Are You Out of Touch with Your Hunger?

Becoming an intuitive eater (someone who follows internal cues versus external rules) includes honoring your hunger. It's not uncommon, however, to be disconnected from your body’s hunger cues.

If you’ve been suppressing your hunger signals for a long time, it’s possible you’ve lost your physical sensitivity to them.

For example, if you have a history of dieting, you may have become accustomed to denying and tuning out your hunger. It gets silenced.

If you live a very chaotic, demanding and fast-paced life, you may ignore your hunger, especially if you feel it’s not a priority or there’s no time to eat.

Unrelenting stress and distractions can also dull your senses, making it hard to hear your hunger. So can sleep deprivation.

Perhaps you don’t realize what you're experiencing is actually a sign of hunger. We typically think hunger is felt in the stomach, however, any of the following sensations and symptoms can indicate hunger:

• Difficulty concentrating or articulating your thoughts (i.e., brain fog)
• Feeling light-headed, faint, dizzy, shaky or weak
• Irritability, crankiness or short temper
• Fatigue, low energy or sleepiness
• Dull, gnawing ache in your throat or esophagus
• Headache
• Nausea
• Stomach emptiness, pain, gurgling, rumbling or growling

Vulnerable to Overeating
When you’re not attuned to your hunger signals, you may not eat until you're ravenous, which leaves you vulnerable to impulsive eating, overeating and binge eating. When such primal hunger hits, all intentions of mindful, conscious eating fly out the window.

Cultivating a healthy relationship with food and your body includes responding to hunger when it comes gently knocking. Every time you do, you develop a higher level of trust and connection with your body.

If you have difficulty getting in touch with your hunger and honoring your body’s wisdom, I encourage you to seek support.

What Are Your Attunement Disruptors?

People are often surprised that I don’t tell my clients what to eat, when to eat, or how much to eat. I don't because I don’t have a clue what their body needs and wants at any given time. They are the expert of their body, not me!

My role is to help my clients connect with their body’s innate wisdom and trust it to guide them to the most nourishing, satisfying and supportive choices for their unique being. Part of this process includes exploring their attunement disruptors.

Attunement Disruptors
Attunement disruptors are obstacles that interfere with your ability to clearly hear—and appropriately respond to—the messages your body is sending you, including its sensations of hunger and fullness and feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. Here are a few common ones:

• Dieting: When you’re on a diet—whether it’s Weight Watchers, Whole30 or Paleo—you prioritize a set of external rules over your internal cues (e.g., denying your hunger because you’ve reached your calorie allotment for the day; avoiding a pleasurable food because it’s not allowed).
   
• Food Rules: As with diet programs, your personal food rules (e.g., no eating after 7 p.m., no snacking, no seconds, no carbs) dictate your food choices rather than your body’s needs and desires.
   
• Distracted Dining: Eating while multitasking (e.g., TV watching, emailing, texting, driving, cleaning) inhibits your ability to tune into your body’s feedback.
   
• Eating Habits: Ingrained habits, like skipping breakfast, inflexible meal times and a clean-your-plate mentality, can override your body’s needs.
   
• Performative Eating: You’re disconnected from your body when you change how you eat when eating with others. You might do this to meet social or cultural expectations, please other people, or project a certain image.   
   
• Inadequate Self-Care: Not prioritizing foundational daily self-care practices, such as restorative sleep, joyful movement, stress relief and screen-free time, makes it difficult to hear and respond to messages from your body.

Start Small
Addressing obstacles to body attunement can take time, especially if your inner wisdom is clouded by a dieting mentality, food rules, internalized weight stigma and other deeply embedded beliefs and behaviors. Start small and get support if needed.

Removing your disruptors will help you reconnect with your body and become more aware of and responsive to its messages, needs and desires. As a result, you will cultivate a more trusting, peaceful and relaxed relationship with food and your body.

I Really Did This… (How Dieting Made Me Crazy)

When I was obsessed with losing weight, I was hyperconscious about every single morsel that entered my mouth. 

One of my go-to snacks was sea-salt soy crisps. I would carefully count out one serving, putting 21 crisps into a bowl. This portion equated to an allowable number of calories.

I would snap at my boyfriend if he innocently grabbed a handful from my bowl to munch on. It left me unsure about how many crisps I could still eat, which caused me great anxiety.

One day, after months of eating these soy crisps, I happened to glance at the nutrition facts label on the back of the package. To my horror, the serving size had changed from 21 crisps to 17, yet the calories remained the same. I had no idea how long ago the change had been made.

I was so incensed, I fired an angry email off to the company’s customer service department. I complained about how incredibly misled I felt. I had been deceived and demanded an explanation.

I don’t remember what the company’s written response was, but they did mail me some coupons.

When I recalled this event years later, I felt deeply embarrassed and ashamed. I still can’t imagine what the person who received my email must have thought about me (hello, crazy lady!).

Dieting’s Dark Side
While I still feel a tad bit embarrassed, I now see this experience as a powerful example of the negative impact dieting can have on not only your physical health, but also your mental, emotional and social health. And when I say dieting, I mean any form of food restriction that’s not medically necessary.

Along with making you do crazy things, dieting can:

• Intensify food and body preoccupation

• Trigger cravings and binges

• Reduce your ability to recognize and honor your hunger and fullness signals

• Provoke feelings of guilt, shame, anxiety, fear, hopelessness and more

• Erode self-trust, self-esteem and confidence

• Lead to harmful food rules, disordered eating and eating disorders

• Slow your metabolism

• Increase your risk of gaining more weight (up to two-thirds of dieters regain more weight than they lost)

• Raise your cortisol level (dieting is inherently stressful)

• Become all-consuming, while other parts of your life suffer, like your relationships, social life, career and hobbies

These are just some of the harmful effects of dieting, but hopefully, it’s enough to help you consider whether or not it’s worth it.  

Ditching Diets Can Be Scary
It can be scary to let go of dieting, especially when it seems like everyone around you is on some type of diet.

If you’re ready to liberate yourself, you can learn how to trust your body wisdom again and return to the intuitive eater you came into this world as. I don’t have any magical powers. If I can do it, so can you.