How Do You Know When You’re Hungry For Reals? [Where Carrie Underwood and I Part Ways…]

I used to love this game SO HARD as a kid. Raise your hand if you’re an 80’s kid!

“Mom! I need food now! My little legs are so weak!!” My 7-year-old son eats like his dad (and is dramatic like his mom) so I wasn’t surprised when he came barging in the door after school as if he were auditioning for Oliver! He then proceeded to eat half the kitchen and only quit when he realized the spaghetti he was chewing on was the plastic pile that came with Jelly Bean’s play kitchen. The next morning at breakfast I prepared his usual feast only to have him shrug and say, “I’m not hungry this morning” and wander off to put Legos down his Captain America costume (I don’t question it as long as they’re dressed in something).

Now compare that with this recent conversation:

Friend: You want to go get something to eat?

Me: I dunno. Are you hungry?

Friend: Eh. I could eat. Are you?

Me: Maybe. What were you thinking?

Friend: I dunno. I’m kind of munchy.

Me: It’s okay, we’re in Colorado, it’s legal now.

Friend: Har har. Actually I’m probably not hungry for reals, I ate a ton today! But I’m starving – isn’t that terrible??

Me, what I WISH I’d said: No, Ivan was terrible. Age two is terrible. (Lie, it’s totally age three. Two is a cakewalk compared to the Tasmanian devil threes.) Going as Miley Cyrus for Halloween is terrible. But your hunger is not terrible!

Me, what I actually said: Blerghhh.

And my brain short-circuited. End scene.

Figuring out if I’m hungry, when I’m hungry, what I’m hungry for and then when I stop being hungry has been probably the most important lesson I’ve learned and the hardest struggle I’ve had over the past few years of Intuitive Eating. Being a basic bodily function and all you’d think this would be easy but sadly many of us lose the ability to really understand our hunger cues sometime between childhood and grownup-hood. (We also lose the ability to sleep in bizarre positions which is another child superpower I wish I still had. My same son once fell asleep with his head and torso on his bed and his feet on his bookcase leaving his body dangling in midair. Awesome.)

I have hunger on my mind because today I’m fasting. Today isn’t “Fast Sunday” – the first Sunday of each month is designated for LDS (a.k.a. Mormons) to go 24 hours without any food or drink, Intermittent Fasting: we’re so on trend! – but sometimes we do it when we’re really worried about someone or something and praying extra hard for answers. It’s a way to show our devotion, focus our energy on spiritual matters and also do a little bit of service (we donate the money we would have spent on food to the poor in our area). So while I fast primarily for spiritual reasons, I do see other benefits from this as well and one of the best (and worst) is remembering what real bodily hunger feels like. It kinda sucks, frankly.

I went for a long time not knowing what this felt like. When I was in the grip of various eating disorders, I remember that hazy, light-headed, exhausted past-hunger-to-starvation feeling. And then when I was Getting Healthy By The Book By Golly and eating 6 mini-meals a day every three hours like clockwork, I remember always feeling kinda full but never quite sated. At the time I was experiencing these feelings I thought both situations were ideal – “I’m so hungry I don’t feel hungry anymore! Whee! Wait… how am I driving a car?” and then “I eat so much I never feel hungry! Whee! Wait… am I eating a cold chicken breast with my fingers while driving a car?” The problem with my thinking (and with myriad diet tips, frankly) is that feeling hungry is a good thing. It’s your body talking to you and telling you that everything is in proper working order and oh by the way, time for more fuel please.

Everyone hears their hunger differently, something I was reminded of as I read Carrie Underwood’s interview in this month’s Women’s Health. 

“Most songwriters carry notebooks filled with jotted lyrics. In Carrie’s striped one you’ll find an impeccably recorded food journal. “It’s the most important thing in my arsenal,” she says. “[Most people’s] stomachs say, ‘Hey! I’m full! Stop sending food down!’ Mine doesn’t do that.” The journal helps her make informed decisions.

carrieWH

Clearly whatever she’s doing is working great for her! She’s always so glow-y!

I was once in Carrie’s same position. No, not as a world-famous country singer with a voice as golden as my shiny locks. Just with the obsessive food journaling. Except I parted ways with my journal after having an epiphany reading my beloved grandmother’s journals. She was (bless her) a lifelong bulimic and when my sister and I found her diaries after her death, we were treated to page after page after page of her food. What she ate. What she didn’t. What she wished she’d eaten. When she barfed. It made me realize that I don’t want to leave that kind of legacy for my grandkids. (Instead I want to leave them with years of embarrassing blog posts! Suh-weeet!) Now, I’m not judging Carrie – I think it’s awesome it works for her and that she’s happy with it. (At least I hope she’s happy.) But it just didn’t work for me. That stupid journal dictated my whole life. Getting rid of it was one of the most liberating things I’ve ever done!

All the food noise in our culture makes hunger hard to hear. We tell ourselves we’re “bad” if we eat something good. We tell ourselves we’re “good” if we don’t eat something bad. It’s crazy-making. These past few days, after an unfortunate incident with the Halloween candy that I’d rather not remember but the two empty bags of Starburst Candy Corn* can explain, I decided I needed to really focus on my hunger cues. Rather than look to something external to tell me when I’m hungry, like Carrie’s journal, I’m trying to pay more attention to my body. I’m still learning to trust it but here’s what I’ve learned so far:

– Hunger is the need for fuel.

– Hunger is not the need for comfort, entertainment, stress relief, novelty or love.**

– I feel real hunger in my stomach – it tightens and growls – and not as much in my mouth. When I see candy my mouth waters but my stomach doesn’t usually join in.

– If I get too hungry the only thing I want to eat is sugar and simple carbs (which inevitably gives me a killer case of the tireds if I indulge too much).

– If I eat when I’m not hungry I feel a little sick.

– Real hunger ebbs and flows. A craving can be super persistent but true hunger does not feel like an emergency. Like today, when I choose not to eat for 24 hours I will obviously get very hungry and yet reminding myself of what I’m doing and why often makes the hunger pangs subside for a bit. And then they return in an hour or two.

– When other people around me are eating it makes me want to eat too, even if I’m not hungry.

– The “I’m full” signal is harder to hear than the “I’m hungry” one but it is there. I’d thought that thanks to all my decades of eating disorders I’d completely damaged the mechanism to feel satiety but when I eat quietly and am not distracted I’ve found that even I can hear it.

– When I eat past the point of fullness it’s most often out of a sense of deprivation, i.e. “This candy tastes so amazing but I can’t eat it ever again because it’s so bad for me (never mind I’m taking candy…from a baby)!” Eating because I feel deprived never ends well. In fact, one of the trickiest parts of IE for me is trying to mitigate feeling deprived.

All of this made me curious- what does hunger feel like to you? How did you learn to hear your hunger? Does a food journal help you know when you’re hungry? Do you love Candy Corn or hate it??

* I HAAATE Candy Corn. It’s just colored wax – and ugly colored wax at that! But this year Starburst invented “fruity” candy corn which… are basically just seasonally inappropriate JELLY BEANS. They are pure, sugary deliciousness.

**So is it wrong to eat for reasons besides hunger? A lot of diet gurus and books say yes but I don’t know that I agree. I do think there is a time and a place for it. Food can be comforting, entertaining, soothing, and novel and I think using it for that purpose on occasion is fine. So much of food is about the experience of eating it, right? But I think that when I do this I need to be perfectly honest with myself about why I’m using food in this way and if it is really the best thing to help me feel better (and often the answer is no). Emotional eating in my book isn’t always harmful but it’s harmful when eating is all you do to deal with your emotions.

 

 

 

42 Comments

  1. Right there with you on the deprivation thing. And the emotional eating. These days I’m trying to recognise when the need is emotional and take it from there. If I know what the emotion is and still choose to eat, that’s fine. It’s when I don’t even realise that I’m eating for boredom/happiness/loneliness/whatever that I don’t know when to stop. But feeling deprived…a big issue. Haven’t found the key.

    I’ve tried food journaling only briefly and it makes me crazy. The best way for me to stay in tune with my hunger is to stay busy (but not too busy – too much stress and I panic eat) and not eat too often but eat enough in one go. Get a rhythm going. I don’t get there often enough but I try.

    • This: ” It’s when I don’t even realise that I’m eating for boredom/happiness/loneliness/whatever that I don’t know when to stop.” YES!!! Me too. It’s the unconscious eating that gets me. I like your point about staying busy too.

  2. Excellent post, Charlotte. I completely agree on how difficult it can be to discern hunger from craving, and that the threes are waaayyy worse than the twos! I try to wait for a slight growling sensation, but I do consult the clock. Often I’m so busy moving around that I don’t notice it, then I go overboard later. Who knew knowing when to eat would be so difficult??

  3. To your last question, I think it’s also a little bit about quantity-do you have a cupcake for comfort as a treat or do you eat the whole cake? Almost like alcohol-I know you don’t drink Charlotte but a lot of people like to have a glass of wine or a beer after a stressful day. It starts becoming a problem when drinking is ALL they do to cope and it’s the whole bottle of wine instead of a glass.

    Off topic, but can I ask a question, out of curiosity and not judgement (I promise!) when you fast from liquids too, what’s that like? Do you have stuff you can do to prevent dehydration? Or is it just short enough that that part is kinda like the hunger part-it gets uncomfortable at times but it isn’t long enough to get dangerous? (I knew LDS fast, but I didn’t realize that included liquids… For some reason I’m super curious about that one detail!)

    • Excellent point about quantity. It’s true I don’t drink but I do have some trigger foods that I absolutely will binge on. Jelly Beans, ahem, for one.

      As for your question, it’s not as hard as you’d think! I try to schedule my fast days for days when I don’t have a workout so I don’t have to worry about that. 24 hours isn’t that long without water although sometimes I do get a slight headache that I attribute to that. That said, if I ever feel like I’m dying of thirst, I’ll just get a drink. I try to follow the principle of fasting but in the end I believe God is very understanding of human frailties;)

  4. “True hunger is not an emergency.” What a tremendously helpful thing to remember. After years of finding what healthy means to me, I still struggle to find the difference between hunger and craving. I love, and totally identify, with this sentiment, and will try to carry it with me. Thanks Charlotte for such a thoughtful post, and for sharing your spiritual and psychophysical journey with us.

  5. If I let myself get too hungry, true hunger does feel like an emergency for me. I get dizzy, shaky, and a bit nauseous. If I get up too fast, I black out. This tells me I need to eat, NOW. Maybe I’m just not “normal” in this regard…

    • What you’re describing sounds like low blood sugar and definitely means you should eat! I think what I was trying to say is that when you look at a food and think “I MUST have that [cake or whatever] RIGHT NOW!!” it can feel like an emergency (I’ll never get to eat it again! It will be all gone!) but that’s a sign it’s more of a craving. True hunger allows you to make choices as to what your body needs rather than demanding a certain thing right in the moment. If that makes any more sense?

  6. Our body can tell us if we’re hungry. The best sign is a discomfort/slight burning/growling of the stomach. I try not to eat before that starts, but I also try not to wait too long either, as you make bad choices when you’re too hungry.

    So many things can be confused with hunger, this one is a big challenge.

    Another trick of mine is to ask myself if I would eat – insert something you don’t really like – and if the answer is no, it means my hunger is not hunger.

  7. Not long ago I literally texted my boyfriend that I thought I might have appendicitis because I was having such terrible abdominal pain. It turns out I had actually just gotten *that* hungry without even recognizing it, because 13 years of anorexia has totally f*cked all of my hunger and satiety cues.

    Likewise, there are times when I’ve boosted a meal plan, am honestly trying to give my body what it needs, and yet feel even hungrier after a large meal than before I ate anything, because my body switches into hypermetabolic mode and wants to EAT ALL THE THINGS. This is frustrating, to say the least, and makes it easy to see how some people pingpong between fasting and binging, although that hasn’t happened to me personally.

    I’m still at the stage of recovery in which I follow a meal plan, and I honestly don’t think I have any idea of hungry/full to this day. I eat what I’m prescribed to eat at the dictated time, stop when that measured portion is gone, and that’s that. The whole concept of intuitive eating (following your body’s cues) still totally blows my mind, although I guess it’s a good goal to aim for.

    • Oh although occasionally I miss hunger cues until I feel like I’m ripping in half, sometimes when I miss realizing I’m hungry I have no abdominal pain at all, I’ll feel it in my head or shakiness or anywhere else except my stomach.

    • It gets better, I promise!!! I felt like I was in the stage you’re at forever and I was sure I’d wrecked my metabolism to the point where I’d never feel hunger normally again… and yet I do now (mostly). Hang in there – it’s SO hard right now but it does get easier. Keep with your plan, keep trying, it will get better:) ((hugs))

  8. “- Hunger is not the need for comfort, entertainment, stress relief, novelty or love.**:
    This is what I struggle with. That and my “full switch” being a bit delayed so I have to watch myself and stop eating at what should be enough (I’m a fast eater) before I feel full or I am absolutely stuffed and then feel awful (knowing I can nibble a bit in a few minutes if I’m still hungry seems so simple but it took a long time to figure out…).
    Then there is eating for comfort or stress relief…or even boredom – It doesn’t fix anything and makes me feel worse later. Thankfully I’m learning to be more honest with myself and this happens less.

    • This: “Thankfully I’m learning to be more honest with myself and this happens less.” totally made me smile. I don’t know why it’s so hard but being really honest with myself about why and how I’m eating is so hard. I guess there’s still a part of me that thinks it’s “bad” so I try to hide it… from myself. Oy.

  9. The hardest part for me is figuring out WHAT I’m hungry for. I can usually tell when I’m hungry (although sometimes I ignore it or eat when I’m not actually hungry), but trying to figure out what it is that I should be eating befuddles me. It usually takes me so long that by the time I finally decide, I’m way beyond hungry and just need to get. food. now.

    • It helps me to plan out my meals in advance. It sounds like a lot of work but it really saves energy and time in the long run! I don’t do a ton – usually just the day. So at breakfast, I already know what lunch will be so I don’t have to spend too much time thinking about it. And if I get to lunch and what I planned sounds awful? I’ll pick something else. Just try one day, I swear it helps:)

  10. “Raise your hand if you’re an 80′s kid!”
    Talk to my daughter’s hand.

    “If I get too hungry the only thing I want to eat is , , ,”
    . . . cheese. Ya know, real fuel, not that highly volatile, yet low energy, temporary booster stuff.

    “I HAAATE Candy Corn.”
    I see your Candy Corn, and raise you Circus Peanuts.

  11. Great article, Charlotte! Thank you for reminding me of why food is important and why being in tune with my body is not as hard as it seems! And I totally agree that food serves a variety of purposes other than fuel, and these purposes are not bad! It’s just people’s views differ and cause a variety of unfortunate problems.

  12. I must admit to candy corn love. And tootsie rolls. Guess I just can’t resist waxy, completely artificial, sugary goo. But I shall abstain this year, as I’m trying to avoid processed sugar in general. (I think my teeth will thank me 🙂 ).
    I HATE food diaries! During the height of my ED I kept a diary obsessively, recording every morsel & counting every calorie. I remember one night coming home starving after a 14-hour day and “bingeing” on an apple & peanut butter, then mentally flogging myself because I’d gone over my daily, self-imposed calorie limit.
    I recently did a 10-day cleanse (with solid food, lol!) and one of the few rules was that we were NOT to count calories. Even though I was following a food plan, I found myself hearing my body’s cues loud and clear. If I was scheduled for a snack but didn’t want it, I didn’t have it. And I found myself NOT obsessing over everything I put in my mouth, and whether or not I’d exercised “enough” that day.
    In the 2 weeks since I finished, I’m still following those cues. I had a bad cold last week, so I let myself rest rather than trying to push myself through workouts.
    I know I still have a long way to go, but I can feel progress being made. I think whatever road we take to get to freedom is great.

  13. I’ll admit it, I love Candy Corn! We’ve already gone through 2 bags in our house this year and when I say we, I mean mostly me.

    Seriously though, great timely post. I just got back from a long weekend away that involved a state fair (the new fair food this year was deep fried gummy bears, ewwwww), popcorn at the movies, lots of meals out with friends, Ruffles and a cookie tray, and some drinking. I feel like all I’ve done since Wednesday is eat what sounded good when I wasn’t hungry. I feel ready to focus back in on my hunger cues too.

    I find it very hard though. Hunger I can generally pick up on, it’s a rumbly stomach feeling to me, but satiety? I’m still not really sure. Too many years of EDs maybe. It often is just the absence of hunger for me or deciding that I’ve eaten a reasonable serving of food so that should be it. I’m also easily influenced by others too. I want to eat when people around me are eating and if someone leaves part of their meal I find it hard to finish mine.

    • Good point about learning to feel satiety being a whole different skill!! I hadn’t thought of that but you’re so right. I too am really influenced by others and how they’re eating…

      Deep fried gummy bears?? Eh. Gummy bears are delish the way they are, why mess with that?

  14. I LOVE candy corn. Even the smell in the Halloween aisle can make me buy a bag and eat half of it in one sitting. So far, so good, but I can’t promise I won’t kill a bag in the near future….

  15. Great post! I totally agree that food doesn’t necessarily and shouldn’t just be about fuel, I honestly think that way of thinking is a bit disordered. Birthday cake I shared with my kids wasn’t eaten out of hunger but celebration. And that piece of cake hasn’t made me fat! Sometimes I have a cup of tea and a biscuit (cookie) with a friend to chat and be social not to fuel. And that is A okay!

    • I totally agree Jess! You whole comment just made me grin (especially the part where you translated biscuit to cookie for this American girl haha!). You are awesome.

  16. I long realized that I am often feel hungry but it is the water that I crave. Since then everytime I am hunger, I drink a glass of water, and if in 15 minutes I am still hungry, I have a meal.

  17. I take exception to the idea of eating just for physical reasons. To say food should just be fuel is like saying a home is just for shelter, clothing is just for coverage and sex is just for procreation. food can be so much more than just stuff for the body to use and I believe it’s certainly possible to eat for emotional reasons and cravings and still be healthy.

  18. I adore your blog. 🙂 Really. You are just delightful.

  19. Mmmm, when I read the article in Women’s Health, I actually thought that it was really sad. Carrie is a beautiful girl–and she’s always been–and I would hate for women to read about her dedication (if you want to call it that) and think that that is normal and/or healthy. I couldn’t help but think that it sounded like she was obsessive and that some of her habits were not really that healthy (fake meat? vitamin water?), but this is coming from a girl who’s dedicated the last few years of her life to getting away from food obsessions and dieting.

    • Yeah, I kinda felt the same way – like I wrote, it wasn’t healthy for me. Totally obssessive behavior for me. But I can’t judge health nor happiness from the outside and I sincerely hope she has both:)