10 Principles of Intuitive Eating Series, Principle 2: Honor Your Hunger

The 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating were created by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN, CEDRD-S; and Elyse Resch, MS, RDN, CEDS-S, Fiaedp, FADA, FAND. These principles were created to act as guidelines and steps for anyone and everyone to learn about intuitive eating and incorporate them into their lives. We will go into the ten principles individually, what they mean to me and what they can mean for you, and how they will help to guide you on your journey through intuitive eating. Throughout this series of blog posts, we will go in-depth on the individual principles.

Today, we continue with Principle 2: Honor Your Hunger.

In the last post, we learned about rejecting diet mentality and how the dieting mindset can interfere with our bodies hunger signals. In this post, we will learn more about how to honor your hunger. Honoring our hunger can be a way to rebuild trust between us, our bodies, and the hunger signals we have lost touch with. It can also be a way to start rebuilding your trust in food. But in honoring your hunger, it should be noted that it does not mean you can only eat when hungry. Especially when considering that we may not know the sensation of hunger like we once did. There can be severe biological repercussions if we do not honor our hunger fundamentally. We will examine several examples of how NOT honoring our hunger can negatively affect our bodies.

The Biology Behind Eating

First, we will have a small high school biology class refresher; I'm sorry in advance for those who did not like science. ATP is the chemical breakdown of energy that we get from food. We need an adequate amount of ATP or energy to move about our day-to-day lives and for our bodies to complete the invisible tasks they complete for us successfully! However, if we do not have enough ATP, our bodies must break SOMETHING down. Instead of the food in our stomachs being broken down for glucose and ATP, the body begins to break down. Deteriorating the tissue, but the bits that can be critically damaged are the muscles, heart, and even our brain. Not honoring our hunger can also lead to biological indifference, which means that a person does not have evident hunger or satiety cues. A satiety cue is when your body tells you that it is full and satisfied from eating. Several mechanisms can trigger eating; these are biological drives, not an issue of willpower over foods. All of this being said; a dieting body is also a starving body, and do not think that you should ONLY eat when you feel hungry (this could trick you back into the dieting mindset)

Fasting and Food Restriction

This section could trigger some people if they have recently recovered from an eating disorder or a dieting mindset. If this is your circumstance, please skip this subsection and move on to the next one, as there will be a small discussion of fasting and food restriction. Fasting and food restrictions are quite counterproductive to a healthy appetite. With these behaviors in place, a person is likelier to go into ravenous eating. Ravenous eating is evident when a person has decided to skip a meal, let's say lunch, after breakfast. By the time that person is ready to have dinner, they will be so food deprived and hungry that they will overeat to make up for the energy their body was deprived of when they missed lunch. When food deprived, overeating is more likely to occur to replace the energy not obtained through regular meals. Being so distant from hunger can make it challenging to identify the sensation of hunger.

To honor your hunger, you must ensure you are in a safe environment to feel like you can eat. You will not feel safe or secure enough to eat in moments that trigger trauma. Find a safe space that you feel comfortable in to eat and eat to the point where you feel you have had enough. The process of intuitive eating is a long road; let those closest to you know the path you have chosen for yourself so they can continue encouraging you on your journey. If you have questions about Intuitive Eating, please message Robin Harris through email, robin@bodypositiveacupuncture.com, to schedule a workshop. Look forward to more posts like these, which will cover the ten principles of Intuitive Eating.