After years of chronic dieting, you’ve learned to prioritize the diet plan over your body’s hunger and fullness cues. It may not even be the case that your hunger cues are gone, they just seem like a different language when you haven’t been listening to them.
How dieting impacts your hunger cues
The way dieting influences your hunger cues depends on the type of diet you were following. Did the plan allow you to eat when you wanted to or were your meals scheduled?
I know in my years of chronic dieting I followed everything from timed meals to having my foods planned out but flexibility on the timing. But I learned to view my hunger cues as something I needed to resist and fight against.
It created a negative relationship with both food and my body. When I started to learn intuitive eating, I had to re-learn what my hunger cues were. At first I didn’t think I was hungry until I was feeling hangry and ravenous for food.
And I couldn’t tell when I was starting to feel full until I was uncomfortably stuffed.
Dieting taught me to eat the food I determined in my meal plan. I would stop eating when the food I planned was gone, which sometimes meant I wasn’t fully satisfied and sometimes I was way too full.
That way of eating created an unhealthy relationship with food where I spent way more of my day than I’d like to admit thinking about food and my meal plan. And I know I’m not alone in this experience because I’ve seen it over and over again in chronic dieters.
If that’s where you currently are, don’t worry it is possible to create a healthy relationship with food and your hunger cues.
How to get your hunger cues back
Before I dive into how to get hunger cues back after years of chronic dieting, I need to mention there are some medical conditions or medications that can alter your hunger cues – this article isn’t about those situations.
Instead these tips are meant for someone who wants to get back in touch with their hunger and fullness cues so they can stop dieting and create freedom around food.
Evaluate hunger and fullness cues
If you want to understand your hunger and fullness cues, you have to start paying attention to them. That means checking in with your body before, during, and after eating. You may be surprised by some of the signs of hunger you experience – I know I was.
Maybe it’s obvious to you, but I didn’t realize the reason I would have trouble concentrating mid-morning was just an early sign of hunger. And when I was waiting until I felt hangry to eat, that was actually extreme hunger. Plus I learned I could feel better throughout the day just by eating at an early stage of hunger.
A great tool for relearning these cues is the intuitive eating hunger fullness scale which you can read about in this post. And you can learn about the different types of hunger here.
Regular eating schedule
Eating on a regular schedule can help to bring your hunger sensations back. Sometimes people say their hunger cues aren’t there or they can’t feel them after years of ignoring them. So establishing a schedule to provide some regularity to your body and may help you start to feel your hunger cues more strongly.
Eating enough
This is a big one. You want to make sure you’re eating enough consistently throughout the day. If you’re always prolonging eating to try to eat less on your diet, it’s so much easier to eat beyond a comfortable fullness. When you eat enough throughout the day, it helps your body, hormones, and energy level feel more stable throughout the day.
The best schedule will depend on how it impacts your body, but as you start to relearn your hunger cues you’ll rebuild trust with your body and yourself to make decisions around food.