What Your Hunger Cues Really Mean
What are hunger cues?
Your body has a natural system to gauge its energy needs, which signals you to eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full. This system is regulated by hormones including ghrelin, the hunger hormone, and leptin, the fullness or satiety hormone. These hormones send the cues that allow your body to regulate how much food is eaten, in an attempt to maintain your body’s weight and energy balance.
Unfortunately, there are different ways that this system can be disrupted or overridden. When you are stressed, emotionally eating, or distracted, it is easy to become disconnected from the subtle cues of hunger and fullness, allowing overeating to occur.
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What hunger cues look like
Knowing when you’re actually hungry and when your mind is just playing tricks on you can be a huge challenge because the difference between “that smells really good” and “I need food for energy” may be a fine line.
Learning how to tell if you’re really hungry or falling for a common eating trigger is an important skill for taking care of your body, and to help you better understand your body’s true hunger cues. The following are typically hunger cues that you will experience when you are physically hungry:
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Feeling tired
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Lightheaded
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Gurgling, grumbling or growling
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Dizziness and/or faintness
However, for some people a hunger cue is not what triggers them to start eating. Moreover, because every person’s body is different it is even more essential to be sure you are listening to your body.
Varying nutritional needs
Two people can eat the same exact meal, leaving one person still hungry and the other completely full. Your nutritional needs can also vary day to day, depending on whether you did an at home workout that morning or sat on your couch binge-watching television all day. The key is to listen to, and try to understand, your body’s communication and hunger signals.
One way to do this is with a food diary. By keeping a food diary, you’ll be forced to recognize your eating patterns, both good and bad. For instance, you may see that you always reach for a handful of candy for an afternoon pick me up or that you order pizza for every movie night.
If you’re actually hungry, you’ll experience true hunger cues, such as stomach growling, low energy, shakiness, headaches and problems focusing. It’s just as important to recognize when you listen to those signals too, so you know what they feel like for the future.
To create your food diary, make the following columns in a notebook or on your phone’s note app:
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What you eat
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What time you eat
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The mood you were in and what you were doing when eating
Then make a list of what triggers tend to cue you to eat. Common eating triggers include:
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Seeing something you want to eat on a commercial, or opening up your refrigerator
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Feeling stressed, such as after a long day of work or a fight with a friend
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Being offered food from a kind neighbor who baked you cookies
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Relying on habits like brewing your favorite coffee each morning
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Feeling bored or tired
Don’t forget to make note of when your eating seemed to come from true hunger cues.
How to listen to your hunger cues
The toughest part about hunger cues and getting in tune to them is when you have to say no to overeating. Once you have a better understanding of your eating habits, start using this knowledge to prepare for situations that involve food and make it a priority to listen to your body.
Planning ahead
Turning down tempting food is much easier if you never actually have to say no. This doesn’t mean frantically running away the moment someone offers you a slice of cake. It means planning ahead for eating triggers that you find particularly challenging to resist.
For instance, do you always snack on food while you're watching your favorite movie at home? Do you go for a healthy snack, like an apple or nuts to munch on, or do you find yourself making frequent refrigerator visits? Water with lemon is a great way to suppress your appetite to help encourage you to wait for full meals.
If you can’t completely avoid it, try to prepare with a healthier option. If you find yourself stress eating after work each day, have a healthy go to snack ready, such as veggies and dip or a handful of nuts.
Checking in with your body
Life is unpredictable, which makes planning for all of your snacks and meals nearly impossible. You’ll inevitably experience moments when you’re faced with a food option you hadn’t thought of and it’ll be up to you to determine if you’re really hungry.
Some ways to check in with your body about your hunger levels include:
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Pausing and asking yourself if you’re hungry, and doing your best to be honest
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Doing a head to toe body scan to evaluate your physical state and mood
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Eating more slowly and allowing your body time to let you know when it’s full
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Distracting yourself with something else other than food
Hunger signals and eating habits
Learning to listen to your body and read the signs it’s sending you is just as important as what you eat. The following are a few important reasons to be in tune with your hunger levels.
Your hunger cues tells your body what you need
Your hunger signals are your body’s way of telling you what it needs to feel and function at its best. This may be that it needs more energy or that the portion of food you ate was too much.
With mindful eating, we’re really focused on developing a strong mind to body connection. This allows you to understand what works uniquely for your own body and accept that what works for one person may not work for another. This is why so many diets, plans, and trends don’t work because they are one size fits all solutions and ask us to follow specific guidelines or rules without tuning into our own bodies to see if it’s working for us.
While there are many signals our bodies may send us, your hunger cues are ones that are present in your daily life and are a great starting place for building a stronger mind-body connection and understanding your unique needs.
They guide your portion sizes
As you become more familiar with your body’s own unique hunger cues, you’ll learn how to make choices that work best for you. This is especially true around what portion sizes you need based on your current hunger levels. The portion sizes you need change day to day and meal by meal based on what your body needs and what you have or have not eaten.
They help you to navigate emotional eating
Many times, things outside of our hunger can influence our decision to eat and our food choices. One of the most common things we hear and support our community with is emotional eating, or a more specific form of emotional eating which is stress eating.
Emotional eating is when your emotions, anything from boredom to stress or grief, are guiding what, when, and how much you eat rather than your physical hunger signals. When you are in tune with your hunger signals, you’re better able to identify when you’re truly hungry or when your emotions are causing you to reach for food for comfort.
Hunger cues prevent you from eating when you’re bored
Along similar lines to emotional eating is eating when you’re bored. When we’re bored, it’s common to mindlessly reach for snacks or sweets. By practicing using your hunger cues, you can identify when you’re doing this and instead choose another activity to fill your time. You can also accomplish this by using a food journal to help track when you are specifically doing it.
They help you notice your triggers
Another reason we tend to eat aside from being physically hungry is that we’re exposed to a certain environmental or situational trigger. An example of an environmental trigger may be seeing cookies or bags of chips at the office in the break room. When you pass by, they’re sitting there for you to grab and you might subconsciously eat them even when you don’t truly want them, simply because they were there.
A situational trigger may be something like going out to eat. When we go out to eat, we choose an item off of the menu that sounds delicious, and then the server brings out the plate to us. The portion on the plate is the same for everyone who orders that entree. So as you’re eating at a restaurant, you may be more inclined to finish your plate, even if you’re only hungry enough for half of what was served.
Checking in with your hunger levels before you eat can help you identify if you’re actually hungry or if the environment or situation you’re in is influencing your decision of what to eat or how much to eat.
Lifestyles that would benefit from getting in tune to their hunger cues
While anyone can benefit from getting in touch with their hunger cues, there are certain lifestyles that would greatly benefit from it. Once you recognize that you fall within one of these lifestyles, you can be one step closer to a healthy lifestyle. However if you don’t relate with one of these lifestyles, you might find that you could still benefit from learning and recognizing your hunger cues.
Food anxiety
Those who have had experiences with food anxiety would likely benefit from getting in touch with their hunger cues. Someone who suffers from food anxiety typically fears food and often avoids eating most foods because they cause anxiety. They might develop a fear and avoidance of most foods all together. This type of lifestyle would greatly benefit from learning and recognizing your hunger cues because it will give them the opportunity to develop a positive relationship with food.
Mindless eaters
Those who experience episodes of mindless eating would likely benefit from getting in touch with their hunger cues. Someone who eats mindlessly can often be found eating in the car commuting to work, at the desk in front of a computer screen, or on the couch watching TV. They typically eat by shoveling their food down regardless of whether they’re still hungry or not. This type of lifestyle would greatly benefit from learning and recognizing your hunger cues because they often eat for reasons other than hunger, like satisfying emotional needs, relieving stress, or coping with emotions such as sadness, anxiety, loneliness, or boredom.
Bad eating mindsets
Those who possess bad, or negative, eating mindsets would likely benefit from getting in touch with their hunger cues. Someone who has a bad eating mindset often experiences feelings of shame, guilt and even anxiety when it comes to their relationship with food. They might even have fixed rules about the food they allow or don’t allow themselves to eat. This type of lifestyle would greatly benefit from learning and recognizing your hunger cues because it could help eliminate some of the fixed rules they have set up around their food.
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Now, it’s time for you to put this into practice. At your next meal, stop to check-in with yourself and see where your hunger levels are. This might be challenging at first, so be patient with yourself as your practice and learn.
Extra tips for hunger cues
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Throughout the day, before meals, during meal times, in between meals, take note of where you are on the hunger and fullness scale. 1 is that you are so full you couldn’t eat another bite and 10 being that you are starving and weak. 5 is that you are pleasantly full, and all the other numbers in between would fall between these numbers on the scale.
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Habits take time to develop, and it’s important to be patient with yourself as you adapt to a healthier lifestyle. Be patient with yourself, and your body, as you adjust.
