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Old 04-22-2014, 05:49 AM   #1  
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Default Physical Hunger Cues, ED, when to eat?

Any of you that have been around a while probably know by now that I struggled, or have struggled with ED, starve/binge cycle. Once again, I am trying to heal it, and I have hit a new road block.

I am realizing I do not have internal hunger cues. I don't know when I'm hungry or full. I have been trying to really observe when I am hungry, and how much food satisfies me. And listening to my body goes like this:

4-5am wake up. Black coffee & water. Run.

7-8am Feeling hunger BECAUSE of run. Would be satisfied with 2 scrambled eggs. If I don't run and I could go until noon and not eat.

12-1pm. Thinking a lot about food, but not feeling physical hunger cues. Have recognized that thinking about food may be sign I'm hungry. Could eat half sandwich (2 slices turkey, lettuce tomato mustard) and be satisfied.

3-4pm I'm usually thinking about food. I have the urge to eat, like I want to but there are no physical hunger cues. If I were busy, I wouldn't eat, because my mind would be occupied. If I am home and bored, then I could eat a piece of cheese or a yogurt and be fine.

6-7pm I typically don't want dinner. I kind of hate it. I don't feel hunger. I would rather just eat some comfort food, as I typically have a lot of "cravings" at this time. If I had my way, I'd skip dinner and just eat some ice cream! lol...I do often eat dinner out of obligation. No physical hunger. But I find myself really wanting to snack on things like apples, raisins, peanut butter. No physical hunger, just what feels like emotional cravings. If I were busy, I would not eat.

If I am very bust all day, like when I was doing 12 hour shifts (nurse), I will typically feel physical hunger maybe around 2pm, it would be satisfied with a very small meal, half sandwich, then I'm good the rest of the day.

I also notice since cutting out sugar (and when I'm eating minimal carbs) my hunger is even less. So its like none existent at times....even when I binge, its not physically driven...or is it?? But I don't feel hunger.


If I truly only ate when I was physically hungry, I'd almost never eat. Which I've done years ago, as part of my ED. "Fortunately" I eat for many other reasons, like sugar cravings, and emotional cravings etc.


Does anyone else deal with this? Its like I broke my physical hunger cues from so many years of disordered eating.
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Old 04-22-2014, 06:28 AM   #2  
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Glamour absolutely. Years of eating for reasons other than hunger confuse everything. I guess you know this is the whole deal with IE and it takes a while to find your hunger cues but they are still there. Years of eating on schedules and amounts we read are portions or whatever and then binges to pile on calories confuse and mask things.

What works for me is fruit with my coffee early and then I honestly wait until I'm hungry. Some days it's early in a few hours, some days it takes until late morning and some days it isn't until lunch. It also helps me to ask what sounds good, some days I have oatmeal and other days it is scrambled eggs but it's funny how one or the other jumps at me and I try to follow it.

The books are full of how to work through re-attuning to hunger signals, but bottom line what you are finding is absolutely typical.
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Old 04-22-2014, 07:44 AM   #3  
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I'd say most of us who have suffered with an eating disorder have experienced a lack of hunger cues. For me, someone who has been eating for emotional reasons for a lifetime, focusing on my hunger cues has been a great distraction from emotional stress. Because hunger and satiety are physical feelings, tuning into them is a skill that can be honed and we're all born with the ability to get hungry - it's vital to our survival.

But I spent such a long time eating for reasons other than hunger that I too didn't understand what real hunger even felt like. To me, boredom or stress meant hunger. The book Overcoming Overeating does a really good job of explaining how emotional eating takes over our hunger cues, I finally understand the process of that and now I'm sorting it out.

I don't know what has worked for others but this is how I went about tackling hunger. At first I spent a few days focusing only on mindful eating. Really tasting the food, no distractions like tv/phone/conversation, putting the fork down between bites, chewing thoroughly, paying attention to each component on my plate, making little decisions like "do I like the mushrooms better or the potato and why?" This process helped me start connecting to my body while I ate.

Then I wanted to experiment with hunger. Whenever I felt "hunger" I questioned it. I couldn't recognize if it was real hunger or emotional hunger or what. So I sat with it and drew out the process. I basically starved myself for a few days, allowing myself to get really really really physically hungry just for the purpose of identifying that feeling. Now I know what my hunger feels like - it's a burning at the top of my stomach, an empty feeling in the bottom of my tummy, an inability to focus, fatigue and weakness. Over time it has gotten easier to identify that feeling without having to starve myself.

Then I started seeing a nutritional therapist who gave me a chart to fill out everytime I ate. This has been really helpful and although I don't use the chart to write down what I eat anymore I still use the scale to identify my hunger levels, maybe this will help you? Make a chart with the following columns:
Time
Food/Beverage with portion
Level of Hunger pre-meal (1-5)
Level of fullness post-meal (1-6)
Self talk/food rules/rationalizatioins/emotions

1 - Famished, irritable
2 - Very Hungry
3 - Hungry
4 - Slightly hungry
5 - Neutral
6 - Appetite goes away
7 - Satisfied
8 - Full
9 - Overly full, Stuffed
10 - Sick, Discomfort

Now I know that I like to eat at a 2-3 and get all the way to an 8. Anything in between leaves me unsatisfied. Continue to eat mindfully, it's the key component to eating out of hunger and getting satisfaction out of your meals. And a secret that has helped me a lot when I'm eating a meal and can't figure out when I've become full yet is to put the fork down and walk away and do something completely different for 2 whole minutes like wash dishes, put the clothes in the dryer, tidy up my room etc. When I come back to my plate after 2 minutes I am suddenly completely aware of whether or not I'm still hungry or still want to eat some more but it's very specific like "i'm practically full, I just want to finish this salad and nothing more." I hope this helps.

No matter what diet someone chooses, I feel like being in tune with our hunger is an awesome skill to have.

Last edited by Palestrina; 04-22-2014 at 07:45 AM.
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Old 04-22-2014, 10:20 AM   #4  
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I feel hunger pangs, but I think that they have increased to above what I need - hunger pangs to maintain 73 lbs heavier than where I want to be!

If on those days where you follow your hunger cues, do you feel drained? How about developing a schedule where you can at least make sure that you get your essential nutrients/calorie requirements in and see how you feel from there? I know some people without a history of ED but they have few hunger cues. Perhaps just making sure that you eat what you need to eat while not eating for purely emotional reasons/sugar cravings could be a good experiment.

If this does not work, feel free to take some of my (TOO MANY) hunger pang signals!! =D
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Old 04-23-2014, 05:48 AM   #5  
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Thank you all. I'm amazed at the length of the journey to heal from ED and I often think now that complete healing will never happen, but rather I will learn strategies that will ehlp me normalized eating as much as possible.

I wonder if even "normal" people only eat for hunger. I would think that even the healthiest person, would still in the course of the day or week, eat for other reasons, like social gatherings, wanting to taste something or as a treat. Maybe the difference is they don't do that several times a day?

I ate only when hungry yesterday and ate:
2 eggs, 1/2 c oatmeal made w 1 c milk (didn't finish oatmeal) 2 cups coffee w cream, 1 pint steam chicken w broccoli (didn't finish) 1 small apple, 1 small pork chop and some steamed spinach.

Overall that doesn't seem like too much for me. I think if I could do that I'd be ok with continuing to lose weight. There were several times I almost ate because it was time to eat but I stopped and surveyed my hunger and realized I was not hungry yet. This is very new to me. Maybe I do get hungry, but I'm so used to eating for so many other reasons that I see "normal" eating patterns as not being hungry often enough?
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Old 04-23-2014, 07:33 AM   #6  
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Originally Posted by GlamourGirl827 View Post
I wonder if even "normal" people only eat for hunger. I would think that even the healthiest person, would still in the course of the day or week, eat for other reasons, like social gatherings, wanting to taste something or as a treat. Maybe the difference is they don't do that several times a day?
You're absolutely right about this. There are very few people for whom eating is not pleasurable or comforting. People who eat only for "fuel" are a little bizarre to me, don't you think? Ever meet a person who hates food? I have and it's awkward. But normal eaters do eat for comfort or pleasure, they just don't do it all day long. I've learned to accept the fact that I will always and forever use food to comfort myself and I'm ok with that, in fact I look forward to it! I'm just working on using other coping techniques as well, does anyone really need food every moment of the day to feel comfort? No! There are other ways lol! If I had to quantify it I'd say I use food for comfort once every 3 days or so. That's a huge difference from before.

Just a little tangent if you don't mind - I was talking to my nutritional therapist about normal eaters vs dysfunctional eaters and I have come to understand about myself that I am very uncomfortable around my fellow dysfunctional eaters and always have been. My definition of normal eaters are people who are not weird about food, eat a variety of foods, don't diet and are not obese. Dysfunctional eaters come in all sizes and guises. I have a skinny friend who says something negative every time she reaches for food "I really shouldn't be eating this but it tastes so good" or she'll mention something about battling 4lbs every time she's around food. I absolutely hate eating around her, I'm so uneasy about it. I have another friend who eats really really really fast and cleans her plate, does not leave one single tiny morsel ever! I'm also very uncomfortable around her. And then there's the people who scold sugar and carbs at every gathering "no thanks, already had my carbs for the day." Anyway, the point is that normal eaters (imo) don't do this sort of strange behavior around food, they are calm, they don't narrate or criticize. Dysfunctional eaters are constantly judging themselves, others, and the food itself.

Sorry about that, just wanted to clear up what I meant about normal eaters. Back to your point, absolutely! Food is pleasurable, it is comforting and it doesn't have to change. I think people scold themselves for finding pleasure in food and that does not need to change much. My husband who is a completely normal intuitive eater reaches for food for comfort sometimes. He will go out buy a big bag of chips and eat it all in one sitting. He throws away the bag and never thinks about it again. He doesn't hate himself for it, he doesn't proclaim it the last time he ever does it, he relieves himself of any burden of it. It happens rarely, but he doesn't want to stop himself from doing it, he's admitted to me how enjoyable it is and how comforting it is to sit with a big bag of salty snackfood once in a while and he's ok with it.

Normal people eat for pleasure and comfort, they just don't do it 10 times a day like I used to. That's why it's important to relearn how to eat only from hunger, the more you do that the less you turn to compulsive eating. There are other ways of coping with stress and anxiety and while you search for those ways keep building the skills of hunger/satiety, it is time well spent.

Last edited by Palestrina; 04-23-2014 at 07:38 AM.
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Old 04-23-2014, 07:46 AM   #7  
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Forgot to say, an eating disorder can be taken care of. I never once thought about going to see a nutritionist, ever. I thought that a nutritionist would put me on a diet and I never wanted anyone telling me what to eat, mainly because I knew I couldn't stick to it and it would cause me to be a failure. But now I have found a nutritional therapist who is really helping me sort this out. She has not told me once what to put in my mouth, except she told me that based on my food journal that on the days I eat a big breakfast I eat less throughout the day so she advised me to continue eating a big breakfast. That's it. She has not criticized a single morsel of food I've chose to eat and when I talk about the times I have used food for comfort she has applauded my efforts to take care of myself.

I asked her point blank - "Can I be cured of this ED?" and she said YES. She also told me that I will never not seek comfort in food but that I can build other coping mechanisms to use as well. Using food for comfort is not a bad thing, as long as it's not the only coping technique we use.
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Old 04-23-2014, 06:19 PM   #8  
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Work on controlling your blood sugar, and also don't be fooled into "intuitive eating." Obviously if that worked, no one would ever be fat to begin with. However, sometimes that means eating something when you aren't that hungry to avoid hunger later or to stay healthy. I don't mean eating a lot, but if you aren't hungry at breakfast, don't skip it, just have something small. Try to avoid eating big meals that will spike your blood sugar up very much.
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Old 04-24-2014, 07:17 AM   #9  
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Obviously if that worked, no one would ever be fat to begin with.
Obviously if diets worked then nobody would be fat to begin with.
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