How do you know when you’re hungry?
On the surface, this seems like a straightforward question.
Since the day you were born, you’ve been eating multiple times a day. As a species, our survival depends on food coming in. We have evolved with a system of glands, hormones, reward circuitry, and the ability to taste, all to push us to eat.
But despite this, the sensation of hunger is actually quite fuzzy.
If I were to ask a child how they know when they’re hungry, I bet the answer would be something like “because I feel hungry.” This is the same response you’d give if you’re an adult who’s never dieted or intentionally tried to restrict or alter your food in some way.
There’s been no intense analysis of all the signs and symptoms connected to hunger. There’s no second-guessing. This sensation simply arises, and without any real thought, you recognise it as hunger.
Because the feeling of hunger is strange. It’s subtle and vague. While writing this piece, I noticed I was hungry. But if asked to describe precisely how I knew I was hungry and to be specific, I wouldn’t be able to do it.
Part of this is because I usually eat before becoming overwhelmingly hungry. I’ve learnt to notice these nebulous feelings and respond when they occur. But even when the feelings of hunger do become more intense, you could easily attribute them to a different explanation, if you’re so inclined.
Another reason hunger can be difficult to pin down is due to what happens after eating.
When you eat, you shouldn’t feel that different afterward. Sure, you no longer feel hungry, but how you experience the world isn’t altered much (assuming you eat before becoming ravenously hungry).There is not a massive spike in energy. Life mostly continues as usual.
As strange as it sounds, hunger can be this unverifiable truth. We can experience it and know when it is occurring, but when we look deeper and try to prove its existence, it can be more challenging. And this can be a considerable problem when living in a culture obsessed with dieting.
Dieting, at its core, is about eating less food. No matter how you dress it up, the goal is to reduce the number of calories that you consume.
The body needs energy to run on. When you decrease what is coming in, your body makes you hungrier in an attempt to change your behaviour.
So, given your desire to diet, hunger now becomes the enemy. It’s a sensation that isn’t welcome. And because the feeling of hunger is so ill-defined, it can be easy to start questioning the sensations you are receiving.
Maybe you start using the clock to determine meal times. Irrespective of what you feel, you don’t eat outside of these times. So even when you’re hungry at 12pm, you put it off because lunch must be eaten at 1pm.
Or you start calorie counting or use some other arbitrary measure of portion size. Calories or macros become the determining factor for how much you eat, not your hunger.
This is the problem with restriction. With time, the list of rules increases, all disconnecting you from your body. And before you know it, that unverifiable truth of hunger that you used to simply accept, is now a mess of convoluted signals and easy-to-ignore subtle cues. Now, you tell yourself it’s not really hunger.
As I keep saying, hunger can be vague. Let me explain some further reasons why, if you start messing with your hunger signals, you can start hearing the message less clearly (or not at all).
One issue is that people create this specific and narrow feeling that they associate with “hunger.” Typically, we associate this feeling with times when we’ve experienced overwhelming and intense hunger.
Maybe this is because you’d been dieting, keeping food intake so low that you had moments when the feeling of hunger reached “stop you in your tracks” intensity. Or maybe this is because you’d experienced moments of extreme hunger during recovery.
This feeling now becomes the norm for what you expect when you’re hungry. “This is what true hunger feels like,” and anything less doesn’t even register.
Hunger typically builds if we don’t respond to it. It starts out faint but with time becomes louder and more noticeable. But under the burden of restriction and rallying against hunger, this can break down.
You notice that you’re hungry, but you try to distract yourself. Maybe you think, “I’ll get something to eat once I finish these emails.” Then, 30 minutes later, rather than intensifying, the sensation has disappeared. You are no longer having an “obvious” hunger sensation.
And when you’re trying to ignore and outsmart hunger, this gets interpreted as “I was never hungry in the first place.” That initial hunger sensation gets accounted for as something else, and that feeling, when it occurs in the future, is no longer looked at as hunger at all.
I should add that stress and the pressures of life can interfere with hunger signals. This can impact even those who aren’t dieting or trying to avoid feelings of hunger.
I can become so engrossed in work or play that I unintentionally miss any signals that tell me I’m hungry. Typically, only when I stop what I’m doing do I have this strong slap in the face that lets me know just how hungry I am.
So, missed or blunted hunger signals due to stress or focus is a normal part of being a human living in the modern world. But what turns this into a problem is when you layer on top the glorifying of weight loss and the pursuit of eating less.
Because in this situation, when the flow state is broken and hunger arises, it is still ignored and explained away as something else.
What makes recognising hunger more challenging is the fact that we feel many hunger symptoms in places besides the digestive system.
We commonly believe that unless we feel certain sensations in parts of our bodies that we associate with hunger and digestion, we’re not actually hungry.
Like, our stomachs need to be growling or feel empty. Or we need to have a dull ache or gnawing in the throat.
But for many people, they don’t get this sensation. Or they might, but only well and truly past the point at which they should have eaten. There might be many other symptoms that occur before this to say, “you’re hungry,” and the growling stomach comes considerably later.
Common non-digestion symptoms that indicate you’re hungry can include:
With each of these symptoms, you may experience the subtle end of the spectrum first. You notice your concentration is fading slightly, your hands are a little cooler than usual, and you’ve had a couple of thoughts about food.
But if you’re dieting or trying to eat less, you can easily chalk these symptoms up to something outside of the need for food.
Even as symptoms get more intense, and a definite impact on your physiology becomes apparent, you can come up with many plausible reasons why this isn’t related to hunger.
So much so, that hunger can become a permanent state. You walk around feeling anxious, angry, cold, feeling shaky, constantly thirsty, and experiencing regular headaches. But to you, none of these symptoms directly feel like hunger, so you explain it away.
When things are working as they should, hunger occurs before eating. You notice you are hungry and so you consume a snack or meal. As you eat, if you pay attention, you notice that you slowly get full. More food coming in equals a fuller feeling, until the point at which you feel satisfied and stop eating.
But for those who struggle to notice hunger, the opposite can be true. You start a meal with no obvious hunger and, if asked, would respond with, “I’m not really hungry.” But as you eat, at some point, you finally notice, I am hungry, which often occurs towards the end of the meal. It’s like eating makes you hungry.
Post-meal hunger typically occurs with meals of a certain size. If you have a small snack, you still feel numb to hunger upon finishing. But if you eat more and go over some threshold, then the hunger wakes up.
But if hunger is occurring after a meal, is it really hunger? For many, they tell themselves an emphatic, “No!”
Earlier, I wrote about how hunger becomes the enemy and an unwelcome sensation. Intimately connected to this are strong negative feelings about food – namely, a fear of eating.
Eating can become such a psychological ordeal that the idea of doing it on a regular basis fills you with dread (like it can with anorexia). Sometimes it can be a mix of feelings, with enjoyment and pleasure occurring alongside a hefty serving of guilt, shame, and regret.
This can be in combination with many other symptoms that start to occur and become negatively associated with eating.
You eat and:
These various symptoms can become more common with reduced food intake, with long gaps between meals, being in a restrict/binge cycle, eating lots of high fibre/low calorie food, or due to orthorexic-type fears around food and the nocebo effect (see here for more information). All things that regularly occur when someone is trying to outsmart hunger.
So these uncomfortable physical symptoms, alongside a hypercritical internal voice and a slew of negative emotions, can become too much to handle. And it’s understandable – with these issues coming up at every meal, who would want to eat? Who would want to even recognise they’re hungry?
What makes noticing hunger symptoms even more challenging is the disconnect that starts to occur between the reality of what your body needs versus your perception of what your body needs.
So much of our eating is impacted by what our eyes see. When we plate up food, how much we serve is often connected to our best guess of what we think we need. And by “need,” I mean both the demands for the body but also what we think will fill us up.
But much of this is based on past behaviour. And if you’ve been dieting and restricting and are used to serving yourself smaller quantities, this becomes the norm for what you think is the right amount.
I will regularly use this calorie calculator with clients to demonstrate how far off their estimations are. This video explains it in more detail.
Understanding the energy requirements of the body is important because expectations matter. It’s much easier to ignore hunger when you feel like it shouldn’t be occurring because you are eating “so much food.” But when you realise you are consistently under-eating, you’re now open to the fact that all these supposedly random symptoms are truly hunger.
Note: I’m not a big fan of using calories with clients, and in many circumstances using this calculator is counterproductive. But for those who are open to it, this tool can be one of the things that most shifts their thoughts about what their body truly needs (even if they still struggle afterward with making eating that much food a reality).
Over the years, I’ve heard countless explanations for why someone ate that supposedly had nothing to do with hunger.
They tell me they weren’t hungry but ate because of:
And the reason they “know” they can’t be hungry is:
“My body can’t need this much”
“Everyone else eats less than me”
“I used to get by eating less than this”
“I eat a lot of food”
“I used to do more exercise than I am now”
“I’m not thin / I’m not that thin / I used to weigh less than this”
“Look at how big I am, of course I can’t be hungry”
Even in cases of extreme hunger as part of eating disorder recovery, they question whether this is “really” hunger or something else.
What I have discovered through all of this is that hunger is about acceptance. You accept that this collection of many subtle symptoms mean “I’m hungry.” If you’ve never had a reason to doubt or question this, you do this automatically.
It’s also acceptance around what you are hungry for. That if you feel like a quinoa salad, that is ok. And if you feel like fish and chips, that is also ok.
If acceptance is missing, then hunger can often feel like it has gone MIA. You’ll convince yourself that you’re not hungry. Or if you’re feeling drawn towards the food you deem “bad,” you can rationalise that it is merely a thought that crossed your mind, that “of course this isn’t connected to hunger.”
Because without acceptance, hunger is an unverifiable truth and you’ll continue to deny its existence.
Do you struggle with feeling hunger? If hunger has gone “missing,” irrespective of how long it’s been like this, it’s not a permanent state. Like so many aspects of body connection (or disconnection), it is a learned skill. You can relearn how to hear the sensation of hunger.
That is, as long as you’re open to hearing this message from your body.
If you’re ready to move beyond suppressing, avoiding, or ignoring your hunger, Seven Health can help.
I’m a leading expert and advocate for full recovery. I’ve been working with clients for over 15 years and understand what needs to happen to recover.
I truly believe that you can reach a place where the eating disorder is a thing of the past and I want to help you get there. If you want to fully recover and drastically increase the quality of your life, I’d love to help.
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