Honor Your Hunger, Honor Your Needs (how attuned eating leads to attuned living)
One principle of Intuitive Eating is Honor Your Hunger. While it may seem simple (ringing up past moments of diet-y advice to ‘just eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full!’), we know it’s more than that. After decades of being told that your hunger is something to be controlled, revered, or ignored, honoring it feels scary and somewhat impossible.
Honoring your hunger is more than feeding your body what it desires and needs. It is that, but it’s also honoring the slow and messy process of re-learning (or maybe learning for the first time) that you have needs unique to you and that they’re deserving of your attention and care. The ‘slow’ part comes in with the fact that most of your life you may have been told your hunger is to be controlled/your needs are too much and that shit takes more than a few weeks to unpack. The ‘messy’ part comes in when you realize your relationship with food involves other parts of your life that may also need tending.
Judith Matz and Ellen Frankel, incredible voices and advocates in the non-diet movement and authors of The Diet Survivor’s Handbook (*link below) and Beyond a Shadow of A Diet share “attuned eating leads to attuned living” and I couldn’t agree more with their wisdom. Because when you step into the truth that you are hungry and hungry for specific foods at specific times, you start a chain reaction. You begin to gain confidence that “maybe, just maybe, I do know what’s best for me and how to get what I need” in other areas of life. And once that truth is known, it’s hard to un-know.
So how do we honor our hunger?
Get curious what hunger feels like for you
Often we think of hunger as our stomach growling or pains, but that often comes after more subtle cues. Some of these cues may be an empty feeling, food starting to sound good, or having greater difficulty focusing. Other more intense hunger cues may be a headache or shakiness. Just try to remain curious and don’t judge yourself for what may be hunger cues at a time when you feel you “shouldn’t” be hungry.
Be open to experimenting
Part of learning to tune in to internal cues for decision making (with food or life in general) is being willing to tolerate twists and turns. You are going to eat past fullness. You are going to go too long without eating and wind up hungrier than feels good. It’s all okay. This process isn’t about about hitting every eating experience out of the park. It’s about collecting small moments and building trust in yourself and your body. If we can view it as one big experiment, we’re less likely to label every action as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.
Give yourself permission to feed yourself
Here’s what can feel scary: you are remaining curious and open to experimenting and find you’re wanting a previously-forbidden food and fears set in “I’m only going to want ____; I can’t eat this, it has too carbs/fats/calories; I should only want vegetables and lean proteins if I’m really listening to my body”. These are the lies our fear is telling us. I’m asking you to sit with this fear and then, when it’s still present but maybe not quite so loud…eat the food anyway. You deserve to eat, to enjoy what you’re eating, and to not spend all of your time consumed with thoughts of food.