Intuitive Eating Principle #2: Honor Your Hunger

This week on the podcast we’re talking about the second principle of intuitive eating: Honor your hunger.

There’s this message that we can’t trust our hunger, that we should push it down and delay it as long as possible to not overeat.

But here’s the thing… this is the number one reason WHY I see women overeating.

When you aren’t honoring your hunger, when you wait until you’re at late hunger (which we’ll talk about what this is in a sec), you’ll find yourself going into your meal RAVENOUS and have a much harder time noticing when you’re full.

So, one of the best things you can do to NOT overeat is to regularly honor your hunger.

Let’s talk about EARLY HUNGER vs. LATE HUNGER…

Ideally, you want to eat when you first notice early hunger cues. Some typical early hunger cues are a gentle grumbling in your stomach, slight empty feeling in your stomach, and even just starting to think about food more or getting distracted from what you’re doing.

If you don’t eat with those early hunger cues, you’ll find yourself experiencing LATE hunger cues. These are strong grumbling in your stomach, headache, lightheadedness, even losing the sensation of hunger, and what we all know as “hangriness” or mood changes.

When you’re in late hunger, you’re going to have a harder time noticing fullness cues, so you likely will just have to be more mindful when you’re eating. But ideally, we want to eat with those first and early cues of hunger.

And as I said earlier, if you struggle with overeating, one of the could be you aren’t honoring your hunger with those early cues.

With dieting, you may find that you don’t notice your hunger until it reaches that late hunger phase. This is really common because dieting conditions you to NOT listen to hunger and to use the clock as the guide for eating. Hunger cues are kinda like a muscle… if you haven’t used them or payed attention for a while, they may be a little muted. But don’t worry, as you keep practicing and getting curious, your early hunger cues will become more obvious.

For more on honoring your hunger, be sure to listen to this week’s episode of the Redefining Health Podcast.

Find and listen to this episode of the Redefining Health Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or Google.

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