Ep 25- Why You Feel Hungry All The Time
July 25, 2024
I’m ALWAYS hungry! Ever said these words before?
Where you just feel like a bottomless pit needing food?
Today I discuss causes and solutions for constant hunger.
Unraveling this will help you step closer to becoming an intuitive, natural eater.
You will learn…
why hunger isn’t a bad thing
the impacts of prior or current dieting and restriction
the biological and psychological reasons you always feel hungry
Do you ever feel like you are hungry all the time or that there are some days where you just can't stop eating? You constantly feel like there's this never ending hole in your stomach that no matter how much you eat, you're still hungry. That is what we are going to be talking about today.
Now first hunger is not a bad thing. Hunger is just a physical cue from your body, letting you know that you need food. So learning how to listen to hunger is a key foundation of becoming an intuitive natural eater. And knowing and honoring your hunger is a superpower in intuitive eating.
So this is something we want to learn to notice acknowledge and honor as a key signal. This is something that I struggled with the most when I was recovering from dieting and restriction. And this is the first reason you may be hungry all the time. If you have been someone who has been eating too little calories that they, then they need. Or you are yo-yo Deiter where you were on an off-track of the diets were really, you were not giving your body enough food on a frequent, consistent basis. You'll maybe dealing from feeling hungry all the time. This is a total natural thing to happen.
When I was recovering from this period of restriction, I had a lot of true, genuine hunger where I really felt like I just could not satisfy the amount of hunger I had. And this is very normal because our body is trying to help us after this period of restriction. If you were to go out for the day and not to have water, when you get back home, you're going to want to drink lots of water at first. That makes sense.
We don't judge ourself when we are wanting to drink lots of water, because we've been really thirsty for a while. And the same thing happens with our body. If we have been starving and under feeding ourselves for a long time. We shouldn't be judging our body for wanting more food. This is a natural biological response to dieting, which is why diets don't work.
But I want to assure you that if this is you right now, and you were starting to let go of past diet thoughts, let go of this restriction. This level of extreme hunger will level out over time. It will end. This does not last forever. This is a temporary time period where your body is just trying to get you back to baseline.
Now a big mistake I see people making is that they freak out during this time about wanting more food, about eating a little bit more than they did when they were dieting. And so they keep going back to these diet thoughts and this diet mindset, which keeps them binge eating. We know that diets are one of the major causes of binge-eating. So, if we continue to go back to them, we are just going to get stuck in this diet, binge cycle for even longer.
So the number one reason you may feel hungry all the time is simply because you're not eating enough. Now, I know no one wants to hear this, but you need to listen to this because it's so important. You may just need more food quantity. Diets distort your idea of what a normal portion is. So whatever you imagine is like, what you're supposed to have is probably too little. And this is what I see from most of the people working with me is they come to me thinking that they are maybe good all day. And then they binge at night or they think I'm not barely eating anything. Like, why am I still binge-eating so much. And that's because they're really not getting enough consistent calories throughout the day.
So right now I eat much more at my meals that I did before. I thought there was no way I was supposed to be eating this much at breakfast and lunch and dinner. But the difference is I don't binge anymore.
So even though it might seem like I'm eating more food and more calories at each of my meals, which I probably am. I am actually feeling full and satisfied for them. So I'm not going and then having a thousand calorie binge after. So it's, I know it can be scary at first to start eating more food, but think about it from the perspective of, if you have a little bit of a bigger breakfast or a little bit of bigger lunch or dinner and that prevents you from having a binge or over eating later- that is well worth it.
Along with that is your meal timing. So if we're not getting any food, until later in the day, you're skipping breakfast, chances are you're going to feel hungry more often throughout the day. This is because when our body checks in towards the end of the day, and it looks for how many calories it has, it looks for how much fuel it's gotten and it realizes that hasn't gotten enough. It's going to start to send out really strong hunger signals. Now, even if you don't recognize these hunger signals right away, what this might look like is you start eating dinner and then you feel like your hunger is awakened, that you woke a sleeping monster.
And now all it wants to do is he eats. This again is not something wrong with you or something broken. This is your body recognizing that it needs more food because you didn't eat anything earlier in the day because you only had coffee and a protein bar for the first eight hours of your day.
So if that's what your day normally looks like, I'd highly encourage you to start getting in a nutritious breakfast and lunch. Maybe a snack in there before you just rush into your day and start skipping meals aren't getting enough.
The next thing you want to look at is your food quality. So making sure you're getting these four things in; fat, protein, carbs and fiber. For fiber I usually say that some form of fruit and vegetable. You want to get those four things in at every single meal, for the most part, right? We're not perfect humans. It might not happen to every meal. But if you were not getting all four of those in, you might feel hungry later on and all four of those play a role in satisfaction and fullness. Yes. All four of them. Even carps.
So if you were only eating filler foods of like celery and rice cakes, And low sugar drinks that aren't actually giving you the nutrition you need, you're missing out on a lot of vital nutrients. And if you only have salad with low fat dressing and chicken, you're also missing out on key macros and your body knows this. It's very smart. So it's going to send out signals to make sure you get that in.
Now, same thing here, I know sometimes adding in carbs can be scary. It's something that we're told that we're not supposed to do if we want to lose weight. But again, thinking about, if you start including a carb source and your body is finally happy and satisfied, you might prevent that big afternoon snacking where you just crave all the carbs and you feel like I'm just so hungry. Preventing that by having carbs earlier and will probably help you one, get more carbs in that are actually beneficial in a little bit more nutritious, but also really change your relationship to hunger and hope you feel better all day long.
The next ones we won't dive into a ton, but they are important to mention. Sleep, stress and medications. These are all biological factors of things that could be impacting your hunger. So, if you do not sleep a lot at tonight, or you didn't get a good night's sleep last night, you may feel extra hungry the next day.
If you are stressed, you are not managing your stress well, you don't have support in your life to help with that stress. You also may crave food more and there's some physical symptoms involved with that.
If you are taking certain medications that make you feel extra hungry. That may be something you want to talk to your doctor about or investigate a bit more, but all three of these things, what's important to note is whether you didn't get enough sleep, you're stressed out, you're on a medication, your body doesn't actually need more food. Right. Maybe a little bit, but in reality, you're not going to need like thousands more calories a day because you didn't sleep well last night or because you're on a medication. This is what we want to be aware of, because it allows us to see that when we're getting this hunger, we want to extra question it and we might have to tune in even more to make sure that we actually are physically hungry versus just getting this urge for food because of these biological factors.
Now the last reason why you may feel hungry all the time is one I do not hear anyone talking about. And this reason is that you just think you were hungry, but you are not actually hungry. So this is an important distinction to make. I will have people come to me and say, Amber, I am just hungry all day long and when I dive in a bit deeper, Oftentimes, they are not actually physically hungry all day long. They are just thinking about food all the time. They're just wanting food a lot. They're having a lot of urges for food. And they label that as hunger.
Hunger is not a thought. Hunger is a physical sensation. Again, hunger is not something you think about. Hunger is something you feel in your body. So we feel hunger a little bit differently doesn't necessarily have to be just in your stomach, but if you are not getting some sort of physical sensation along with hunger, chances are you are just thinking you are feeling hungry, but you are not actually feeling the sensations of hunger. And we don't want to confuse these things.
If you were telling yourself you were hungry when you were really just having an urge for food. You are confusing yourself about your body signals. You are lying to yourself. You are not hungry you were having a craving or an urge for food, and that's important to make that distinction. So you don't start blaming your body and saying, well, I can't trust my body cause it's just always hungry.
Chances are, you know when your body's hungry or not, we all have this wisdom inside of us. It can take some time and some patience and some practice to figure out. But deep down inside, I truly believe that most people know. You know, I think I'm not actually hungry right now, but we can use hunger as an excuse, even if it's not true hunger. If we tell ourself we're hungry, we can oftentimes use that as an excuse to allow ourself to eat. We don't want to be doing again. You're breaking that trust with your body. You're confusing yourself. It's going to make it much harder to become this intuitive, natural eater. If you were not telling yourself the truth about your body's signals.
So if you're having a hard time figuring out your true hunger and fullness signals and listening to them. My confident eater program is where you're going to want to be. If you're listening to this in real time, I am currently open for some one-on-one clients.
I have availability to take you in and how the program works. It's a six month in-depth step-by-step program where I teach you exactly how we became a confident eater, how I stopped overeating and binge eating all by rewiring my brain. So we take a psychological approach that teaches you not just a bandaid solution, but how to change from the inside out. So you can maintain your progress forever.
If you're interested in working with me. There's a link in the show notes. I would love to talk with you. I have free consultation calls so we can discuss your eating goals. I give you an eating assessment, really dive deeper into what's going on and how I can help you.
All right confident eaters. I'll talk to you next week.