One skill I love building with my clients is learning how to identify hunger and satiety. At first, this might seem a little too straightforward to make an actual topic of discussion. We eat every day, and there’s a good chance you already understand that it’s time to eat when you feel hungry and stop when you feel full.
Well, it can get a little more complicated than that. And more often than not, it is.
There are different levels of hunger and fullness. Being hungry doesn’t only mean that you eat when you think you might chew your arm off. And being full doesn’t only mean that you feel like you have to unbutton your pants.
When I begin going over this identification scale with my clients, sometimes they report to me that they never feel hungry at all, so they aren’t sure how to interpret their own personal level of hunger or satiety.
And, yes, I can totally see how you might go throughout your day and not feel hunger. Actually, it’s quite common. It also depends on how you’re thinking about hunger in the first place as mentioned above.
So, you might be asking yourself: “Why Don’t I Feel Hungry?”
- Numbing – Sometimes we attempt to numb our hunger, not truly believing that actual hunger is knocking on the door. Sometimes we think it’s an imposter. Here, you might find yourself going for liquids instead of foods.
- Dieting – Unfortunately when you’re on a diet, you aren’t eating according to your body’s natural rhythm. You learn to simply tune out your hunger and the cues dissipate over time. AKA they stop knocking at the door because you rarely ever answer.
- Chaos – It’s easy to ignore hunger when we feel busy or otherwise occupied. I’ll have people often express to me that it’s a lot easier for them to quiet the food noise when they’re very busy at work or running errands all day and don’t have time to think about food. Subtly, this could be your way of suppressing your hunger and using being busy as an excuse.
- Trauma – Sadly, feeling unsafe can lead us to not feel hunger. When the basic need of safety is not met (food is also a basic need by the way), since that’s the most threatening feeling it can take precedence over other feelings. Until we feel safe, we may not be able to feel much else.
- Skipping breakfast – This goes back to ignoring hunger cues, but there’s also something else here. If you skip breakfast or fast for the earlier part of the day, you might find yourself overeating at night causing you to wake up less hungry than you would had you eaten normally the night before.
- Stress – A state of stress can stop hunger signals to focus on stress management, similar to the feelings of safety mentioned in #4. While stress eating is very common in my clients, they aren’t stress eating because they are feeling hunger. They are stressed and are choosing to cope with food. But the difference here is that they aren’t necessarily feeling hunger. Frankly, you might find that you aren’t hungry at all when you’re stressed.
- Basic needs not being met – Sleep, recovery, down time, mindful movement must be met otherwise disconnection can occur. It makes it much easier to understand your body’s feedback when you’re plugged into these other things vs. everything going haywire.