How To Eat - Your Hunger and Fullness Signals
What kind of eater are you?
Do you eat even though you’re not really hungry? Maybe you sometimes think you are hungry but you can't be certain? Have you got the awareness of knowing when you are full? But you carry on eating anyway? Or perhaps you don't know what your Hunger and Fullness Signals are? More importantly, do you listen to them?
Eat until you are satisfied, but not full.
This tip alone is a game changer. It's so extraordinarily powerful, in knowing how to eat.
So with your hunger and fullness signals we’re aiming to eat until we are about 80% full. When we walk away from the table (or wherever it is we are eating), we feel energized instead of feeling weighed down.
Now what’s important about that?
Well when we’re eating we’re eating really to fuel our bodies with optimal nutrition, and we want to do that in a way that’s pleasurable.
But now, when we eat until we’re full or too full we’re doing the opposite of what we want to do.
We end up feeling weighed down, heavy, uncomfortable, sleepy and with less energy that we had before we ate.
Your hunger and fullness signals are important
We need to recognize when to stop and if eating until we are full or too full is having an effect we don't want, then we need to ask ourselves, why do we do it? Because I do, you do, we all do it, so what’s up with that? Let’s look at some reasons.
It could be about being deprived, denial and dieting. This is a tough one when we restrict food and try not to eat anything and then we become so hungry and in our starved state we end up overeating.
Disconnection
We ignore what our body is saying to us and disconnect from listening to our hunger pains. And then what happens when we do this? Our portions get bigger and our metabolism gets confused. Another reason we overeat is just disconnection - so we get disconnected from the messages that our bodies are sending us.
We don’t slow down to eat, we run out of the door with food in our hand or we eat at our desk while we work. We hardly chew our food, we definitely ignore any sacredness of a meal and when we do that, we shut down our digestive systems.
We also eat without paying attention to the quality of food, the quantity of food or whether we’re even hungry or not.
Learn to Listen to Your Body
So we need to wake up and learn to listen to our body and the signals it’s sending us each and every day. And how we do that is, by learning how to eat what our body requires for energy. Then learn to figure it all out by measuring if we’re hungry, full or somewhere in between.
So when you’re learning to listen to your body what we’re really trying to determine is whether it is an emotion or physical hunger.
What’s important about this for you is that by listening to physical hunger signals, you can start to determine how hungry or full you are. And with practice, you’ll be able to pinpoint where your body is at any given moment on this hunger scale.
So the goal is not to eat above 80% full.
We want to eat until satisfied. So you can see on the scale, it goes all the way down to -100 and that’s starving. And then there is -80% hungry and weak and then there is -60% when you’re sort of lightheaded and growly.
We really don’t want to get hungrier than -60% you want to keep in a range of that -60% to 80% full. That’s really the ideal and, that way you’re not getting too hungry or too full. And then when you’re eating 20-40% you start to feel energized. Then at 60% you’re almost satisfied and then 80% you are satisfied. Here you are happy but then you can sometimes tip over the scale in a couple more bites, like I'm full, I'm stuffed!
So that is how you understand Your Hunger and Fullness Signals.
What To Do Next?
Use this handy tool daily to help you recognize, understand and honor your hunger and fullness.
Join our Private Facebook Community and connect with like-minded individuals for inspiration, encouragement and ideas.
Read my Article here on Become Aware of How You are Eating.
