Motivated With Meg

The Gas Gauge of Eating: Tuning into Hunger and Fullness

The holidays are here! And with them come big meals, endless snacks, and food-focused gatherings. It’s easy to lose touch with your body’s hunger and fullness signals when surrounded by tempting dishes, traditions like cleaning your plate, or even guilt around indulging. But what if you could enjoy the holidays without the stress of overeating or restrictive food rules? Welcome back to Motivated with Meg! In this episode, we’re continuing the Eating Experiment by exploring how to reconnect with your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues (even during the holiday chaos). You’ll learn simple ways to notice when you’re hungry or satisfied, why it matters, and how to approach these signals without judgment. Let’s make this holiday season one where food brings joy, not guilt. If you’re enjoying this series, please subscribe and give us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts! 🙂 Topics Covered Why so many of us feel disconnected from our hunger and fullness signals How diet culture and medication can disrupt these natural cues My personal story of skipping meals and how it backfired The science behind hunger and fullness The hunger and fullness scale (and how to use it) Your weekly experiment Resources: Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch – Learn more about the 10 principles of intuitive eating. Harvard School of Public Health on Mindful Eating – Insights into using your body’s cues for healthier eating habits.

Duration:: 11m
Broadcast on:: 02 Dec 2024
Audio Format:: other

But what if you could enjoy the holidays without the stress of overeating or restrictive food rules?

Welcome back to Motivated with Meg! In this episode, we’re continuing the Eating Experiment by exploring how to reconnect with your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues (even during the holiday chaos).

You’ll learn simple ways to notice when you’re hungry or satisfied, why it matters, and how to approach these signals without judgment.

Let’s make this holiday season one where food brings joy, not guilt.

If you’re enjoying this series, please subscribe and give us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts! 🙂

Topics Covered

Why so many of us feel disconnected from our hunger and fullness signals
How diet culture and medication can disrupt these natural cues
My personal story of skipping meals and how it backfired
The science behind hunger and fullness
The hunger and fullness scale (and how to use it)
Your weekly experiment

Resources:

Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch – Learn more about the 10 principles of intuitive eating.
Harvard School of Public Health on Mindful Eating – Insights into using your body’s cues for healthier eating habits.

(upbeat piano music) Hey, hey, welcome back to Motivated with Meg. We are in season one, The Eating Experiment, where we toss out the food rules and explore how food and freedom connect. I hope you found last week's experiment with Mindful Bites' phone an exciting, and I'd love to hear all about it. So if you tried it, comment below or DM me at Motivated with Meg and let me know how it went. So this week, today, we are continuing this journey with The Eating Experiment by exploring hunger and fullness signals, which are two key principles of intuitive eating. And just to take a moment and talk about intuitive eating, I just wanna give you an idea of what this is. For those who know what it is, or they think they know what it is, try to listen with an open mind, 'cause you might think intuitive eating is really the hunger fullness diet, and that's not what intuitive eating is. Intuitive eating is actually an evidence-based mind-body health approach comprised of 10 principles that were created by two dietitians, Evelyn Tribel and Elise Resch. And so it's a weight-neutral model with over 90 studies to date, and essentially it is a personal process of honoring health by listening and responding to the direct messages that your body is giving you in order to help you meet your physical and psychological needs. So if you've ever felt out of touch with your hunger and fullness cues, your bodily signals, you're not alone. I think that eating issues, they feel really lonely, 'cause we don't usually talk about them. As whether it's due to diet culture, overeating tendencies or even chemical reactions or interactions because of the medications you take, many of us are trained to ignore our natural hunger and fullness cues, and some of us don't even notice them anymore. But today, we are going to explore how to reconnect with those signals and why this matters. So let's start with some quick science behind hunger and fullness cues. Our bodies, and you haven't noticed, are incredible machines, and they are designed to regulate energy balance. We've talked about habits a little bit and how our body and our brain are designed to create habits, right, neural pathways, and the body's also designed to regulate your energy. You don't want to overuse it. So these signals tell us when to consume nutrients for energy and when to stop eating. So like I talked about in Mindful Bites, we did talk a little bit about the hormone ghrelin, which signals that you're hungry, and then the hormone leptin for fullness. And these both help you maintain your body's energy needs. So one way you can think about this that is helpful is to think of hunger and fullness, like the fuel gauge on your car dashboard. These indicator lights, the E light, they're here to tell you something. It's telling you to go take an action, to go to the gas station, to fill up your gas tank. You're on E. And if you ignore this light that comes on with your gas tank, you know, not great things happen. And if you overfill your tank, there are some consequences of that too. So let's start with hunger. Hunger is your body's signal telling you it's time to eat. Just like you wouldn't ignore the gas light on your car, we don't want to ignore your body's hunger signal. Otherwise we wind up hangry, stranded on the side of the road, wishing we'd stop for gas earlier. And I used to do this all of the time. Oh my gosh, it was insane. Just straight out ignored my hunger, especially if I had over eaten recently, or I didn't like the number on the scale, because I had this belief that if I skipped a meal or two that I would somehow make up for what I ate earlier, and the number on the scale would go down magically. But this often backfired, skipping meals, because it usually led to me overeating somewhere else in the day, or snacking mindlessly, because I was hungry. My body wanted its fuel and I wasn't giving it to it. And so I rarely would then choose a nutrient-dense meal. I would just go for what I was craving, which was like chocolate or chips. 'Cause salty sweet, who doesn't love those two things? I know I do, but it would backfire. I would end up overeating 'cause I ignored hunger earlier in the day. And I'd often eat really fast because I was really hungry. And so when I'm really hungry, I don't practice mindful bites, I eat quickly. And then I often don't notice fullness, 'cause I ate so fast, and I didn't give my brain and my stomach time to communicate, like we talked about in mindful bites, then I go and I skip fullness, and I just jump straight into stuff, and I didn't even notice fullness. So this is where slowing down and taking mindful bites is going to be really helpful, in beginning to notice your hunger and fullness signals. Fullness signals are your body's natural way of letting you know it's time to stop eating. But in a culture that is often encouraged to clean their plate or there's a lot of mindless snacking, these signals can be easily overlooked. One way to begin noticing your fullness is to pause mid-meal and begin to ask yourself how the food tastes and how your body feels. This is, again, part of mindful bites is slowing down and putting the fork down, and then you can ask this question. And you might begin to notice a shift from hunger toward fullness toward satisfaction, where this can show up with, you know, I mentioned food tastes because initial intensity of flavor, when you start to eat is usually really intense, but that starts to lessen as you get more and more full, as your stomach feels comfortable, but not over full, and that's the feeling we're looking for here. As I said, I used to ignore both hunger and fullness cues all the time, and this would often lead to overeating and feeling bloated and crappy. Luckily, I've since learned to stop ignoring my body and stopped using the scale to decide if I was going to eat, and I started to respect my hunger and fullness without judgment, and that's what I hope for you this week is to start to notice this and practice this for yourself. So what can hunger feel like? Well, hunger can feel different person to person, that is for sure. For some, hunger feels like a growling stomach. I definitely get a growling stomach, and I get hangry. For others, it might be a feeling of lightheadedness, irritability, having trouble focusing, and you might even just start thinking about food or craving certain foods, and these can all be cues that your body needs fuel, that you're hungry. However, hunger cues can be disrupted by several factors. To name two, they can be disrupted from years of dieting, and they can also be disrupted from medications you take. So there's medications that definitely affect your appetite, and then years of dieting and ignoring your hunger or fullness cues can make it so that you're just not as good at noticing them. That's where we want to eat slower and begin to bring awareness to this area. Research does show that eating based on internal cues like hunger and fullness, rather than external cues like calorie counting can improve not just your physical health but your mental wellbeing as well. Studies have demonstrated that intuitive eating practices, mindful eating practices like this, where people learn to listen to hunger and fullness signals can help improve body satisfaction, reduce stress around food, and then it also leads to better digestion, 'cause as we talked about in mindful bites, digestion starts in the mouth with chewing and the enzymes in our saliva. So what can you do to tune back in and start to trust these natural signals again? Well, I'm assuming you guessed it, but it's to experiment. But this week's experiment has two parts to it. Part one is to bring awareness to what hunger and fullness feel like to you. That's it, that is part one. So you're just trying to start to really notice what does hunger feel like to me? What does fullness feel like to me? Tune into those sensations. Part two is to experiment with actually listening to them and honoring them. Those are two different things. The listening part is a lot harder than noticing. Once you notice it, now you have a choice to listen to it. And what I mean by that is that if you notice fullness and there's still food on your plate that's yummy and delicious and you wanna finish it, you have a choice to honor that fullness, pack that food up, put it in the fridge and have it later when you're hungry again, or to ignore that fullness and just keep eating, clean off your plate because, you know, why not finish what's in front of me? Or, you know, it's not good, reheated or whatever reason you come up with. And again, there's no judgment here with what you choose. It's just noticing hunger and fullness and experimenting with honoring them. And when you don't, or when you choose not to honor them, look at why, was it like, I'm really busy at work and it felt like, you know, more important to be productive and get this product done than to go take a break and eat 'cause it was hungry, or was it like, hey, I was eating and I was just like consumed by my phone, doom scrolling and I didn't even notice fullness. What's going on when we don't honor them? That's what we wanna look at here too. Ottering on fullness involves listening for that feeling of satisfaction and stopping when you feel content rather than waiting till you're stuffed. The hunger and fullness scale can be a really helpful resource. It's a scale that rates your hunger and fullness on a scale from one to 10 where one is ravenous and 10 is uncomfortably full. Ideally, you'd aim to stop around six or seven where you're pleasantly satisfied, but still energized, you know, you're not like stuffed or bogged down and have no energy now from eating like a Thanksgiving dinner. So again, this is never about perfection. It's about developing trust with your body and knowing that you can eat again when you're hungry without guilt or restriction. By regularly checking in with your body's signals, you'll start to feel more in tune with what it needs to feel amazing. Keep in mind that fullness isn't just about physical sensation. Just like with hunger, sometimes we eat past fullness because we feel deprived or because certain foods are forbidden. So diet culture and mentality can play a huge role in if we choose to listen to hunger or fullness signals. As diet culture promotes restrictive eating patterns that label certain foods as good or bad or off limits, this can lead to feelings of deprivation and eventually overeating and wanting to ignore these signals. And that's one reason that I started the entire eating experiment season off with mindful bites is because I know that feeling of deprivation. Like, I didn't get to enjoy what I just ate, so let me go eat more of it and I'll start fresh on Monday. And this cycle of not honoring our body, it creates and reinforces the idea that we're constantly at war with our bodies and with cravings and with hunger rather than learning to just listen to the natural cues that our body is giving us. So this week, slow down, chew more, savor your food and see if you can notice those hunger and fullness signals. Notice your fuel gauge is the E-light on. Are you ignoring it to finish something? Did you miss it? That's not a big deal, don't make a big deal out of it if you weren't able to notice it, just reflect. Be kind to yourself and try again. The key is to continue practicing, to build trust with your body takes time, especially if you've been disconnected from your hunger and fullness signals for a while. So with each meal, just give yourself the opportunity to listen and honor those cues. If you're unsure, remember that it's just an experiment, there's no failure here, just try to listen and adjust as you go. Remember, it's not about perfection. You'll overeat and you'll under eat sometimes, just like you're gonna forget to practice mindful bites. Instead of judging yourself, use it as an opportunity to reflect. What was happening in that moment? As we wrap up today, I want to remind you that reconnecting with your body, it is one of the most empowering things you can do for your health and wellbeing. Because this is a lifelong journey. Think about it, if you have a plan to at home, that you just water it once, the first day you get it, and then you just kind of hope it lives. You know, that's not a great thing. You need to go water it daily, right? And that works the same for us humans. We need to be water daily, taking care of it daily. And when we were kids, our parents did that for us, but now we are adults and we have to do it for ourselves. And we make a lot of excuses to not do that. We get really busy. One thing I'd love for you to take away from this episode is to remember that your body has wisdom. And sometimes we just need to slow down and trust it. So tune in, get curious, and most importantly, be kind to yourself as you experiment with honoring your body's hunger and fullness signals this week. Please comment below or DM me if you have any questions. That's it for today's episode of Motivated with Meg. Thank you once again for listening. Until next time, be kind and be yourself. Everyone else is already taken. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)