This week I’m exploring Principle 2 of Intuitive Eating – Honouring Your Hunger. This principle helps to build the foundation in reconnecting with your body’s natural cues and fostering a healthy relationship with food. But what does it truly mean to honour your hunger, and why is it so important?
Understanding Hunger: More Than Just a Physical Need
Experiencing hunger is your body’s way of signalling that it needs nourishment. It’s a biological cue designed to keep you alive and energised. However, in a culture that often glorifies dieting and restrictive eating, many people have become disconnected from their natural hunger cues. This disconnection can lead to cycles of deprivation and overeating, ultimately harming both your physical and mental health.
Honouring your hunger means tuning in to these biological signals and responding to them with kindness and respect. It’s about trusting your body to know what it needs and when it needs it. This principle encourages you to listen to your body, rather than external rules or restrictions, and to feed it when it asks to be fed.
The Importance of Honouring Your Hunger
When you consistently ignore or suppress your hunger, your body goes into survival mode. This can trigger intense cravings, overeating, and a preoccupation with food (hands up if you often daydream about a big bowl of chips!) This a natural response to hunger, your body is trying to protect you from what it perceives as a famine. Over time, consistently ignoring hunger and your brain being in constant survival mode can lead to a cycle of binging and guilt, where you eat beyond fullness because your body doesn’t trust that it will be fed again soon.
Honouring your hunger breaks this cycle. By consistently responding to your body’s hunger needs, you rebuild trust in your body’s signals. You begin to eat in a way that feels satisfying and nourishing, rather than in response to deprivation or emotional triggers. This ultimately helps to stabilise your metabolism, improve your mood, and reduce the obsession with food that often comes from chronic dieting.
How to Honor Your Hunger
- Listen to Your Body: Start by tuning into your hunger signals. These can range from a slight emptiness in your stomach to feeling lightheaded or irritable (there’s a reason we have the phrase Hangry!) Everyone’s hunger signals are different, so take time to notice how your body communicates with you.
- Eat Regularly: To honour your hunger, it’s important to eat regularly throughout the day. This doesn’t mean you need to rigidly adhere to mealtimes, but rather ensuring you don’t go long periods without eating. Eating regularly helps maintain your energy levels and keeps your hunger from becoming overwhelming.
- Trust Your Body: One of the biggest challenges in honouring your hunger is learning to trust your body. After years of dieting or ignoring hunger cues, this can be difficult. Remember that your body is incredibly wise and has been designed to regulate itself, that’s how humans have survived for thousands of years! Trust that it knows when it needs food.
- Let Go of Guilt: There is no need to feel guilty for eating when you’re hungry, unless you’ve killed the chef! Food is not just fuel; it’s also a source of pleasure, comfort, and connection. Allow yourself to enjoy your meals without judgement.
- Be Patient: Reconnecting with your hunger signals can take time, especially if you’ve been out of touch with them for a while. Be patient with yourself as you relearn how to listen to your body and respond to its needs.
The Bigger Picture
Honouring your hunger is about more than just eating when you’re hungry. It’s about rebuilding a respectful and trusting relationship with your body. It’s about breaking free from the diet mentality and learning to view food as a source of nourishment and enjoyment, rather than something to be controlled or feared.
As you start to practice honouring your hunger, you’ll likely find that your relationship with food becomes more peaceful and intuitive. You’ll start to eat in a way that feels good for your body and mind, without the stress and guilt that often accompany dieting and restricting your food.
Remember, intuitive eating is a journey, not a destination and its about progress, not perfection. Honouring your hunger is just one step on that journey, but it’s a crucial one. By honouring your hunger, you’re laying the groundwork for a healthier, happier relationship with food, your body and yourself.
If you’d like to learn more or some support as you embark on the Intuitive Eating journey, head to the Contact Me page to get in touch and book in a FREE consultation call, where I can answer any questions you have and we can explore your goals together.
