How to Get Hunger Cues Back: A Guide to Getting In-tune With Your Body's Natural Signals

Anyone who has ever dieted knows the dilemma of feeling hungry but thinking you aren’t *supposed* to eat. In those moments, you might choose to eat anyway, or you might decide to restrict your food intake and eat nothing. You can see how over time, chronic dieting disconnects you from your body’s hunger cues. Imagine your body saying to you, “Well, you never seem to listen to me when I tell you I’m hungry, so I’m done communicating!” 

If you’re healing from disordered eating or trying to lean into intuitive eating, a vital part of the process is regaining your natural hunger signals. Ideally, you will restore your relationship with your body and with food so that one day eating will be a natural, normal and easy action that doesn’t require a ton of thinking. For this to be the case, we want your body’s internal cues, like hunger, fullness, cravings, likes/dislikes and satisfaction to inform your food choices, instead of external cues, like diets or food rules, calling the shots.

In this post we dive into what hunger cues are and some steps you can take to restore your body’s natural cues. 

Understanding Hunger Cues

Let’s go over a basic definition. Hunger cues are physical and emotional signals that indicate the need for food. They vary in intensity based on how long it’s been since you ate, what kinds of foods you ate, what kind of activity you’ve been doing, your level of distraction or busyness, and more. 

Some examples of hunger cues include: stomach rumbling, inability to concentrate, crankiness, nausea, lightheadedness, feeling weak, or shaky hands. As you get more in-tune with your body and engage in regular body check-ins, you will be able to detect the more subtle, early hunger cues, instead of waiting until the later, more intense cues hit. 

Why Do Hunger Cues Disappear?

There are many things that can cause hunger cues to fade, either for a short time (acutely) or chronically. Let’s review some of the causes:

• Long term dieting, regular food restriction or eating disorders decrease the activity of your body’s hunger messengers, and eventually slow down your metabolism, too. Think of your body being in survival mode. If it learns that you aren’t providing it with adequate nourishment (energy), it attempts to conserve as much energy as possible, and can slow down many of your body’s internal messaging systems, including hunger. 

• Stress, depression or anxiety can quiet or completely eliminate your body’s hunger cues.

• Acute sickness (like having the flu) or taking certain medications can impact hunger signals, either increasing or decreasing them. 

• Life stages and conditions like aging, pregnancy or puberty can also impact hunger cues. 

The bottom line is this: ignoring hunger cues can lead to disconnection from your body’s needs. If you want to be an intuitive eater, it is imperative you reconnect with your body. Sometimes (like when you’re sick) hunger cues might fade, and you may need to eat without relying on hunger cues to tell you when it’s time. But most of the time, we want hunger cues to be a central part of how you know when and how much food to eat to adequately nourish your body.

The Role of Intuitive Eating

You’ve heard me mention intuitive eating a few times now. If you’re not sure what that is, check out this post “What is Intuitive Eating” for a bit of background. 

Very simply, intuitive eating is using the body’s intuition in harmony with the head’s knowledge when it comes to food, eating and connecting to your body. Babies are a great example of intuitive eating: they let you know they’re hungry by crying (or exhibiting some other signals) and once satisfied they’ll generally stop eating on their own. As we grow up and are exposed to all kinds of influence and ideas about food and eating, we can get disconnected from that intuition. Intuitive eating is a return to eating based on our body’s cues.

Intuitive eating relies heavily on you reconnecting with your body. As you practice it over time, it should reduce food-related anxiety and guilt, help you meet your nutritional and energy needs and support long-term health and well-being (including mental and emotional health!

Steps to Regain Hunger Cues

If you’re thinking that this all sounds great, but wondering how in the world you go about reconnecting with your body, let’s cover some actionable tips you can start practicing right away.

Step 1: Let Go of Dieting Mentality

If you want to fully regain and reconnect with your hunger cues, you have to ditch external cues, like diets and rules. I know that the idea of quitting dieting can be scary. It won’t happen overnight, but you can start with baby steps. Reassess who you follow on social media and unfollow any diet-y accounts. Begin to focus on nourishment instead of restriction. Get rid of diet cookbooks in your home. Quit getting on your scale (or throw it away, perhaps). When you notice a diet thought pop up, remind yourself it’s normal to keep having these thoughts, but remember that you can choose whether or not you act on that thought. 

Step 2: Start Eating Regularly

Establish regular meal and snack times. This is critical if you have been in a pattern of going long periods without eating (intermittent fasting) or if you’ve been limiting yourself to only 2-3 meals a day. As you begin the journey to regaining hunger cues, I recommend having a schedule of eating, with alarms set to remind you, if necessary. Consistent eating will do wonders to regulate your hunger and hunger cues. Aim for eating every 2-3 hours, with three full meals and 2-3 snacks each day.

Step 3: Tune Into Your Body

Practice mindfulness before, during and after meals. Try to quiet your mind and feel for different symptoms within your body. How does it communicate hunger, satisfaction or fullness?

You can use a hunger and fullness scale, if helpful. It’s a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is sickeningly famished and 10 is painfully full to bursting. As you progress with your hunger signals, you’d like to avoid letting your hunger get down to the 1-2 range, and aim to wrap up your meal when you’re around an 8 on the fullness scale. 

Step 4: Honor Your Hunger

Part of using the hunger fullness scale (and finishing a meal at a 7 or 8, rather than a 9 or 10) is building trust with your body that you will always respond to its hunger cues. Your body may be used to eating beyond fullness because historically you didn’t supply it with food at regular and predictable intervals. As you begin to eat regularly and frequently (see Step 2) your body will learn that you plan to honor its hunger. 

If you notice yourself feeling judgemental or shameful about the amount or frequency of hunger, try to acknowledge those thoughts, but then discard them. Replace them with a self-affirming mantra like “I am honoring my body’s needs” or “I am compassionately caring for myself.” 

Step 5: Seek Professional Support if Needed

If you feel totally overwhelmed by this kind of work, that’s okay! You are not alone. Everyone is at a different place with their relationship with food, and some people will benefit hugely from partnering with a professional.

If you decide to get some outside help, I recommend working with a Registered Dietitian or therapist who specializes in eating disorders, disordered eating and intuitive eating. If you see that they offer “weight loss” or “weight management” services, red flag! Their approach to health and healing contains conflicting ideas.

I would love to work with you on rebuilding trust with your body. You can download my Hello Intuitive Eating free workbook, or read more about my services here. 

Wishing you all the best!

What is Intuitive Eating?

Overall, to me Intuitive Eating is getting back to your inner intuition and knowledge when it comes to food, eating, and connecting to your body. I say "getting back to" because I believe that everyone is born as an intuitive eater and then as we grow up in the society that we do, we can lose the ability to connect with that inner knowledge and body cues.

How does this happen?

I think the way that it happens is going to be unique for everyone. I also don't want to place blame on any one place. Often times the feeding rituals that we had growing up had the best of intentions, they just might not be how our body wants to naturally operate.

I will give a few examples from my own story.

I grew up in household that was a proud member of the Clean Plate Club. Meaning that I could have no dessert or leave the table until every morsel on my plate was gone, including the boiled spinach with no seasonings and the gigantic glass of milk. Again, not to place blame but I grew up partially with my grandmother, a woman who grew up in The Great Depression and the era of food recommendations like everything cooked with no salt, no fat and that you should drink 2-3 glasses per day of cow's milk to build strong bones (hence the earlier example). This in turn caused be to get the message that even if I was full, the portion that I was given was the right amount for me, dessert was a treat that I only deserve under certain circumstances and vegetables are a disgusting punishment. I also now know the stomach ache I had from drinking dairy was because I was lactose intolerant, not because I was getting too little fiber.

Again, I am telling this story with compassion and understanding towards my grandmother because she was doing what she thought was right and healthy. Of course in retrospect I can see how many of these messages backfired and I had to re-learn and develop a lot of new relationships with foods and my body cues in my adult life.

This is a common thing that I help clients with, though the details will be different. Often times, there are circumstances that causes us to not know how to listen to our bodies anymore, or caused us to think our bodies were broken in some way because they don't do what we want them to do, ie. diet, lose weight, eat no sugar, crave plain boiled spinach, etc.

This is where I see Intuitive Eating come in. When we start to understand our origin stories with food and our bodies we can start to understand where we received the messages that we have today. It's not that your body is broken or needs to be fixed, it's more of a re-learning patterns that work better for you and your body.

It is about re-learning your hunger and fullness cues so at any one time your body tells you what portion of food works best. It is about making vegetables delicious so that not only do you crave them, but they are a staple of the meal because they feel good in your body, and not used as punishment. You have dessert after dinner most times, but sometimes not, because it just doesn't sound that appetizing, but you have that choice because you know it's available to you whenever you want it. You've switched to oat milk and know that you are getting plenty of calcium because it's fortified and you now love spinach.

I definitely don't want to over simplify this process or say it happens overnight. It's complicated, confusing and emotionally uncomfortable a lot of the time. Food is not just food. We are complex humans that have complex feelings and emotions and thoughts about food. But I can say that it's worth it. It's worth every bit of the process because you give yourself the ability to trust your body again. I don't want to sound like a cheesy credit card commercial but to me, this is priceless.

Katy Gaston Nutrition

Katy is a registered dietitian nutritionist and owner of Katy Gaston Nutrition based in San Francisco, CA. Katy is passionate about her work in eating disorders and disordered eating (AKA dieting) and wants to help people heal their relationship with food and body. If you would like to work with Katy in counseling sessions, she is available virtually via her services page below. If you are unable to be a client at this time but would like learn more, click here for a free introduction into intuitive eating workbook!

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Creativity and Eating Disorder Recovery

Do you need Creative Recovery?

Often times when we hear the word 'creativity' we put our defenses up or we run for the hills.

"I'm not a creative person."

"I'm not an artist or anything but I did enjoy my coloring pages as a kid."

"Oh wow, I could never do what you do, you're so artsy."

And I'm going to be that annoying person and say that I truly believe that every person is creative. You just have to find your brand of what that looks like. I don't think everyone is going to be creative in a 'traditional' way or the ways that are usually thought of, but I think everyone has passions or that "thing I've always wanted to try."

Part of reclaiming our creativity is a mindset shift that starts with knowing where these ideas come from.

• How do you feel about your creativity?

• What did you hear about artists growing up?

• What is something that you enjoy but you think it's a little silly?

I think Diet Culture is tied to Hustle Culture which is fed via Perfectionism. All of these things are killers for your creativity.

To do creative things is to feed your soul. It's to get caught up in the moment. It's the transportation into another state of being that is hard to explain.

That is the reason why I think that Creative Recovery is very much tied to Eating Disorder/Disordered Eating Recovery. When we are tying our worth into external markers, we get lost. We think our creativity needs to be the same way. If we don't produce perfect art, there's no point. If we don't produce something of value in the eyes of others, there's no point. If we don't keep up the wears of production at all times, there's no point.

To recover our creativity is to recover a piece of ourselves. A piece of ourselves that calls to us, but we think it's not worthy of the time or energy.

To recover your life from Diet Culture, but from Hustle Culture too. To really tap into our intuitive selves through art, food and body.

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Katy Gaston Nutrition

Katy is a registered dietitian nutritionist and owner of Katy Gaston Nutrition based in San Francisco, CA. Katy is passionate about her work in eating disorders and disordered eating (AKA dieting) and wants to help people heal their relationship with food and body. If you would like to work with Katy in counseling sessions, she is available virtually via her services page below. If you are unable to be a client at this time but would like learn more, click here for a free introduction into intuitive eating workbook!

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Eating As Self Care

Self Care, the Latest Buzzword?

First I would like to start on what I think the definition of self care is because I think that it can get a little lost, especially now that companies have picked it up as a marketing buzz-word.

To me, self care can be anything that recharges you. Everyone is a little different so it could be exercise, sitting in the park, painting, getting you hair done, swimming in the ocean, gardening, playing with your dog, building something, etc. I think there is also an element of rebellion that can come with self care. In this western society there is a culture of hustle, individuality and perfectionism. To which rest, vulnerability and being a human can be rebellious acts. This is where I think eating can come in as a rebellious act of self care.

So how does eating play into this?

When we think about it, eating should be the most instinctual thing we do. Along with sleeping, drinking fluids and practicing safety measures (ie. not getting hit by a car or eating poisonous mushrooms) it is the thing we do every day to keep ourselves alive. So why is it so confusing and sometimes so hard to do?

Because we humans are complex creatures with emotions, memories, social influences and preferences. We have seemingly endless access to overwhelming amounts of information and opinions. Along with all this information, there is $$$ to be had. Each time that a company, magazine article, program, etc can plant a seed of doubt that you don’t know how to feed yourself, they can come in with The Answer. I also want to pause for a second and point out that this is coming from a dietitian, a profession where I literally learned all about how to nourish a human body. If eating is so instinctual, why should you need me, a dietitian, to tell you what to eat?

First I would like to say that this is a major misconception about what I do. I actually don’t want to tell you what to eat. I am more interested in helping you facilitate a relationship with your body so that you can listen to those instincts. Where I do use my degree is when I’m working with people with disease states like allergies, kidney failure, diabetes, etc because there are important food and nutritional components to that. When I think about my work with eating disorders and disordered eating I think of it as a way to help people weed through the noise of nutritional marketing and fear mongering and provide the actual science. So much more of it though is giving permission. Permission to eat when you are hungry. Permission to have your favorite foods. Permission to gain weight. Permission to listen to your body.

If we think about the typical meals, we usually feed ourselves 3 times a day, maybe with some snacks in between. When did this concept become so radical and so out of the norm? To me, it is when weight loss became the gold star indicator of health (which it’s not) and the fear mongering that is the “o*esity epidemic” that was deemed to be running rampant throughout the US (which was wildly misrepresented). Starving ourselves, “hacking” our internal body cues, cutting out entire food groups like carbohydrates or fats, taking laxatives, throwing up after meals, drinking water instead of eating lunch, exercising three hours a day (when we aren’t professional athletes); when did this all become the norm?

I will have to admit, sometimes I get self-conscious about giving up on diet culture. Usually I can ward off remarks about what I am eating or my body with comments like “I am a dietitian that works with eating disorders so actually I don’t really follow the diet trends” or “I don’t know if I’ve lost weight, I don’t track that.” People will comment on if I am eating a salad “Oh you’re so good!” or if I am eating chocolate “Wow, the dietitian eating candy, didn’t think I would see that!” I have to admit sometimes it gets tiring. It feels like I am swimming upstream all the time because not engaging in diet culture is going against established norms. But then I remember that every time I eat when I am hungry, I am standing my ground. Every time I eat a donut or a salad because my body is telling me that is what I need, I am engaging in self-care. Every time I go for the full fat yogurt or the vegan ranch dip because that is what I want vs what I think I should have, it is self care.

Feed yourselves, I give you permission.

I won’t even say that you deserve to eat, because that shouldn’t even be in the conversation. You ALWAYS deserve to eat, no matter the circumstances. Eating is as fundamental as breathing. If we were on “oxygen deprivation cleanse” or working towards taking less breaths in a day, people would look at us like we were in a cult. Eating is no different. Eating when I am hungry, trying out a new baked good recipe, discovering a new favorite restaurant are amongst the things that bring me joy. These are my self care.

Though sometimes it is hard, I will continue to stand my ground that I will always and forever, deserve to eat - and you do too.

Katy Gaston Nutrition

Katy is a registered dietitian nutritionist and owner of Katy Gaston Nutrition based in San Francisco, CA.  Katy is passionate about her work in eating disorders and disordered eating (AKA dieting) and wants to help people heal their relationship with food and body.  If you would like to work with Katy in counseling sessions, she is available virtually via her services page below.  If you are unable to be a client at this time but would like learn more, click here for a free introduction into intuitive eating workbook!

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When You Want to Stop Dieting, For Good

I have been thinking lately how so much of our lives are leaps of faith and really it is more the norm than we think. We really have much less control than we want to believe, something that can be both scary and exhilarating.

Where does this concept come into play with healing from disordered eating, eating disorders or just repairing your relationship with food and body? I say it all the time, society and its constructions as we know it are very anti-recovery. We have normalized disordered eating patterns, disliking and disconnecting from our bodies and the never-ending quest for weight loss. So when people come to me and say “I can’t do this anymore, I want to stop dieting.” They are taking a huge, brave, leap of faith. They want new, positive patterns with the way that they eat. They want to be able to exist in their bodies without constantly feeling ashamed. They want to stop this toxic cycle of pursuing weight loss that is only causing them to misunderstand and hate the way their body functions.

So much of the work I do with clients is to show another side, another idea. Another way to both pursue health and accept yourself just as you are. To have compassion for yourself and create sustainable routines. But this all takes lots of leaps of faith, both large and small.

When we are in the midst of an eating disorder or disordered eating our relationship and connection with our bodies is either severed or misunderstood. To learn to trust our bodies again is to learn to trust ourselves. This trust looks like being able to tune into hunger and fullness cues with neutral curiosity. It looks like allowing ourselves to enjoy the foods that taste good without guilt. To be able to have routines with less rigidity and more adaptability. But to get there takes a leap of faith because everything around you will tell you to not trust yourself. To use external factors like Calories, portion sizes and timing to control your intake. A scale to determine if you give a gold star or punish yourself depending on what it says in that moment in time. The camaraderie that dieting with your friends and family provides. The familiarity of this cycle of “failing” a diet, starting a new one with pronounced gusto to have it “work” for awhile and then “fail” again.

What I ask of my clients is something I have had to experience myself. To wade into unknown waters of unconditional permission to eat food and re-learn how to approach helpful things like eating vegetables and exercise but not from a disordered place. A leap of faith to give up this pursuit of weight loss and the fallacy of perfection, guaranteed love and ultimate happiness that it provides.

It feels like the world will crumble at your feet. It feels like you are clinging to a life raft in the ocean with people standing on the shore yelling “Let go! You’re safe now, you can swim to shore!” but that feels terrifying. I get it, it is really really hard. But when you do, when you take those first little mini leaps of faith that probably feel more like teeny baby steps, it will grow. The fire inside your soul. Who you are outside of this need to control the world around you. Your creativity, passion and joy. That is what I see happen before my eyes when I work with my clients, and it is incredibly powerful and beautiful. Because you are incredibly powerful, beautiful and brave to take that vulnerable leap into something new.

Katy Gaston Nutrition

Katy is a registered dietitian nutritionist and owner of Katy Gaston Nutrition based in San Francisco, CA.  Katy is passionate about her work in eating disorders and disordered eating (AKA dieting) and wants to help people heal their relationship with food and body.  If you would like to work with Katy in counseling sessions, she is available virtually via her services page below.  If you are unable to be a client at this time but would like learn more, click here for a free introduction into intuitive eating workbook!

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