How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 2: Honor Your Hunger

The second principle of intuitive eating is: Honor Your Hunger. If you began implementing the first principle introduced in the previous blog—reject the diet mentality—then you are ready to dive right into this concept. When you chronically diet and restrict foods or calories, you most likely expect to feel hungry at times—maybe even after eating. This just is not a sustainable way to be with food. 

When you restrict and ignore/suffer through your hunger, at some point your brain will override your attempts to not eat and you find yourself ravenously overeating. This is a biological drive to survive, we need to eat to sustain health, and when you don’t honor your hunger, you may find yourself creating dangerous patterns of overeating and possibly developing an urge to binge eat.

When you honor your hunger, you are engaging with mindful eating. Honoring your hunger requires that you are fully present while eating. Honoring your hunger requires that you pay attention to your body and its individual wants and needs. This is mindful eating as its core, being present with your food and listening to your body. When you honor your hunger, you are able to practice eating when you are hungry and tuning into to your body to determine what it truly wants and needs.  

One of the most valuable elements of mindful eating is the concept of nonjudgment. When you are eating mindfully, you continue to pay attention from moment to moment with this nonjudgmental awareness. When you don’t judge your hunger, your body or your food, you can be more fully present and in tune into your body in a deeper way. This allows you to determine—without judgment—what foods are satisfying, satiating and provide the energy, nourishment and pleasure that you deserve to receive from your food. When you practice nonjudgment of your food you allow yourself to let your food just be food.

If you have been engaging with the dieting yo-yo for a while, honoring your hunger may feel awkward, if not foreign to you at first. In my book, Wholistic Food Therapy: A Mindful Approach to Making Peace with Food, I offer the following hunger scale to help with practicing this principle. When you practice using this scale consistently to assess your hunger, you make the process of honoring your hunger feel much more doable. The more you practice tuning in, paying attention to your hunger cues and listening to your body during mindful eating, the more intuitive you become. Eventually you won’t need to consult the hunger scale, but in the beginning, it can be a very useful tool.

Hunger Scale:

0= no hunger present

1= slight hunger present

2= mild hunger, could eat a snack

3= fairly hungry, stomach may be growling, ready for a meal

4= very hungry, stomach growling, possible headache, may be getting irritable or shaky

5= beyond hungry, full on hangry

I recommend that you practice with the scale at least one time per day. When you have one meal or snack per day that you can dedicate to mindful eating you will grow in your comfort with honoring your hunger. Have a journal and writing utensil handy. Limit your distractions. Tune into your body and notice where you are on the hunger scale. Write it down along with the signs and signals your body is sending you in relation to how hungry you feel.

This feedback is so valuable and will allow you to see your own progress over time. It also allows you to identify and work through emotional and stress eating patterns. If you find that you are eating and you are not hungry, you can work through the Pause, Reflect, Release process to help change these patterns.

Practice eating slowly, mindfully, and engage all of your senses. After practicing this process daily for the week, you can review your notes and begin to see your patterns and any challenges with this principle of honoring your hunger. You will also begin to see where you are making improvements with trusting yourself, becoming more intuitive with your body, your food and more deeply in alignment with how you want to feel as you begin to make peace with food through intuitive and mindful eating practices.

How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 1: Reject the Diet Mentality

The first principle of intuitive eating as created by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch is Reject the Diet Mentality. Did you know that the diet industry has about a 95% failure rate and yet it is one of the most profitable industries out there? That’s pretty frightening, and yet anytime someone feels frustrated by the previous diet that didn’t work, they can get sucked into the false hope of another one that may just be the golden ticket to lose weight (which most likely it won’t…). Even worse, chronic dieting can create a very unhealthy relationship with food and lead to disordered eating patterns.

The trouble with any diet is that when you begin, you know full well that there will be an end point. This end point might be a desired weight goal, size goal, event or season. What happens at that diets end point is the need to eat, to feel satisfied and to make up for lost time of deriving yourself from receiving pleasure from food. While it might begin with the intention of just this once I’ll eat this or that, or there’s a special occasion, and eventually the old patterns of eating find their way back into your life and the weight gain increases rapidly—way more rapidly than it took as you suffered to lose it. What may have taken months to achieve can be overridden in a couple of weeks.

It is clear that dieting and deprivation do not work for the long term. Diets feel restrictive, punitive and at times joyless and frustrating. In our current culture we have now shifted diets into new shiny wording of wellness and lifestyle to take the edge off. However, if a lifestyle or wellness plan requires complete restriction of certain foods it’s still a diet. If you are attempting to create an actual path to wellness with a desire to heal your relationship with food, any diet or lifestyle will most likely keep your feelings and thoughts about food and your body at the top of your mind. When this occurs it often creates stress and anxiety over food which only more negatively impacts the cycle of emotional and stress eating patterns.

Intuitive eating invites you to become the expert on what your body wants and needs—not a dietary theory. When you reject the diet mentality you can release the rules about food, the judgments you project on food and in turn inevitably internalize towards yourself. Then, you are able to step into being in tune with your food, your body and your internal experiences more fluidly and decisively.

Intuitive eating is a pathway to connecting with yourself and your body where you create a new and powerful way of being with your food that encourages health and wellbeing in mind and body. When you reject the diet mentality you might feel lost or worried that you might overdo it with food, and in the beginning you just might. However, the truth is that when you tune into your body you can recognize what foods satisfy your body, what foods make you feel good, vital and satiated.

When you integrate mindful eating into this first principle you can build a way of being with your food that is both informative and pleasurable. As you begin to let go of the diet mentality, commit to a daily practice of eating one meal or snack in a mindful way. When you eat mindfully, you notice the impact of what you are eating on your mind and your body.

Mindfulness is all about being fully engaged with the present moment without judgment. When you release judgments of your food (salad: good, pizza: bad) you are just eating what you are choosing to eat in this moment. When you tune in, eat slowly, pay attention to how your food makes you feel, you begin to create your own record of what foods make you feel good, of what foods allow your body to feel vital and the foods that you truly derive pleasure from and enjoy during and after eating them.

When you find that you are eating and you are not hungry, that is information that you are most likely in a pattern of emotional or stress eating. You can disrupt this with the pause, reflect, release practices to ensure that you give space for your emotions and stress in a way that does not involve food. That way when you are eating what you enjoy, you can focus on and be engaged with the process of eating, not the squashing of emotional discomfort.

Over the next week try these practices to begin rejecting the dieting mentality, integrate mindful eating practices and tune in to the wisdom and intuitive of your mind and body:

-       Keep a log of any dieting thoughts, fears, shoulds, hopes, shame…

-       Practice mindful eating each day with one meal or snack

-       Prior to eating allow yourself to tune inward and relax your body and mind and ensure that you have minimal distractions

-       Eat slowly, chew thoroughly and engage all of your senses

-       Practice nonjudgment of your food—stay away of thoughts of good/bad, superior/inferior

-       Make notes on how your food makes you feel and how satisfied and satiated you feel

-       Notice any tendency to restrict, count calories, any behaviors that feels like a diet

After practicing this process for the next week or so, go back and reflect on your log and journals and make any notes about insights you gain into what it means to let go of the diet mentality and step into mindful eating. Let me know how it goes!

Spring Cleaning for Emotional Eating

During this time of the year, you might spend some extra time cleaning out your home. Clearing out the cobwebs and dust bunnies that have collected in the corners over the winter, changing out clothing for the new season and getting rid of old stuff that might be cluttering your space and fogging your mind. This process requires a lot of effort and when it is completed it feels so refreshing. After a good spring cleaning you feel lighter, calmer, and accomplished don’t you? I know I love a clean and clutter free space, I just don’t always love doing the work it takes to get there!

While you might spend this time cleaning your physical space, do you ever think about spring cleaning your pantry, fridge, habits and emotions? Spring is a time of renewal and hope. With more light, energy, nature and bright colors all around, spring provides inspiration. If you have become bogged down by emotional and stress eating and these habits feel frustrating, NOW is the time to clear it all out.

When you consider spring cleaning for emotional eating, it’s helpful to work in the direction that makes the most sense for you. You might begin from clearing your pantry + fridge to then clearing your habits and emotions. However, you might feel more comfortable working from the other way around, where you clear out emotions + habits and then shift to kitchen. No matter which direction suits you the best, the outcome will definitely be the same. Through this process of spring cleaning for emotional eating, you can refresh and renew your relationship with food—and with yourself.

Spring Cleaning the Pantry + Fridge

While it might make more sense for you to work from the other direction, l will start with clearing out the pantry and fridge first. When you spring clean there is a process of letting go of things that no longer serve you, releasing built up grime, dust and dirt and a creation of positive feelings with the action you are taking. The same is true as you clean and clear your pantry and fridge.

When starting, you want to align with your goal and then determine if the items in your fridge and pantry serve you and your goals. What do you want? How do you want to feel? Do the foods currently in your fridge and pantry provide that outcome? If yes, take inventory and plan when you will use them. Get creative, cook new dishes, refresh old ones, have fun with it. If no, these items don’t align with your goals and how you want to feel, you can choose to donate them or give them to a neighbor or friend. It’s a helpful process that will leave you feeling empowered and motivated to care for yourself. After the clearing process, be sure to organize and clean them out so it feels calming to open and access your fridge and pantry.

During this clearing process, notice what foods might be “trigger” foods. Trigger foods are ones that it’s difficult to stop eating once you start or ones that you crave to temporarily suppress stress and uncomfortable emotions. These foods are not bad foods or good foods, they just may not serve you and it’s helpful to evaluate if having them in your space helps move you in the direction of your goals. If they don’t, you don’t have to keep them.

Spring Cleaning Habits + Emotions

Now let’s dive into spring cleaning for your habits and emotions. This process is a bit less straight forward. You can’t just give or throw away your habits and emotions so easily. You can start this process of spring cleaning emotional eating through self-reflection. Be honest with yourself about how often you are using food to suppress stress and emotions, how often you turn to food for comfort. Be curious about how that makes you feel about yourself. Become aware of how any habits and patterns of stress and emotional eating have created a rift in your relationship with yourself and your body.

Once you can deeply reflect and develop self-awareness, you can begin to clear out the habits and develop healthier ways to cope with your stress and emotions. To change a habit you need to replace it with a new, healthier, more desired habit. If you have been feeling stressed during the quarantine or if you struggled with any winter blues, you might have developed a habit of soothing with food in the evenings, when feeling down, lonely or bored, among other emotions. For example, maybe you started eating something after dinner that comforts you and releases your stress regardless of whether or not you were still hungry. There may be some pondering about wanting to stop this habit or maybe even some guilt for having it, however, it feels too difficult to break.

You want to consider spring cleaning this habit first by determining what else could you do in the evenings to soothe your mind and body that do not include the comfort foods? How do you want to feel? Can you practice assessing your hunger levels and committing to only eating if you truly feel hungry? Can you journal to connect with why this habit feels so good and so bad at the same time? You want to dive into self-awareness and self-reflection and create a plan to shift this habit into something more desirable and something that can still soothe you without food.

Changing a habit takes time and constant self-reflection and self-awareness. I recently wrote 10 blogs about creating a life that you love, you can review the overview here. You can go back and check out each of the steps in depth on the blog for support with this challenging change process. While awareness is the first step, you have to create action steps and a formulate a plan to actually follow through.

When you are spring cleaning any habits that no longer serve you, awareness that the habit has become problematic is the first step and then deciding what you could do and aligning with a sense of what you truly want is the next. Then you, of course, need to have a plan for how you are going to make it happen. Following through, consistency and believing in yourself are super important when it comes to creating the change you desire.

Commit to yourself to spring clean just one habit. Be sure to give yourself time to reflect in order to ensure that you make it happen.

As you begin to shift your habit, you may notice more emotions and stress to become present when you are no longer soothing them with food. This is where journaling is a great place to start when working to spring clean your emotions. Giving yourself time and space to recognize, sit with, understand, process and release your emotions is essential. Journaling offers you a specific safe place to do this.

Anytime you experience a food craving is a great time to pull out your journal and get in touch with the craving. This way you can determine if it’s an emotional craving or more general craving. Go through the Pause, Reflect, Release process where you first pause and give yourself space away from the craving. Then reflect where you can explore and understand the craving and then attempt to release the craving. If is an emotional craving, you will choose a coping tool to help manage or release the emotion. If it is a general craving, you might choose to eat the food, however you want to be sure do so mindfully. Allow yourself to savor and enjoy your food.

Breath work, movement, and talking are additional helpful tools to cleanse and clear in mind and body. No matter what you do to begin to spring clean your stress and emotional eating patterns, start somewhere and believe in yourself and your ability to create the change you desire.