intuitive eating principles, #2
2. honor your hunger
this is the radical notion that humans ought to eat when they’re hungry! how many ways has diet culture taught us to try to override hunger signals? being hungry doesn’t mean you’re thirsty, bored, lonely, food addicted, or any other invented narrative, it means your body needs energy in the form of calories from food.
honoring your hunger can be really scary if you’re experiencing hyperphagia (extreme hunger/eating) after a period of deprivation. you may have a LOT of hunger! you may be eating far more than you think is normal. that’s part of the process of repairing biological and psychological damage from restriction.
structure may actually help you here, tho it doesn’t feel “intuitive” at first. honoring hunger may mean getting on an eating schedule, something like 3 meals and 2-3 snacks per day. eat every few hours, and notice how you feel beforehand (hunger can appear as difficulty concentrating, dizziness, nausea, thoughts about food, irritability, even a sense of euphoria for some of us). you’ll find as you eat regularly and consistently that your hunger cues become more refined and perceptible, and you will learn to eat before you’re ravenously hungry. hunger will eventually become gentle and manageable if you’re eating adequately.
honoring hunger also means eating what you’re hungry for. if you’re craving a cheeseburger, don’t eat a salad. obviously we all have some material constraints around food choice, but believe your body when it communicates its needs in the form of cravings. as much as it’s in your power, eat what you crave and watch the body crave increasing variety over time. human bodies have been driving eating behavior via hunger for 200,000 years, and they’ve quite got it down–the fact that we have more dietary choice now is not reason to think our bodies incompetent in this area.
i love this phrase, “honor your hunger.” respect it, trust it, attend to it, defer to it. the tricks of diet culture are not worthy of honor, but your hunger (that is, your body) absolutely is.
