One of the most radical, yet simple, realizations of my eating journey was this:
If I start eating when I’m not hungry, it will be hard to tell when I’m full.
In other words, a clear way to know when to stop eating is that we can feel the contrast: before I was hungry, and this feels very different, and now I’m definitely not hungry.
But if we start eating when we weren’t hungry to begin with — maybe we were neutral (neither hungry nor full), or even somewhere on the fullness spectrum — we will never have that very clear physical cue of the contrast.
There are other physical sensations that will indicate fullness — the feeling of a distended stomach, for example — but often we won’t sense them until we’re quite full, maybe even bordering on uncomfortably full. For most of us, it will be easier to stop at a comfortable point if we can sense the contrast between hunger and our current state.
So, want to make it easier to notice fullness? Just wait until you’re hungry to start eating.
…
And, two key caveats:
Of course, there are other, non-physical sensation-related reasons why we might choose to stop eating. Maybe we’ve decided what a “reasonable” portion is, so we stop there. Maybe we’re rushing off to something else and don’t have time to eat more.
But, most people I work with find that physical sensations are an essential part of assessing when, what, and how much to eat. Other reasons have a tendency of…just disappearing into thin air right when we might need them the most (e.g., when we just got home from work, are exhausted, and eating peanut butter while standing next to the fridge sounds extremely appealing).Not all of us can notice the body sensations associated with hunger and fullness. Many of us have forgotten how to do that long ago! However, extensive experience has taught me that almost anyone can re-learn how to do this, and it’s a big theme of the work I do with individual clients and in the Dessert Club.