The relationship to food is complex and fueled by both emotion and physiology. Food is commonly used for more than just nourishment, as a means to distract, numb, or reward. I gain valuable insight about a woman’s relationship to food and her body through an exploration of how she responds to hunger and fullness. Does she feel worthy of her body’s desires? Is there either comfort or fear associated with a state of hunger (scarcity) or fullness (abundance)? Does she have emotional regulation skills aside from using food?
The goal of mindful (or intuitive) eating is to develop the self awareness to base food selection on physical cues, rather than eating in response to emotion. For anyone who has been wrapped up in our diet-obsessed culture, it can be overwhelming to even identify the body’s cues, let alone to trust them. Creating a hunger & fullness scale to express your unique experience can help tease apart which cues are driven by emotion vs. which are driven by physical need.
The exercise shared here is adapted from the book, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works. Begin by charting hunger and fullness on a numeric scale ranging from 1 to 10, where 1=starving, 5=neutral, and 10=uncomfortably stuffed. At each point along the scale, identify both physical and emotional sensations connected to your specific level of hunger or fullness.
Physical cues for hunger may include:
- stomach growling
- headache
- mental fog
- fatigue
- “jitters”
Physical cues for fullness may include:
- stomach distention
- heaviness / weight
- lethargy
- mental fog
Emotional cues for hunger or fullness may include:
- anxiety
- fear
- contentment
- pleasure
- guilt
- frustration
- loneliness
- comfort
- longing
- numbness
- desperation
- abandonment
In individual sessions, I offer the following prompts:
Describe how you experience hunger.
Describe how you experience fullness.
Identify where you feel most comfortable vs. uncomfortable on the scale.
The following are sample responses from women who prefer to be in a state of hunger (< 5).
When I am hungry, I feel safe. I am fearful of enjoying food because I don’t feel worthy of my own desire.
I long to feel empty because I associate emptiness with goodness, purity, and thinness.
Being in a state of hunger means I am in control.
When I am empty enough, I feel numb.
To be full means I am guilty or wrong.
Fullness is an indication that I have lost all control, that I am worthless.
I never want to feel full because it means I will become too big, too much for anyone to love or accept me.
On the other hand, the following are sample responses from women who are most comfortable in a state of fullness (> 5):
Fullness feels like safety, contentment, and pleasure.
Food fills me in a reliable way, the kind of way people cannot. The sensation of fullness from food takes away my feelings of inadequacy and loneliness.
When I am full, I feel guilty. It means I have once again broken the rules of my diet.
When I am full enough, I feel numb.
When I am hungry I feel desperate and deprived. My thoughts uncontrollably turn towards food until I have access to eating something.
I fear I will never be able to eat enough to satiate my hunger.
When I am hungry I feel alone, empty, unwanted, and abandoned.
Regardless of where a woman falls on the spectrum, there is a resounding fear repeated in my office every day:
If I allow myself to fully desire food, will I ever be able to eat enough to feel truly fulfilled? If I allow myself to express my deepest desires, will I be loved and accepted?
For so many women, food has become a way to medicate those deep fears and inadequacies. This exercise urges you to release the judgment and criticism of your body size and patterns of eating. Use the chart as a tool to turn inward and identify the very core desires and wounds that drive your relationship to food. Become curious about the physiological need for food vs. the emotional longing. Follow your hunger & fullness cues to your deepest self and listen. That it is the place where healing happens.