Intuitive Eating Challenge Day 2: Honor Your Hunger

Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, the creators of the Intuitive Eating approach, said:

“A dieting body is a starving body. Drastic comparison? No. While a dieting body may not look like a starving person, the ‘symptoms’ from dieting exhibit a striking resemblance to the starvation state.”

“A 2000 study showed that a disproportionate number of concentration camp survivors suffer from binge eating disorder. Food insecurity or food scarcity is a form of trauma.”

“Dieters push their normal biological cues of hunger and satiety to the extremes. The gentle sensations of hunger are atrophied for a dieter who is constantly trying to suppress them. Instead, the dieter might only feel extreme, ravenous hunger - or be so disconnected that the feeling of hunger is difficult to identify.”

The first step of reclaiming your relationship with food and developing ‘normal’ eating is to “honor your biological hunger”.

Your body needs to know, and trust, that you will nourish it when it is hungry.

It will take time for your body to recondition itself, and trust that you are done dieting for good.

Or you may genuinely not feel hunger pangs. This happens for many who have:

• Gone through years of numbing and/or dieting (actively disconnect from hunger pangs)

• Experienced trauma and stress (“You need to feel safe in order to feel hungry”)

Symptoms of hunger can include:

• Mild gurgling or gnawing in the stomach

• Growling noises

• Lightheadedness

• Difficulty concentrating

• Uncomfortable stomach pain

• Irritability

• Feeling faint

• Headache

** “The general guideline is to go no longer than five waking hours without eating.”

There are also other types of hunger (all of which are OK to feed!):

• Taste hunger - Eating because it sounds good, even if you are not physically hungry

• Emotional (heart) hunger - To numb from uncomfortable emotions (e.g., sadness, anger)

• Eye hunger - When something looks good to eat, even if you are not physically hungry

**I want to give a gentle reminder that this information is simply an introduction to the skill created by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. If you want to learn more, please check out their wonderful book, Intuitive Eating!

Please be gentle with yourself today as you try this principle of Intuitive Eating, and if you are interested in getting my emails filled with reflective questions and ideas for practicing today’s principle, click here and sign up for my newsletter!