sagallimore 
Who here is currently on a diet? – I had a been a religious dieter for the past 6 years of my life before my dieting experience led me to a distorted relationship with food bringing me to an all time low. Before being introduced to the process of intuitive eating, I would always wonder to myself: how the heck am I going to learn how to restore my relationship with food when I can’t even tell when I’m hungry, when I feel full after a meal, or when my stomach is satisfied with a particular meal. My relationship with food had learned to silence those hunger cues and responded with an out of control binge that eventually became the norm for my body. Every time I would eat my body expected a large binge, after a long restriction period, leaving my body feeling confused and unable to get in touch with my fullness level. I begin to lose touch with foods that I even liked or craved. Eating salad after salad, my body quickly replaced cravings of varieties of food for a boring salad. Bleh, who wants to eat salads all the damn time? Did I actually crave them? No, my body learned to crave them as those were the only foods that were “legal” for me to eat.
So, as I was introduced to the intuitive eating process, I decided to read the revolutionary program Intuitive Eating providing 10 principles that led me to better understanding of why I was so out of touch with food. Three of those principles had exactly everything to do with what I described above: not being able to identify hunger, the silenced fullness indicator, and the disguised satisfactory factor.
I began working through the principles: here’s what happened and how I did it.
Principle 1: Identifying Your Hunger – Basically, I had to retrain my body to receive hunger cues. Yep sounds weird right but that’s exactly what I had to do. My body had adapted and learned to hush all the natural urges for food such as: hunger pangs, headaches, irritability, etc. Every time those were silenced, the more difficult it would become to reestablish those intuitive cues. So what exactly did I do? – I kept putting food into my body. Now, at the beginning stages this was hard. I had to remind myself everyday of the purpose behind doing this. Guess what – The more I put food in, the more my body adapted to expecting food at “normal times”. Every time I felt a hunger pang – food. Every time I felt tired and had an inability to concentrate – food. My hunger cues developed because my body had learned to expect food. I now have developed hunger cues for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Principle 2: Feel Your Fullness – After so much time restricting and bingeing, the body adapted to the cycle. It’s expected food intake to be a binge. Let me explain what classifies a binge… Basically it’s an uncontrollable feeling around food. When a person binges, they normally eat in a very fast manner and usually are unable to tell when they are full. Hence, they kept on bingeing. This doesn’t just go for bingers, most of us don’t even realize we are overeating until we feel like we are about to bust out of our jeans. A lot of us don’t care and that’s fine too. Fullness wasn’t even on my radar as I loaded whatever I could get my hands on into my body because it so desperately needed food making up for the calories I restricted before. Then, I was challenged to respect my fullness. This is still so hard for me although I have gotten better. Here’s what I had to do: I had to learn how to recognize physical fullness cues. Whenever I would have a meal, I would eat very slow and listen to my body. If you listen carefully, you will be able to pick up on these subtle hints of fullness. It’s important to realize that these cues are different for every individual so it’s important to get in touch with how you feel your fullness. Here’s how I feel mine to help: I eat slowly and wait for the moment where the food doesn’t taste “exciting” anymore. There is a certain point that hits when the food begins to taste bland and you are no longer hungry nor full – just eh. That is my comfortable fullness. Now that I have identified it, I try to implement it into every meal.
Principle 3: The Satisfactory Factor – As I began to reestablish these hunger cues, I could feel my body becoming bored of “only salad diet”. As more meals were being placed in my body, the more I craved food variety. Basically, I could only eat so many salads. My body was craving something new. I began adding variety into my diet. Different flavors, spices, temperatures, textures, etc. As I did this consistently, I began to identify what types of food my body actually satisfied by. I have a feeling that this will constantly change as I add more foods into my diet. My body is currently craving a sweet/savory combination. Try Mellow Mushroom’s Funky Q pizza with Sweet Tangy BBQ sauce, chicken, and of course cheese! To die for!
*** Remember this – allowing your body full permission with food helps, you to leave food behind at comfortable satiety and save it for later.
I encourage you to try the ways that have helped me and let me know how it goes for you! This can be tricky but with religious practice, it is possible to redevelop these cues.
Let me know how you feel about your own hunger signals and what you body is craving here
