Change:// how we look at hunger
Wether you are a healthy eater, a perpetual dieter, binge eater, or have an eating disorder, learning to trust your body and let it guide you intuitively is pretty much like a shot in the dark and yet is the one thing that can bring us back to that healthy happy bod we have always wanted.
We are a fast paced, reward seeking society that does well with quick fixes and ways out, but the nuances and subtleties that actually take the stress AWAY from food, have left us by the wayside in the wake of feeling better.
Now truth, if you are struggling with an eating disorder, it may be years until your innate hunger cues are restored through nutrition, nutritional counselling and time, but for the majority of people regardless of your relationship with food, these key ideas can really help start bridging the gap between friend and faux when it comes to our food choices.
For some this may mean loosening the reigns on how to eat, and for others, really starting to tighten up and understand why they are making the choices to eat. So here’s a little cheat sheet:
Physical Hunger vs Emotional Hunger
- physical hunger is gradual in feeling / emotional hunger is often immediate and feels urgent
- physical hunger accepts all foods / emotional hunger is usually a craving for a certain food
- physical hunger comes from a physical need/ emotional hunger is paired with an emotion. are you anxious, bored, sad?
- physical hunger is based in the body / emotional hunger is in the feeling. can you tell the difference? Similar to above
- physical hunger is accepting of eating / emotional eating creates guilt afterwards
- physical hunger you can make choices / emotional eating is absent minded and feels like the only option to feel better
- physical hunger as time has passed / emotional hunger little time has passed
The bottom line is, there often is an area of discomfort when we go about making any changes, so when we can tap into the real cues, sometimes the rest can just melt away. Pull up this list when you are mid struggle, see where it guides you.
As you can see, it’s a very thin line between the physical and the emotional, just like many areas of our life, but perhaps as we try and tune in we can be more accepting of our choices and embrace them when we are empowered by the why.
I hope this helps. My goal in doing this is that we all become more in tune with our bodies. It seems like an added process, but it can really be beneficial for some and completely transformative for others.
