Ep. 17- Fear of Hunger

May 30,2024

Are you scared of feeling hungry?

Past diets and experiences may have created an unhealthy relationship with hunger.

But listening to your hunger is an important part of becoming an intuitive eater!

You will learn:

• Importance of feeling hunger

• Why you fear being hungry

• Hunger’s role in binge eating recovery

• Empowering yourself to manage & control hunger

  Hello, confident eaters. Happy Thursday. I hope you had a good Memorial Day weekend. If you were in the U. S., got a chance to relax, rest, recover, had some fun. And today I am here on Memorial Day recording this podcast for you on What to do if you fear hunger, why you're fearing hunger, and what to do about it.

I used to love hunger back in my diet days, especially when I was first calorie counting. I would think, okay, you know, I don't want to be too hungry, but I would notice the sensation of hunger and I would almost get excited. It would be like, woohoo, this means we are probably losing weight. And I really didn't make it a big problem.

I actually really liked that feeling of hunger. I only started making hunger a problem when I started binge eating because then I thought, oh my gosh, every time I'm hungry, I binge. I can't control myself. I don't have enough willpower or self control. So then I started really hating hunger and fearing hunger.

And then as I went through binge eating recovery and in therapy, I was told that I had to eat at least every three hours. And so I really was onto that. I did not want to keep binge eating. So I made sure I was eating every three hours. Now that's very useful in the beginning when you're recovering, but as you go through your recovery journey, you might start to realize I don't actually need to eat every three hours, and that's what I realized. I now only eat every, more than three hours, probably every four to six hours, and I didn't need that much food to be snacking all the time.

So I really needed to learn how to get over this fear of hunger so that way I wasn't constantly putting food in my body that I didn't need. I wasn't really allowing myself to get hungry ever because anytime I'd have the slightest hint of hunger, I would panic and instantly start eating.

Now, why it's important to let yourself get hungry is you are going to have a very hard time maintaining your body weight and feeling good if you never feel hungry, especially if you're consistently feeling full. If you consistently have that feeling of fullness, then you're not having the opposite feeling of hunger. Things are gonna be out of balance in your body. You're going to be too, eating too much because you're having too much fullness and not enough hunger.

So there's a few reasons why you might be scared of feeling hungry and not wanting to feel it.

The first is because you think you're going to binge if you're hungry. Again, we're told, eat every three hours, don't get too hungry, make sure you're fueling yourself. And this is a super important part of binge eating recovery, do not doubt that.

But, the truth is, the amount of hunger you're going to feel is never going to determine whether you binge or not. But you may be thinking, I really do not want to get too hungry right now. And so you are continuing to overeat and eat more frequently than you need.

You also might've created a toxic relationship with the sensation of hunger from past diets like I did, where I was overly hungry for very long periods of time.

And even though I thought, woohoo, I'm losing weight, I didn't really want to be hungry all the time. I was tired. I was irritable. I wasn't able to work out as well. It was really a miserable experience to be hungry all day and I wasn't showing up as the person I wanted to be and it was hard for me to accomplish my goals and to do these things.

So if you felt like you weren't allowed to eat, you may have been angry with this hunger and wished it would go away, and you may have ended up binging because you had this strong dieting hunger. You thought you just didn't have enough willpower, but the truth is, Your body was just having a normal response to diet.

It is normal to feel overly hungry and have this strong desire to eat when you are dieting, which is why diets don't work.

Another reason is you maybe grew up with true food scarcity. So maybe you came from a background where you truly didn't have enough food or you had a whole bunch of siblings, so food was always gone before you got a chance to get to it.

So you learn from an early age that food is something I better get in When I have it, and I better make sure I always have enough.

Then finally, you might think that something really bad will happen if you get too hungry, or maybe you've even had a bad experience at some time in the past where you were too hungry, and maybe you felt like you had really low blood sugar, maybe you fear passing out.

All of these I've heard before, but But I also want you to recognize how many times that's happened in your life and how often our brain tends to blow out of proportion what it has around these fears around hunger.

So how are we going to get over this fear of hunger? I want to start with a story, and this story I debated telling because it's one, a little personal, but two, a little bit out there.

So if you're listening with kids, I might turn this off. Although I never recommend listening to my podcast with kids, because who knows what I'm going to say on here. But I was talking to this guy once, and he was a masochist. And a masochist, if you don't know, is a person who enjoys activities that most would find painful or unpleasant.

And I remember we went out to dinner one night, And he was like, huh, I don't think I've eaten anything since yesterday morning, and it was like the next day dinner, and I was like, oh my gosh, how are you not so hungry? And he said, yeah, I am hungry, but it's just a physical sensation. Like, it doesn't bother me that it's a physical sensation I'm having, because that's just all it is.

It's no big deal that I'm feeling this way. I know I'm gonna get food, so I'm just going to eat soon. And so that's how he thought of both pleasure and pain, as they were both sensations. It didn't really matter what the feeling was, they felt like, it was all lumped into this category of just generalized sensations. They weren't good, they weren't bad, they weren't helpful, they weren't unhelpful, they weren't scary, or not scary, it just existed.

So it really didn't bother him at all, which I thought was so fascinating because I come from this dieting background where I panic at any sight of hunger and I've definitely worked on it and I feel a lot better nowadays, but hearing him just have like totally no issue in the world with not eating for like, what is that, like 36 hours, and this is definitely not something I'm recommending, please take note of that, but just showing you how there is this possibility of a different way of thinking of your body's sensations.

Now, masochists often describe that they like the pain because they are ultimately the ones controlling it, or they have control over the situation, they're giving permission in the situation, so it gives them the sense of control over these sensations of pain, of pleasure of what they're feeling.

And this is something that people struggling with anorexia describe too, is it's like they have this sense of control and power that they're showing over the food in their body signals. Now, I want you to take these two examples on a much smaller, safer scale of these behaviors.

Okay? Like this is not any pro masochism or anorexia, like please do not distort these words, but I want you again to just see this perspective how you may also be able to find a level of feel good, comfortable, safe level of control by showing yourself you are in charge of stopping when you're full. You are in charge of what food you put in your body. You are in control of how much you eat and when you decide not to eat. And you can sit with gentle hunger for an appropriate amount of time. And decide when you want to eat or not. And I am talking about sitting with your hunger for like 15 to 30 minutes to build it to this gentle level, not hours. I am not telling you here to sit with your hunger for hours, but just to practice getting comfortable with it and showing yourself that you're not going to die.

And remember that you are never just taken over by this binge monster. You have power and choice. You always get to choose. And you can handle these sensations, reminding yourself that you are safe, food is always available, that we live in a world of food abundance. And if you're just dealing with food scarcity right now, that is a different topic.

And I want to make sure that, you know, if you are in that place, you know, that that is something that is a different issue. But if you were listening to the podcast and you do have true food abundance, where you have food in your cabinets, you're not on food stamps, you're able to go to the grocery store, really show your brain. There's no lack of food. It is there for you every single day when you want it.

So this is what you need to know today. The sensations of hunger itself are never a problem. It is the thoughts and feelings you're having about the hunger that is making it a problem. If hunger was uncomfortable and scary and horrible, for everyone, and that was just the truth of the world, everyone would avoid hunger and be eating all day. But that's not the truth. Plenty of people manage their hunger and notice it and honor it in a way that feels in control and safe and slow, and you can do that too.

So what I want you to think about today is what are you making hunger mean? When you feel hunger, when you feel this physical sensation, what are you telling yourself about that hunger?

What is the story you're creating about it? And is that story true?

That's all I have for you guys today. Have a great week.