117. Back To Basics - Principle 6, Feel Your Fullness

Today in my back to basics series I’m talking about intuitive eating principle 6, feel your fullness. 

As with hunger, fullness feels different to each person. Right now, if you’ve spent years dieting, you may not know what that feels like for you. 

In this episode I’m going to explain how fullness might feel in your body, and talk about the reasons why you might be a little out of touch with your fullness signals. 

Plus I’m going to give you a little activity you can do to help you to discover what fullness feels like for you.

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] 

Welcome, welcome, welcome. Welcome back to my intuitive eating back to basics series. In each episode, I'm walking you through one of the 10 principles of intuitive eating, helping you understand it a little bit, giving you some thoughts, giving you some tips, and then hopefully you'll understand it a little bit better and be able to apply it to your own life.

This episode is part of a series, so keep listening if you want to. But if you're just finding the series, if you're just finding this as the first episode, I'd really strongly suggest you go back and you listen to the series from the beginning. It will really help you to do that. 

Okay. Today we are talking about principle six, feel your fullness and just like hunger, there are signs of fullness that you might have ignored for a long time because of dieting. 

It's really quite common to find that when [00:01:00] you are on a diet, you don't get full because the amount you're eating isn't enough to fill you up. 

If you're calorie counting especially, you can find that the amount of food that you allow yourself each day or each meal is just not enough.

And there are apps out there, mentioning no names, that will set you on a ridiculously low number of calories that is totally unrealistic. Nowhere near enough to keep your body functioning. And so to achieve that low number, you have to keep the portions of food tiny, and so you never get to the point of fullness.

Or perhaps for you It's that you binge eat or you have cheat days or treat days once a week where you're off plan and so you eat large amounts of food very quickly and your body doesn't have a chance to realize and tell you that it's full. 

Or maybe [00:02:00] You do realize you're full, but you choose to ignore it because this is the one day of the week that you can go all out and eat whatever you want, so you're going to make the most of it. 

There are many other reasons why we might eat past the point of being comfortably full, right? Not satisfied. That's the most common one. You're just not satisfied. So you keep eating because you're still looking for the food that's going to satisfy you. Maybe because of your mood. 

Are you happy? Are you angry? Are you sad? Are you stressed? All reasons why you might eat more than you usually would. 

Because you have to eat at set times, so you eat more to tide you over to the next meal. 

Or maybe you're eating too quickly, so your body doesn't have a chance to tell you that it's getting full. Eating when super hungry can make you do that.

Or if you've just come off a diet because now you're free and you're free to eat everything that [00:03:00] you want to. 

And the same with starting intuitive eating. You feel like you can eat all of this food, and so you have to eat all of this food, and your body makes you eat all of this food, because you can now.

All reasons why you might eat past comfortably full. 

And habit, you know. It can just be a habit to eat that amount of food, to put that amount of food on your plate, to not stop eating when you're full. 

There are more emotional reasons too. So, did you grow up with the message of clean your plate? You have to eat everything on your plate before you can leave the table? Is that a message you used to hear? 

What about money? Maybe money's a big deal for you or was a big deal growing up, and you feel like it's a waste to stop eating the food that's on your plate. 

Maybe it's a food scarcity or accessibility issue. Maybe you don't have food a lot of the week or a lot of the month so, when you do [00:04:00] get it, you just want to eat lots of it, and you do, past the point of fullness. 

Whatever your reasons, it's not a good relationship to have with food. It is physically uncomfortable to be overly full. It is physically uncomfortable to never reach fullness. It's mentally difficult, it's emotionally difficult.

The nicer, kinder option is to learn to recognize what fullness feels like for you and then to work with that. Work with your hunger, work with your fullness, and that will help to naturally balance your food intake. 

There they go again, see, these principles of intuitive eating working together. Hunger and the fullness working together, it's good.

It's important to note here, that this is not about feeling your fullness so that you can force yourself to stop eating, okay. It is perfectly okay to feel full, [00:05:00] but to not yet be satisfied, so to keep eating. 

If we said you're full, so you have to stop eating, that's just putting more rules and more restriction in place, and that is not what intuitive eating is about. 

This is about having an awareness of what your body is telling you and then making a decision based on that. 

Just like hunger, you might think that you just feel fullness in the stomach, but it's much more than that. 

So think about a time when you were really, really full. You couldn't squeeze in another bite. How does that feel to you? 

How does it feel in your stomach? Some discomfort? Maybe some pain. Maybe you feel bloated and like you need to unbutton your trousers, or better still put your pyjamas on. 

How high up do you feel it? How [00:06:00] low do you feel it? Maybe it even messes with your digestion.

Now you think about how it feels in your head. Can you still concentrate? Do you still have the right level of focus and clarity, or do you feel sluggish and tired? 

Once you can distinguish what it feels like for you to be super full, you can start to think about how those feelings are for you when you're a little more comfortably full.

Then maybe when you have a nice comforting feeling in your stomach, maybe that means that you are full of food but comfortably so. 

So maybe instead of feeling like you need to sleep, to feel comfortably full means that you are energized and motivated and have better focus, see.

If you can't yet feel your fullness yet, that's okay. Give yourself some time. Give yourself a [00:07:00] little bit of practice. Like hunger, it might take some work if you've been dieting for a very long time but with some focus, with some practice, you can start to recognize the sensations that are present for you when you're hungry, and when you're full. 

There's a really nice little activity you can do. It's called the water load test. And the water load test is a great way to start feeling physical fullness, especially if you're a bit out of touch with your hunger and fullness signals.

It's a lovely safe test to do because it's just water. There's no food involved, if that's a bit triggering for you this makes it a really nice safe thing for you to do. It's a simple test, all it requires is some water, five minutes or so of peace and quiet, and that really is important because you need the space to focus on what you're doing.

Choose a time where you could be reasonably empty of food. It's not something you want to do when you've just eaten because the whole aim of this is to feel when you're starting to get [00:08:00] full. 

So here are the steps. 

Get yourself a really nice big jug of room temperature water. The more the better so that you don't run out and have to interrupt to go and get more water.

Consider how your stomach feels with no food or very little food in it and no water in it. How does that emptiness feel to you? This is really key as a starting point because it's important to know what that emptiness kind of feels like and then you can make the decision. connection between that and feeling full.

So now take a glass of water, start drinking, not too slowly, a reasonable pace so that you can drink a good amount of water. 

And as that water moves down through your body, feel the movement. Think about how that feels inside for you. Can you feel where the water is in your body? Can you feel the [00:09:00] water reach your stomach?

Your stomach, by the way, just sits just under your diaphragm at the bottom of your ribs. Some people think it's a lot lower, a lot lower down, but it's actually quite high up. 

So, think about how it feels, that water just sitting there. Can you feel it? 

Keep the water going until you feel full. Keep drinking the water, feel it go down, feel it sit in your stomach, and as you drink more and more, think about how that feeling is changing. 

Consider how physically full your stomach is feeling. When you think your stomach is full, then stop drinking the water. 

You might drink a really large amount of water before you feel full. You might drink a very small amount of water. The amount itself doesn't matter, it's irrelevant. This is about recognising the feelings.

Consider how your stomach felt at the beginning of the [00:10:00] activity. Consider how it feels at the end of the activity. You know, can you feel the differences? Can you tell what hunger feels like and what fullness feels like a little bit now? 

It is okay if you don't recognize how it feels straight away. It might take a few attempts. Practice will develop your awareness of your physical cues. Give it some thought. Give it some focus. 

As with hunger, Once you start to be able to recognize it and listen to those cues, you can start being more of an intuitive eater, giving your body what it needs and wants and what feels comfortable rather than eating to rules and restriction.

If you would like me to help you work through this, then I'd love to have a call with you. It's a free 30 minute session. We can talk about how you feel around food. I can give you some tips. I can get you going straight away. So you can [00:11:00] start your intuitive eating journey and we can look at some options for what might help you support wise going forward.

The link is in the show notes.