Hunger Silence

Why many of us aren’t yet ready to practice Intuitive Eating.

Intuitive eating, in layman’s terms, involves listening to our body’s signals around what, when, and how much to eat. Who is really good at this? Babies, maybe toddlers—before they’ve undergone socialization. My pets have been good at it. (Pet cats and pet guinea pigs especially.) But many of us adult humans? Not so much.

I can remember being in the throes of my disordered eating. I was running late in the morning and did not have time for breakfast. Then, I was so busy at work that I worked right through lunch. I reasoned with myself, “Well, I don’t really feel hungry anyway,” as I drank another cup of coffee. All the while, in the background, a part of me was cheering, saying, “How cool that you skipped those meals. Now maybe you’ll lose that weight!”

Then later in the day, my hunger would hit me over the head with a 2x4. Although it STILL didn’t feel like hunger, it felt more like extreme anxiety—an overwhelmingly urgent craving to EAT FOOD NOW. I would eat quickly, past fullness, and feel such shame and loathing for the amount of food I had eaten and the mindlessness with which I ate. I would feel uncomfortable (both physically and emotionally), so much so that even by the next morning, I was in no mood to feed myself breakfast.

Boy, being stuck in that cycle was tough.

I remember hearing about intuitive eating back then. I pooh-poohed it for other reasons, but it may not have been helpful for me at the time anyway. My hunger (along with cues for other needs) had been silenced. And I would have been quite confused about when to feed myself.

Many of my clients, for a myriad of reasons, aren’t ready to start with intuitive eating when they first begin seeing me. Their hunger signals have become silenced.

Here is a partial list of things that can silence our biological hunger signals:

• Trauma

• Eating disorders

• Fat phobia

• Neurodivergence

• Skipping breakfast

• Numbing your hunger (with nicotine, coffee, or tea)

• The internal part of the self that critiques & shames

• Dieting

• Being busy with life things

• Stress

• Low sleep or downtime

• Sickness or chronic illness

• Food scarcity

• Parental agendas/food policing (“It’s time to eat,” “Clean your plate,” etc.)

• Can you think of others?

In order to recover from disordered eating and head toward a more intuitive relationship with food and our bodies, there are some important steps we need to take BEFORE, or in tandem with, jumping into intuitive eating.

1. Ditch diet culture. Stop following influencers who talk about food and bodies in a way that makes you feel bad. Stop body checking and comparing yourself to the thin ideal/made-up standard of beauty and health. Learn the truth about BMI and what really constitutes health.     *Check out this article for more info about the BMI https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/diet-nutrition/a35047103/bmi-racist-history/

2. Give your body the consistent message that food is available by eating regularly. This may involve shopping and a bit of planning ahead (for example, putting snacks in your desk drawer at work). It will definitely involve tip #1; one of the main messages we get from diet culture is to try to eat as little as possible, and this just doesn’t jive with trying to fully nourish yourself.

3. Lean heavily on what I call “practical hunger.” When you’re just not feeling hungry because of any of the above reasons, feed yourself anyway!

Go through the process of asking yourself, if you were a kid and had a kind parent, would they feed you now? If the answer is yes, then you are hungry. Even if you don’t feel it, you need food.

Everyone is different, but you can imagine a schedule like, “I eat a meal or snack every 2–4 hours that I’m awake, beginning with something 45 min or so after I wake up.”

When nourishing regularly, hunger cues will gradually come back online much more often. And then you will be more able to practice intuitive eating.

For more support navigating hunger silence and other barriers to intuitive eating, please schedule a meet and greet with me here. I would love to support you.