When We Distrust Our Bodies’ Hunger Signals

If your parents didn’t teach you to eat according to physical hunger and fullness, you may now distrust your body’s signals.

Many of us don't recall ever being educated by our parents about our body's hunger and fullness signals.

Often we grew up eating because it was technically mealtime according to the clock, or because our parents said so, or for any reason really: it was a special occasion, there was a new item at the supermarket, you're at a party.

This education should happen similarly to how an attentive and caring parent educates their child about how to bathe or why hot things are painful to touch.

There are many other areas it is considered important to educate a child about their own body, and yet so many of us did not receive that education about our hunger and fullness.

The ideal thing would have been for us to be educated about physical sensations of hunger and fullness, which could have been done starting at a very young age.

Also, we should have been encouraged to wait until we were hungry to eat, and to stop when we were satisfied (but not stuffed).

It should have been encouraged for us to decide when to eat and how much to eat based on our body's cues, regardless of any other framework.

We can even learn to "time" our hunger to mostly fit desired meal times when we have learned our body's signals.

It’s understandable that now we don’t trust our body’s signals.

The good news is that even if you didn't receive this education, it is possible to have it now — no matter how old you are, no matter how long you've struggled with overeating.

Your body doesn't forget how to signal hunger and fullness. You can fully regain this awareness and presence.

Another consideration is that children do naturally prefer to wait till they're hungry to eat and they prefer to not stuff themselves...

UNLESS they are unwittingly trying to cope with how they feel using food.

Or if they are being externally pressured towards patterns of eating and want to please their parents, as all children do.

So we need to look back at our childhoods and also look at the question of, "If children naturally tend towards listening to signals anyway, what was going on emotionally that caused me to override that natural tendency?"

The answer is: there must have been a lot.

Photo by Matteo Raimondi via Unsplash