Honor Your Hunger

If you think you are reducing your daily calories by skipping meals… think again.  This article discusses how skipping meals just makes you over eat.

by Kelsey N. Brown, MEd, CHES on Jan 18, 2017 via Ideafit
Food for Thought
 
Ignoring hunger and restricting intake can trigger an impulse to overeat (Mathes et al. 2009). Becoming aware of and honoring biological hunger can help. While this sounds simple, it can be challenging. “Many people seem deathly afraid to trust their internal hunger cues,” Washington, D.C., dietitian Victoria Jarzabkowski, MS, RDN, says. “It shouldn’t be terrifying, but that just goes to show how out of touch most of us are with body awareness.”

To foster this ability, have a dialogue with yourself concerning your hunger. Ask yourself, “What’s my hunger level?” before eating and at regular intervals throughout the day. Jarzabkowski recommends using a hunger scale, where 1 is completely starving and 10 is uncomfortably full, to help you begin to “hear” your hunger. “You should eat when you're hungry, but not starving, and stop when you are at a 6–8 on the scale. It takes a lot of hyperawareness at the start but becomes easier over time,” she says.

“After years of dieting, many people don’t even recognize signals of hunger,” says Marisa Molina of Hello Beautiful Health. “So it’s important to give them examples of what hunger actually feels like. These can include a growling stomach, fatigue or a drop in energy.” By becoming reacquainted with your hunger cues, you can begin eating in response to physiological hunger and avoid becoming ravenous later.
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Reference
Mathes, W.F., et al. 2009. The biology of binge eating. Appetite, 52 (3), 545–53.