Answering this simple question is the key to healthy weight loss that lasts. No dieting required.
Food wasn’t ever supposed to be this tricky. Just ask any crying newborn baby. Yeah, she sounds hungry. She should eat.
But, for lots of reasons – from an overload of brain-hijacking sugar, salt and fat in our food supply to our parents’ well-meaning tendency to “reward” us with cookies when we were well behaved – we’ve grown up to want food, not just when we’re hungry, but when we’re bored, stressed, happy, tired, procrastinating or, hey, just because we see an ice cream cone and it looks pretty darn good.
“Most people actually eat less food for hunger than for these other reasons,” says Dr. Michelle May, founder of Am I Hungry? mindful eating programs and author of “Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat.” And while it’s a completely normal part of being human to eat purely for pleasure every now and then, letting your appetite rather than your hunger drive the majority of your food intake is a primary cause of weight gain and obesity, she says.
The Beauty of Following Your Hunger Cues
“Learning to identify hunger cues and eat in response to those signals, and not others, is an effective way to lose weight without counting calories,” says registered dietitian Georgie Fear, author of “Lean Habits for Lifelong Weight Loss.” “Let your body do the math. It is more accurate than any phone app or published nutrition facts.” Additionally, your appetite will rise and fall with activity levels, so you don’t have to worry about how much to adjust your intake upwards when you take up tennis, or how much to dial back if you break a leg and have to give up your hiking hobby temporarily. Your appetite will adjust as your needs change, day-to-day and week-to-week.
For instance, in one Public Health Nutrition study of more than 1,600 middle-aged women, those who ate in response to hunger were more likely to be at a healthy weight compared to those who didn’t eat in response to their hunger cues. Meanwhile, a 2014 review of 26 studies linked “intuitive eating” – that is, eating due to physiological hunger – with not just a lower body mass index, or BMI, (a marker of body composition), but also to lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, healthier food choices and improved overall health. “When we eat for hunger, rather than for all of these other reasons, food can serve its true purpose to nourish and fuel our bodies,” May says.
Unfortunately, knowing exactly when you’re hungry is harder than it sounds. “The advice to eat when you’re hungry is deceptively simple,” May says. That’s because we’re all so disconnected from our hunger cues, accustomed to eating for reasons apart from hunger, that it can be hard to tell what true, physiological hunger actually feels like.
And men and women with a history of dieting – especially with extremely restrictive or fad diets – can often have even more trouble than most when it comes to understanding their hunger cues, she says. After all, deprivation diets, cleanses and elimination diets often tightly regulate when and what you’re supposed to eat. You eat when the diet says, not when you’re hungry. Because, let’s face it, on these diets, you are hungry all the time.
So Are You Really Hungry? Follow These Tips to Find Out
When it comes to finding out if you really, truly need to eat, the first step is to pause and ask yourself, “Am I hungry?”
It sounds simple and maybe even a bit silly, but the simple question is really a door-opener, May says. To reach a simple “yes” or “no” conclusion, she recommends doing what she calls a body-mind-heart scan, noticing what’s going on in your body, both physically and emotionally. Is your stomach growling? How are you energy levels? What about your mood? What were you doing when the idea of eating popped into your head?
Typical symptoms of true hunger and a need to eat include hunger pangs, stomach growling and dips in blood sugar, marked by low energy, shakiness, headaches and problems focusing, according to Fear. “But if you would turn down an apple, yet are still ‘hungry’ enough to eat a candy bar, you might not be actually feeling physiological hunger,” she says. By considering everything that’s going on in your world at that point, you can start to notice all of the factors that are influencing your trips to the kitchen, vending machine or snack drawer.
May equates this scan to checking your fuel gauge when you pass a gas station on the highway. “You don’t just pull in,” she says. You look to see how much fuel you currently have in the tank, how many miles are between you and the next gas station and maybe even consider if you need a bathroom break before deciding whether to pull over.
Which brings up a good point: Even if you decide you’re not hungry (think: fuel gauge on E), one option is to go ahead and eat anyway, May says. After all, maybe your next opportunity to eat won’t present itself for another few hours, so you need to get in lunch while you can. Or, you just want to have a slice of birthday cake because, hey, it’s your birthday! (Eating for reasons like these on occasion is no big deal, and a normal part of balanced eating. It’s when you give into non-hunger reasons all of the time that you can get into trouble.)
However, other options including redirecting your attention, which comes in handy when it’s nothing more than an environmental cue – such as walking by a popcorn shop, going to a party with a buffet table full of appetizers or just watching a really tempting restaurant commercial – that you decide is making you want to eat, she says. By occupying yourself temporarily with activities like talking with a friend, watching a funny video clip or just checking your email, you can take your mind off food long enough to make your faux hunger fade. The goal is that, once you finish up your distraction, your brain doesn’t hop back to dwelling on that cheesy popcorn.
Meanwhile, if you decide that your reasons for wanting to eat are emotion-based, rooted in stress, guilt, exhaustion, anxiety or loneliness, tending to those emotions head-on cannot only prevent overeating – it can foster better emotional and mental health.
“Many times, when we think we have a problem with food, our problems are really in how we are meeting our emotional needs,” May says. “By giving air to our feelings and actually addressing them, we can meet our emotional needs far better than we ever could with food.” (Don’t worry if you realize you’re doing this; all of us are emotional eaters to a certain extent.)
So, for instance, when you realize you want to eat because you’re bored, figuring out why you’re bored and then getting some social plans on the calendar, starting a project at home or looking for a job that you find more engaging, actually helps to solve the problem, rather than just bandaging it up with fat and sugar. As can learning to delegate or just say “no” to projects that you don’t have the time to take on, rather than stuffing your schedule – and your face – out of stress.
Like May says, that simple question, “Am I hungry?” is both deceptively simple (this really takes some work!) and a door-opener. Take it, though, and the changes to your health, mind and body will all be well worth it.
Written by Health.USnews.com