How to Know When to Eat and How Much to Eat

We need to get back to basics.

When we eat and how much we eat should be determined by our physical sensations of hunger and fullness, rather than an external system.

We often don't want to hear this. We want a program or guidelines that tell us to eat at certain times, and we want precise guidelines about how many cups or tablespoons of this or that to eat.

But this isn't necessary, for the most part. Yes, there are some basic nutritional guidelines that are good for us all to learn. It's best if we minimize refined sugar, for example. And oil doesn't make you feel full so minimal oil is also ideal. It's also true for everyone that eating close to bed isn't the best practice, but rather it's better to allow your digestive system to rest a bit before you sleep.

But aside from some of these principles, it's best we rely on our own bodies' signals.

This makes us nervous. We don't trust that our bodies are precise, and we don't think an internal system can give us the health or weight loss we want. We don't believe that our bodies will lead us correctly with quantities and timing.

But it's not true!

Your body is an incredible machine and hunger and fullness are precise. The issue is more that we have tuned out of our physical sensations.

We are often out of body and not present within our bodies, particularly if we feel uncomfortable with the size of our bodies. We are not used to feeling ourselves from the inside out.

People experience hunger physically in different ways. There can be sensations in the throat, the stomach, the chest, and the head. Do you know what yours feels like?

What does it feel like to you to be full versus stuffed? Do you know what it feels like to be "neutral" where you're neither hungry nor full?

If not, begin to work with learning these sensations.

A quote that I love from Geneen Roth goes, "Being hungry is like being in love: If you don't know, you're probably not."

Learning our physical sensations of hunger and fullness is also helpful to heal emotional eating.

When we know what it feels like physically to be hungry, neutral, and full, we can notice when we want to eat when we're not hungry, and ask ourselves, "Why do I want to eat this if I'm not hungry?".

If we want to stuff ourselves beyond full to stuffed, we can ask, "What's going on emotionally for me that I want to numb out so much?"

Photo by Sambazon via Unsplash