Hunger

Geneen Roth writes in her book "Breaking Free from Emotional Eating" that not one of the twenty five or so diets she has been on has mentioned anything about eating when you are hungry.

One of the selling points for Slimming World for me was that I never had to be hungry: there was always free food I could eat. In fact, for many years, I got hungry very rarely and when I did, I considered it a mistake, the result of an oversight. I once met a woman who ran a slimming club who told me that hunger was our friend. I'm not sure what she meant by that but I don't think she meant it was signal to eat. But that's basically what it is, isn't it? It's not a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a natural thing, a sign from our bodies that we need to eat.

So why did I resist getting hungry? Maybe it was simply that I couldn't resist eating for as long as it took for my stomach to empty. I just enjoyed eating so much that I did it - lots.

Our society tells us when to eat. We get up and we must eat breakfast, after all "it's the most important meal of the day". We have to eat at our lunch break because we can't eat outside of that time. We eat dinner at a more flexible time but usually a whole family will eat together, regardless of whether they are all hungry or not. This shared meal time is one of the cornerstones of our civilisation and many others.

So we are brought up to eat not when we are hungry, but when we are told to eat. That coupled with the obsession with clearing our plate (because of the starving children in Africa, as if our over-eating helps them at all) adds up to a generation of people eating based on several factors of which hunger is not one. Our natural body signals telling us to start or stop eating are overriden and we learn to ignore them. Is this part of the reason for the epidemic of obesity that is expected or possibly already here?

So, what now? I have had a hard time leaving the feelings about breakfast behind. "It starts the metabolism" they say, but surely getting up and moving around starts my metabolism and failing to add food to my stomach can't stop that process. Now I eat when I get hungry. Sometimes that is as soon as I get up so I eat before the children come down. More often it is later and I eat after I have dropped them off at school and nursery or playgroup. I don't eat lunch as such, I eat again when I am hungry. If I have eaten early, it is often mid morning but it can be much later, especially if I am busy and don't tune in to the early signs of hunger.

Not eating tea with the children was hard. I felt strange sitting down but not eating. After a while I realised that it meant I could feed them in the kitchen and not have to keep running back and forward to get things, but it also meant that when I did eat, I could focus on it rather than chewing fast in between clearing up mess and sorting out arguments.

I always disciplined myself not to eat in the evenings when I was on a diet. This meant that I sometimes went to bed hungry, which isn't very comfortable. Now I eat in the evening if I am hungry in the evening, but if I am not hungry, I don't eat. It sounds so simple and logical but it is anything but simple at first. The grazing habit is very hard to break but once I got used to going to bed satisfied rather than hungry or stuffed, I didn't want to give that up again.

I am still working on this. If I have made a lovely meal, I sometimes still eat even if I am not hungry. And when I have had a drink, I usually snack without hunger, but not to the same extent as I used to. I am improving all the time and finding out new things about myself almost daily. For example, I found out today that my post-swimming hunger is very superficial and can be as easily satisfied with a drink as with food.

I will close with another quote from Geneen Roth: Being hungry is like being in love: if you don't know, you're probably not.