Welcome back! I’m so glad you made it for the last week in this series on hunger – I’ve got some goodness for you today!

 

For the past three weeks, we’ve been working together on dialing into the sensation of hunger, learning the difference between physical and emotional hunger, and figuring out when we’re hungry enough to eat. Eating for the signal of hunger ONLY can cause weight loss without changing anything else – it’s just amazing! But over the course of these few weeks, you might have run into some challenges with eating only for hunger, and I want to help!

If you’ve been struggling to eat only for hunger, you’re not the only one. When we learn to eat for lots of other reasons than hunger, learning to eat differently takes some work! Let’s go over some common challenges and solutions to finding hunger…

 

 

Overhunger

One thing I hear from clients is that they struggle to find hunger because they’re always hungry. Once you’ve sorted out whether you’re feeling hunger in your stomach vs hunger in your head, realizing that your stomach is asking for food all the time can be hard, because you know you can’t eat constantly and lose weight!

This is called overhunger, and it comes primarily from a hijack in your hormones that comes from eating processed foods. When you eat lots of food made with sugar and flour, your hunger and satiation hormones get off balance, your insulin response gets jacked up, and to avoid blood sugar highs and lows your body calls for food frequently. The fix is to eliminate the flour and sugar and replace it with fats. Instead of crackers and chips and bread, if you have more nutrient-dense foods like roasted veggies and salads and whole potatoes, your body won’t call for food an hour after you ate, because you haven’t burned through those foods as quickly as the processed ones.

Processed foods get digested very quickly so you need more food after you eat them. When you make your meals, be sure to add healthy fats like avocado or a drizzle of high-quality olive oil to help slow digestion and keep you full for longer. If you eat them, add an egg to your veggies. Saute your veggies in butter. Eat the chicken with the skin on. If you’re eating more fat and less sugar and flour, this will help you transition out of being dependent on fast energy processed food like sugar and flour. Just remember: Eat only when you’re hungry!

 

Stress

Yep, this is a common reason for eating when we’re not physically hungry. We have a lot of stress in our daily lives! We’ve learned that when chaos ensues, the way out is to open a bag of chips or snack on a few cookies. And, it works! For the moment, we get a reprieve from the pain of the stress and we can ignore it while we eat. The problem is that when we’re done, we still have the stress to return to and now we have the pain of the scale not going down the way we want. That’s pain on top of stress, and it’s not worth it in the long run. So we get to practice learning to support ourselves through the stress without eating. This helps in the moment, and we also reap the reward of the long-term gain of getting to our weight goal!

The trick is to find alternatives to food to solve our stress. Deep breathing is one option that doesn’t take much time. A quick stretch break is another – moving the body can help release stress energy, and you can do it in front of your desk. A bubble bath at night instead of a glass of wine(or three!) is another option. What do you want to choose to manage your stress instead of food?

 

Lack of Sleep

This is a big one. We live in a country that “runs on Dunkin”, that believes that sleep is for the weak and I can sleep when I’m dead. First of all, if you don’t get enough sleep, you will shorten your lifespan (but that’s a topic for another time). But lack of sleep actually shifts your hormones and changes your hunger signals. Ever stay up way too late or work all night only to find that the next day you’re hungry all day AND all you want is snacks and sugar? Yep, you really need sleep!

Most adults need 6 1/2 – 8 hours of sleep a night. Aim for 7 if you’re not already getting that. Many of us are getting far less and wake up daily to an alarm we’d like to smash. If you want to be able to trust your body’s hunger signals for fuel, you also need to give it the sleep it needs. They work together!

 

 

Food as Reward

This is culture. We learn very early that a cookie comes when we do something good, that ice cream follows a basketball win, that a party has to have champagne or cake. We think that if we have a good day, made it through a hard day, or accomplished something notable that the way to celebrate is with food. Now, if you’re hungry, go ahead and eat. But to top off your meal with a sleeve of Oreos because it was a crappy day isn’t really a reward.

It’s a punishment.

You have to deal with the consequences of the pity-party Oreos later. That’s just painful. But you ate the cookies because you thought you deserved them after the hectic day you had. But really, did you deserve to eat a bunch of cookies (or drink the wine)? Is that what you deserved – to have a hard day and then have to deal with the weight gain that follows the cookies?

What do you really deserve? You deserve your own compassion for the tough day. You deserve your own kindness and love for doing what needed to be done. You deserve acknowledgment for what you got done, not a beat-down for what you couldn’t get to that day. How can you really support yourself – without food?

 

You can do this! Keep focusing on eating for hunger and the scale will keep going down. Next month, I’ve got a whole new series for you on fullness, the yang to the yin of hunger. We’re putting it all together!

If you want my personal coaching help to get to your goal and if you love what you’re learning but need a little more support to get there, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com and let’s set up your free consultation. Once the course launches, I’m not going to be able to take any more private clients for a while, so get in while you can!

Watch for my upcoming webinar, Weight Loss Without Willpower for more help getting to your goal!

 

 

Here’s your video help for the week!