Ep 60- I Can’t Trust My Hunger & Fullness
April 03 ,2025
Have you ever thought “I can’t listen to my body because I’ll overeat”?
Let’s dispel this thought!
Your unique body has evolved over 1000’s of years to perfect your hunger & fullness signals. They might feel whisper quiet right now, but you can get back to listening to them so you can become a normal, natural eater!
You'll learn…
Why your signals might feel "off" (and how diet culture plays a role)
What it really means to listen to your body, not your mind
How to start tuning back in to your body, even if it's been decades
Why your body does know what it needs (yes, even around Oreos and Cheez-Its)
Simple practices to relearn your intuitive eating cues
TRANSCRIPT:
Happy Thursday confident Eaters. I am back home now in lovely Colorado. I am going skiing this weekend up in Breckenridge, which I am so excited for. But one thing that I am so grateful for through all of my travels is my hunger and fullness signals.
This is something that I thought I didn't have anymore. After years of calorie counting in dieting, I thought my hunger and fullness were broken.
I thought clearly, I could not listen to my body, like other people could because I was always overeating when I did, and I was always eating the foods I didn't want to eat.
And maybe you can relate, maybe when you think, you try to listen to your hunger and fullness signals that all you want is sugar and carbs, all you do is eat past full. And I feel you. I know that this can be a big struggle, so I first wanna consider why this might be, why do you feel like you can't trust your hunger and fullness signals?
Think about when this might have started for you. Was this after you started dieting? Was this, as you were growing up, maybe your mom or dad was a dieter. Your guardian taught you that your hunger and fullness couldn't be trusted and that they knew best. So you had to clean your plate. You had to eat only what they told you to eat, and so you unlearned your hunger and fullness there.
But from diet culture, you might have been hearing these messages. Like you shouldn't be hungry yet. You just ate. Your diet starts tomorrow, and then you won't be allowed any of these foods again, anymore. It doesn't matter if you're hungry. This is your calorie count for today, or it doesn't matter that you're full.
You still have some calories left.
It doesn't matter that you were craving a sandwich, you were supposed to have a salad instead today. All of our internal wisdom has been completely ignored by diet culture, but oftentimes also by our caregivers and the people who raised us because they were also a part of diet culture.
Or Here's my favorite one, that you are ungrateful because you're not finishing your plate and there's children starving in Africa that teaches you to ignore your fullness signal and keep going. But what I want you to think about today is if you can find a time, even if you barely remember it. Of when you did listen to your body.
Even if it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when you were five years old, when you were an infant. I don't care when it was. I want you to think back to a time where there was a possibility that you were a natural eater, that you did listen to these hunger cues.
And when people tell me that they feel like they can't trust their body. Chances are, it is your mind that you can't trust, not your body.
Most of us are hearing our hunger and fullness signals much more than we might imagine. Now, I will say if you have been binge eating and restricting for a long time, or you have dealt with bulimia, anorexia, any sort of these extremes, then yes, your hunger and fullness cues might be off because of how in the extreme you have been. But that doesn't mean you can't come back to them and relearn them. And for most of us, it's not that we aren't hearing our hunger and fullness signals, but that we aren't listening to them. So what that means is you probably are hearing your body say, Hey, I am full right now.
But then your mind says, but it's just so good, but I just wanna keep going, but I don't know what I mean. Get this food again. And that's what leads you to keep eating.
If you're here as someone who's struggling with binge eating and overeating, your mind has been conditioned to have these urges in place, which are going to skew your perception of desire for foods. You're over desiring foods right now. You're wanting food more than you have hunger for. So what that means is when you finish your meal and you think, well, I want more, but you know that your body is saying, actually, I'm good. What's coming up right then is an urge for food. And if you haven't already, make sure you get my free guided urge audio in the show notes below that will help you get through all of these urges.
Your hunger and fullness signals might be whisper quiet right now. It might have been like you turned a volume knob way down, but they're still there. Just 'cause they're whispering to you doesn't mean they don't exist. It just means we have to practice tuning into them and making them louder. Think about what it's been like for your hunger and fullness signals all of these years.
If you have been frequently overeating and undereating, you have been communicating to your body. Hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of times that you don't care what it's saying think about, if every time a person asked if you wanted to hang out with 'em, if you were like, Hmm, I don't think so. Hmm. I don't think so. Hmm. I don't care what you wanna do. I don't wanna do that anyways. You would be like, uh, not friends with them anymore. But that's what we're doing with our hunger and fullness signals is we're basically telling ourselves over and over that our signals don't matter and that they're not important and that we don't care what they have to say.
So once we start telling our body, Hey, I care what you have to say. I'm here to listen. I'm so sorry for not listening to you all of these years. That's how we turn the volume up on it.
Something that I've been thinking about recently is how cool it is that we exist on earth at this point in time with so many cool animal species that have all evolved to coexist together and we ourselves are animals too. Sometimes we act like we are a bigger and better being. That is not part of the animal kingdom, but we are.
And what that means is that because we are just animals. All our brain is always trying to do is survive, but one thing we need for survival is nutrients. And another thing we need for survival is to be mindful of our resources. If we are constantly over consuming and overeating and not mindful of how much we eat and we're not getting enough vitamins and nutrients, we we'll die.
You are here today because your ancestors have had the genes and the survival skills and have chosen the right foods to not die for hundreds of thousands of years. The human species has been around for, I think, tens of thousands of years, something like that, at least tens of thousands of years. And because of that, it's quite the miracle that you are here today.
Your ancestors did not get you here today because they were super bad at listening to their hunger and fullness and getting in nutrition. No, they had really refined skills that allowed them to get here today, and you have that same thing too.
Your taste buds can detect how much of a certain micro and macronutrient is in certain foods. Same thing with our smell. Our smell is actually a much more evolved scent than we think. We often think of dogs as a animal that has really intense scent and smell ability, but really we do too. We actually smell our food more when it's in our mouth and when we chew it, it releases compounds that our nose detects too. That helps us determine what type of food we're eating, and if we eat too much of a food, that is also toxic. Technically, everything we eat is toxic to our body because there's always an amount that's poisonous to us. If we have too much protein without enough fat, we will die of protein poisoning. You can also overdose on vitamins. Anytime we have too much of a certain vitamin, it can cause toxic effects.
And what's so interesting is that. Despite all of these complexities of how many nutrients we need and how many different plants and animals exist that we can eat on the earth, our ancestors managed to do all of this without the modern day research on nutrition.
And in fact, it wasn't until 1911 that we knew vitamins existed. Okay, that is barely a hundred years ago. Did we even understand that certain vitamins were needed in our body? So your body has this wisdom inside of you, whether you wanna believe it or not.
We can survive without counting calories. We can survive without knowing, are we getting the right nutrition? If we tune into our taste buds, if we tune into does our body actually want this?
It might take some sorting through, and that's what I help you do in the Confident Eater program is sort through all of the bullshit that diet culture has taught us so we can tune into the natural wisdom that already exists, but I promise you it's in there.
If you look at monkeys, they are able to go around to all the different fruits and decide which ones are poisonous, which ones are not. Which ones do I need right now? Which ones are available? Which ones have we had too much of and feed themself in a way that works.
Now I know what you might be thinking. Well, Amber, like there weren't Oreos for the past tens of thousands of years, so we didn't have to navigate eating Oreos and chocolate chip cookies and sea salt chips. Okay. But the thing is, even though we didn't have those foods, they are still edible to some degree. I don't wanna get into the debate on whether these foods are toxic to us or not, because again, all things are toxic to us in some amounts, but our body can still figure out what's in these foods. And what I've learned is that if you get really in tune with your taste buds, and I mean really in tune. Like you have all distractions tuned off and all you do is close your eyes and focus on the taste. What you might realize is a lot of these ultra processed foods don't actually taste that good.
Your body doesn't actually want them, and even if they do taste good, you'll tune into your body and your body will say, yuck. I don't like how this feels and my body, it's giving you that information to tell you, this is not beneficial for my survival because it doesn't have the nutrients that I need.
When I bite into an Oreo right now, which I do still enjoy from time to time, but like for the most part, Oreos are dry and crumbly and they kind of taste a little bit like nothing, just kind of bland. If you taste a Cheez-It, to me, it kind of tastes like cardboard on that first bite. If you taste a Hershey's, it tastes like the plastic that it was wrapped in, and I didn't notice all these things when I was binge eating because I was so out of tune with my body.
But practice today. Ask yourself, what does this actually taste like? And then ask yourself, what is my body actually telling me? If my mind is telling me to eat more, that is not my body, that is my mind.
While you're going, throughout relearning your hunger and fullness, I want you to normalize that this is a learning process. It's not going to happen overnight, and that's okay.
At first, you might eat past fullness. You might misread your hunger signals. And learning to trust your body again, is kind of like learning a new language. It takes practice, or maybe you learned a language when you were a kid or you learned piano as a kid. That might be a better example. But then you totally forgot about it as an adult, it's still in there. It just might take some learning. You might make some mistakes at first, so be patient with yourself. But again, the more you practice, the more you tune in, the more you're conscious of what your body is saying.
And every time you listen to it, you are rebuilding that muscle. All right, have after it. Good luck. to you next week.