Hunger Is Your Body’s Way of Telling You to Digest Food. Here’s How to Listen to It
In Western culture we are not taught to listen to our hunger never mind use it as a gauge for our behavior., At best we’re taught to eat on a schedule often dictated by work or school and to eat until we are full. At worst, we’re told to fear hunger as a sign that the body is going into starvation mode and will start storing pesky fat cells out of panic (not true).
Hunger is simply your body's way of telling you that you are ready to digest food. True hunger means you’ve digested your previous meal. When your body signals hunger, your nutrient absorption will be at its optimum level. Furthermore, when we eat till we’re stuffed (or simply till the plate is empty), we may not leave room for peristalsis, the function of moving food down your digestive tract, to happen. In a culture where we haven’t been taught to respect hunger, and may fall back on eating out of boredom, we have our work cut out for us.
Re-educating yourself to listen to your body's cues will result in you eating according to your body's needs, both in terms of how much you eat and what you eat. Keeping a Hunger Log for a few weeks is an effective way to bring attention to how you feel before each meal (are you really hungry? How hungry?) and track how you feel after each meal. Simple awareness and reflection is a powerful way to highlight your behaviors and, if you’d like to, activate change.
To begin, on the first page of your Hunger Log, write out these four categories on the scale:
Ravenous
Hungry
Satiated
Stuffed
Then note your hunger level before and after every meal. Aim to be hungry, but not ravenous, before each meal, and to be satiated, but not stuffed, after each meal. This will help you to respond to your body's inner intelligence of hunger and satisfaction, and promote good digestion, vitality and wellbeing.
Remember: your body is intelligent. There has never been a better time to start listening to it than right now.
