared up to eating more often. 

So, you know, this grazing, this snacking type of eating, absolutely fine. If you're satisfying your hunger and you're making this peace with food. 

We often think that hunger is just a feeling in the stomach, but it is much more than that when you really tune in.

So for some people it's a gurgling or rumbling in the stomach. That's what we tend to recognise, right? 

But there's also things like, do you get lightheaded when you're hungry? Does your concentration wane? Do you have pain? Do you have physical pain? Does your mood change? Do you get headachy? Do you feel different in your throat?

And it's okay if you can't feel any of those right now. It's okay if you don't recognize that for yourself. There are many [00:07:00] reasons why you might not be able to. 

Dieting really destroys our ability to feel these cues. Maybe you're just too busy and you don't think about it. Trauma, stress, poor sleep. And poor sleep, that's a vicious cycle because eating well promotes good sleep. 

I like to think of hunger as a visitor to your house, right? 

They come to your house, and they knock on the door, and you let them in.

Which means, you eat. Hunger comes knocking, you eat. Then, your neighbour comes to the house again, and you let them in. Which means, you got hungry, you let them in, you eat. Yeah? Right? You with me? You with the neighbour analogy? Then you start a diet. Which means you try and control how often your [00:08:00] neighbour can visit.

So they come to your house and you leave it a little while to open the door. They can wait, right? They knock a little bit louder, which means you get a bit hungrier. You let them in. 

Next time, you try and put them off. They knock, and they knock, and they knock, and you make them wait, and wait, and wait. And by the time you open the door, they've got less time to chat to you, so they blurt out everything they've got to say really quickly.

For the sake of the analogy, this means you've left it so long that you're actually now super hungry, so now you eat more and you eat more quickly. 

Next time, you're hoping that if you ignore them, they will go away, because that's what you've been told will happen. So they knock and they knock and they knock, they shout through the letterbox, you ignore them and they leave, [00:09:00] which means you get super hungry, your body feels rubbish, but eventually the hunger subsides because it gives up trying to tell you to eat. 

Next time, your neighbour just stands at your door. They know there is no point in knocking. You won't hear them. You won't come. So they just stand there, all sad. 

And this means you're really, really hungry, right? You've ignored all the signs for so long that now you can't feel them anymore. 

You've ignored them. They've gone.

Your hunger is that neighbour. That neighbour needs to know that they will be heard when they call. You have to build up that trust again. 

And then after a little while, the neighbour will just have to tap on the door lightly and you'll let them [00:10:00] in and you'll give them what they need. You'll have a nice time.

But how can you learn to feel it? 

Eat regularly. The body runs out of carbs in about a 3 to 6 hour window. Sounds like a big window, but we're all unique. So for some it might be 3 hours, for some it might be longer. We're all unique, right? 

Check in with your body regularly to see how it's feeling and whether some of those feelings might be indicating that you need to eat.

Start to associate also how you feel before and after eating. See how your body feels before you're eating, when you're hungry. After eating, when things might be a little bit more satisfied. 

So my questions for you today are, what does hunger feel like for you? Do you know, or do you need to work out what that is for you?

Think about what it feels like to have no [00:11:00] energy and how it feels to have lots of energy. Compare the two. Try and figure out the sensations that you might look for when you're thinking about hunger. 

So take those away, think on them for a bit. 

Principle two, done. I'll see you tomorrow for principle three, making a piece with food.