November 2001

 

Honor Your Health: 
Respect Your Hunger & Fullness

Vera Massey Nichols, nicholsv@missouri.edu

Do you eat when you’re hungry? Do you stop eating when you ‘re full?

Most of us have ignored our hunger and fullness signals at times and that is normal and to be expected. However, if you routinely ignore your hunger and fullness signals, it becomes impossible to have a healthy relationship with food.

Learning to trust your body to tell you when to eat and listening for the body signals that tell you you’re no longer hungry is actually a way to show respect for your body and a way to honor your health.

Trusting your body to tell you when you should eat may be a little scary at first. This is especially true, if you’ve dieted a lot during your life and you relied on the diet’s food plan to tell you when to eat— not on your stomach pangs. You might even be afraid you’ll gain weight if you give in to your hunger pangs. But the reality is this— when you ignore your body’s hunger signals, you eventually end up overeating. You must give yourself permission to eat whenever you are truly hungry. All bodies, large and small, deserve to be fed when they are physically hungry.

It’s difficult to hear hunger signals if you never listen for them. So you’ll want to tune into your body’s hunger signals when they arise. Those early solid hunger signals include:

• mild gurgling or gnawing in the stomach
• lack of concentration
• low energy level

Then there are the “I’m starving” signals:

• headache
• irritability
• weak/feeling faint

It’s important to make an effort to eat when you get the early, solid hunger signals. If you let yourself get to the “starving state”; it sets you up for those cravings and binges on high calorie, less nutritious foods. You will also find yourself overeating as a result of waiting too long to eat.

It’s also possible, you may find yourself eating because of emotional hunger—to relieve uncomfortable feelings (such as boredom, anger, loneliness, or anxiety). These feelings can trigger anything from a mild case of nibbling to an out-of-control eating binge. Unfortunately, food won’t make the feelings go away. And if you frequently eat in response to your emotions, you’ll ultimately have to deal with the emotion, as well as the consequences of overeating. It is critical to identify other ways to cope and address those emotional needs without routinely using food.

Another aspect of honoring your health is listening to your body signals that tell you you’re full. More than likely, you’re familiar with the over-full or stuffed feeling. Some people refer to this as “Thanksgiving full.” But in order to avoid eating more food than your body needs, you’ll want to stop eating (most of the time) at the point of comfortable fullness. Comfortable fullness is a point you may not recognize or you might recognize it and just routinely pass it by. Either way, if you continuously eat more than your body needs, you will most likely gain unneeded weight.

Food’s primary role is to fuel the body, just as gas fuels a car. And just as it’s unnecessary to overfill a car’s gas tank, eating more food than you need is also unhelpful. Your metabolism can adjust to an occasional overeating experience. But if the overeating occurs daily or even weekly, your metabolism cannot burn off the extra calories.

In order to stop eating at the point when you are comfortably full, you will first need to recognize that point. If you routinely restrict your food intake, either dieting or “cutting back”, it may be hard to recognize fullness signals at first. But with practice, you will be able to tune into what comfortable fullness feels like and learn to stop eating at that point.Here are some signals that indicate you are at the point of comfortable fullness:

• feeling of satisfaction or relief, like: “Ah, I’m not hungry any more.”
• peacefulness
• no more stomach pangs or twinges
• feeling like you don’t need any more food
• food starts to taste less good

Over-fullness, on the other hand, is:

• realizing you didn’t need those last few bites
• very “full” feeling; discomfort or pain in the stomach; “stuffed” feeling
• need to loosen clothing at the waistband
• fatigue or sleepiness
• food is substantially less tasty

When you honor your health, you will make an effort to pay attention to (respect) your body’s signals of hunger and fullness. Your stomach will be in charge of how much and when you eat. In other words, you trust your body to determine its fuel needs. This trust is very important for achieving and maintaining a healthy body.