You’ve started your intuitive food journey, but lately you’ve been feeling stuck. You know you’re supposed to be listening for signals from your body to let you know it’s time to eat, but all you hear is a voice in your head asking, “why am I not hungry?” Read on to find out why you might not feel hungry slogans, and what you can do about it.
Why don’t I feel hungry?
There are many possible answers to this confusing question. In a previous post I talked about how the following things can affect appetite and reduce your desire to eat:
-Some physical and mental health conditions can affect your appetite
-New medications or changes in your medications may have an impact on your appetite
-If you work on intuitive eating, food may not have as much power over you, meaning you crave foods less than before, and food is less exciting. This can sometimes make eating more difficult.
Today, I’m going to focus on another big reason why you might not be feeling hunger cues: diet culture disconnects us from our body’s cues.
One of the principles of intuitive eating is to honor your hunger. This can be quite complicated because, in order to honor your hunger, you must first know what hunger is and what it means to you.
Many people with a history of dieting struggle with this because they report not feeling hungry. Because this? If we step back and think about some of the common tenets of food culture, they might include:
- External dietary rules and guidelines
- Ethical food choices, e.g. good/bad, clean/toxic
- Ignoring hunger and fullness cues (and eating according to portion size or calories or macros)
- Emotional eating stigma
- Focus on appearance and body size
- Body dissatisfaction
- The repeating cycle of failure and shame
…it may begin to make sense how easily we can disconnect, unlearn, and “erase” our hunger cues.
Because all these “diet rules” and patterns are training us to stop listening to our mine bodies and ours mine wants and needs. They teach us that we don’t know what’s best for us and that we can’t trust our body’s signals.
This lack of trust leads to disconnection: if we believe we can’t trust the signals we receive, we tune them out. And the more we tune them out or ignore them, the weaker those hunger signals become.
Let’s take a deeper look at how each of these areas can affect your connection to your body’s signs.
External Rules and Guidelines:
Food culture promotes rigid external rules about what, when and how much to eat. They often encourage you to rely on meal plans, calorie counting, or strict portion control. This external control leads to contempt for your preferences, your desires, your experiences that created connections with certain foods, and your cultural foods. Over time, this leads to a repetitive override of your internal cues and reduces your ability to listen to your body’s cues.
Ethicalizing food choices:
When foods are categorized as “good” or “bad,” we assign a moral value to eating behaviors. This dichotomous or binary thinking can lead to guilt, shame, and anxiety about food choices, making it another challenge to trust your own desires and preferences. The focus shifts from internal cues to external judgments based on social norms.
Ignoring the signs of hunger and fullness:
Following a diet or diet rules promotes the exact opposite of honoring your hunger. You are specifically directed to ignore or suppress feelings of hunger or fullness. We encourage you to stick to predetermined meal times and/or portion sizes, regardless of your body’s signals. This suppression of natural hunger and fullness cues can lead to disordered eating patterns, such as chronic undereating or overeating at certain times, never really knowing whether you are hungry or full.
Emotional eating stigma:
Food culture stigmatizes emotional eating, portraying it as weakness or lack of control, again making us feel bad about ourselves. As a result, we may feel guilty or ashamed that we turn to food as a source of comfort or emotional coping, which further alienates us from our body’s real needs and emotional cues.
Focus on external appearance:
In our culture, there is a lot of emphasis on achieving a certain body size or appearance, and thinness is equated with health, respect and dignity. This fixation on external aesthetics takes precedence over internal well-being and promotes disconnection from the body’s inherent wisdom and unique needs.
Body Dissatisfaction and Body Comparison:
Diet culture perpetuates the idea that our bodies are inherently flawed and in need of modification. This constant messaging and normalization of dissatisfaction with our bodies is yet another influence that disconnects us from our body’s signals instead of honoring the inner signs.
Cycle of failure and shame:
Diet culture thrives on the cycle of dieting, weight loss, and inevitable weight regain. This cycle leads to feelings of failure, self-blame, and shame, which further intensify the disconnection from the body because it erodes self-confidence. The focus shifts from internal cues to external measures of success and failure and value.
How to know if you are hungry
Phew, time for deep breaths. Can you see how many factors are at work telling us to disconnect from ourselves and our body’s cues? No wonder you may not feel regular hunger cues during the day!
The good news is that our bodies are incredibly wise and you have the ability to reconnect with your body’s cues and be able to understand what your body is communicating.
Tools to help you get back in touch with hunger cues:
1. Create a relaxed, flexible eating plan. Eating regularly throughout the day can help your hunger cues return. The more regularly and consistently you eat throughout the day, the more body trust and connection is rebuilt – the more your hunger and appetite cues will return. Most people feel better when they eat every 3-5 hours. Even if you don’t feel physically hungry, doing some mechanical eating is important. Make it flexible, for example:
- Breakfast between 7:30-9:00 am
- Snack around 11:00 am
- Lunch between 1:00-2:00 p.m
- Snack around 3:00-4:00 p.m
- Dinner around 7:00-20:00
2. Find meals and snacks you can eat, even if you’re not hungry. This is where convenience foods can really come in handy, especially if you struggle to make food. Here are some more ideas for what to do if food doesn’t sound like good food.
3. Try using the Huger-Fullness scale. Once you’re eating consistently, the hunger-fullness scale can be a useful tool to better understand the subtle signals your body sends when it’s hungry (and/or full and full).
And don’t forget: there are different kinds of hunger and many other reasons besides physical hunger for food.
Looking for more support?
My team and I deliver virtually personal nutrition trainingsupporting people with intuitive eating, disordered eating and eating disorders and more.
I also recommend mine Unapologetic Eating 101 Coursean online, self-paced intuitive eating and body image program to help you break free from dieting and make peace with food and your body.
Author biography
This blog post was written by Nicci Schock, a dietitian at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Post reviewed and edited by Alissa Rumsey, MS, RD, CSCS, Registered Dietitian and Certified Intuitive Nutrition Consultant. She specializes in inclusive weight care, intuitive eating, body image therapy, mindfulness, self-compassion, and healing from chronic dieting, disordered eating, and eating disorders. Alissa holds a BA in Nutrition and Exercise Science, and a MA in Health Communications, and is also an NSCA Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist.
