On hunger
This post has been floating around in my head for a couple of years, but recent circumstances have made me finally attempt to stick words on a feeling about a concept that has been bothering me for a while. I'm a Weight Watcher, and someone who has kept a 65 lb loss off for 5 years. I'm also a poet, so my job is to use language (in a lyrical manner) to be precise about describing imprecise concepts.
I have some ideas about the sensation of hunger and also how I react to it when I experience it. Just to be clear, I am not talking about the social condition of Hunger, I am talking about the messages that I perceive are going on in my body about food and the understanding that I need/want some.
First, sometimes I think I experience hunger as a sensation and sometimes I think I experience hunger as an emotion, and sometimes I think I experience hunger as a thought or an idea. This is an important difference and one I am not sure I had understood before. You will see how this ties in to everything else in a bit.
Second, I actually think the sensation of hunger as an impetus to eat was not broken down into distinctions in my head before I started my weight loss and maintenance journey. Slowly understanding that there was a difference, refining and responding to that understanding and those differences was critical to my success in loosing weight and keeping it off. Before I started this process I always felt hunger as HUNGER and my response to HUNGER was to EAT!!!!. The fact that I did not, was incapable of drawing these distinctions was one of the reasons why I was overweight. I have phrased this clumsily in the past as, "no one ever taught me how to eat!" That is not true. My parents taught me nutrition, basic portion control, the need for exercise and all that stuff. What no one taught me how to do was tease apart the various sensations of hunger into a coherent, meaningful messaging system that I could appropriately respond to.
I am not blaming my parents here. I don't think anyone teaches us the subtle distinctions of hunger. Hunger is one of those weird touchy subjects in our culture. If you start talking about hunger at all, you slide over into the social issue of Hunger pretty damn quick, and then you are really talking about something else. As a society we spend a lot of time worrying about The Hungry, we believe food is a basic human right, and if people are Hungry they should be able to have the resources and the freedom to feed themselves. It seems inconceivable that we should ignore or deny hunger signals. Hunger is something we fight. We have a war on Hunger. When we approach holidays that are centered around food, as a culture we obsess about making sure that everyone has enough to eat.
But hunger for me is more than just the rumbling in the belly and that is where I get into trouble. When I am dealing with my own personal hunger, war is not an appropriate metaphor. That metaphor makes hunger my enemy which I must defeat with FOOD! This is ridiculous. I don't want to defeat my hunger. I want to listen to the voice of it and acknowledge what it has to say. I am in a conversation with my hunger, not a battle. If I were to defeat my hunger utterly I would die because I would stop eating.
This took me a little while to process, and I have only just now put words to it, but at some point I started listening to my hunger. There are 6 distinct voices I have identified. I will name and list them here. I have avoided using words like ”crave”, “binge” “starve” “emotional eating” “comfort eating", "need”, "obsess"… these are overused words and phases with pejorative values and connotations that don’t add value to understanding the voices of my hunger.
H1: Physical This type of hunger is the physical sensation of "My body needs fuel. I should put some fuel into it". This sensation is actually one of the most subtle sensations I experience. It is almost all physical sensation and almost no emotional or thought sensation. It took me a long time to tease the distinctiveness of this voice out from the clamoring of all the other hunger voices crying for attention. Nutritional education taught me the best fuel to put into my system to respond to this hunger. Reminder to Self: it's never an ice cream sundae.
H2: Physical/emotional This sensation is a very strong physical sensation with an urgent emotional trigger built into the middle of it. It is "My body needs nutrient X, for the love of GOD WOMAN... GO GET IT!!!". There is no thought behind this hunger sensation. Also how my body expresses it's cravings for nutrients generally gives no clue as to the identity of the nutrient it needs. Sometimes I will feel like “HOLY SHIT CHOCOLATE!” when what I need is cruciferous vegetables like broccoli or brussels sprouts. Seriously, I sit there and fantasize about chocolate, and if I eat broccoli it goes away. It took me a LONG time to figure that out. For the record, this is a rare sensation in me these days. Mostly because I pay attention to H1 and because I eat nutritiously, I don’t hear this voice much. That said, at Pennsic, or other times when my body is under serious stress I will find myself with urgent hunger signals. Even so, once I figure out what that nutrient is I don’t need more than a single portion to shut up the H2 message. If it’s red meat, I don’t need more than 4 ounces of red meat. If it’s fat, I don’t need more than a tablespoon of olive oil or so. If I have eaten a portion, waited a while and I am still “OH GOD OM NOM NOM!!!!” then I have either the wrong nutrient identified, or I have the wrong hunger type identified.
H3: Emotional It is the hunger that is akin to yearning. There is no thinking sensation here. There is no physical sensation. When I experience H3, I can not hear any signals from my body at all to stop. Or that I am full, or anything related to my body at all. When I am eating to stop this type of hunger pangs I am using food to fill an emptiness inside me. There is a theory in shamanic cultures that when we experience a great tragedy we loose a piece of our soul. A person will never be healed, will never be whole until the soul fragment is found and returned to them. This was my experience. I am a childhood sexual abuse survivor. I was eating to try to fill the hole inside me left over from that experience. I didn’t even know I was doing it, I was just doing it. Remember, there is no thinking sensation with this type of hunger, ergo, I had no words for what was going on. Once I figured it out, that I had an emotional hole inside me and that I was trying to fill that hole with food, I stopped. I filled that hole instead with the shape of what had been taken from me. And that is the only thing, ever, that stopped my H3 hunger. But it did stop it, utterly. Like magic.
H4: Emotional/Idea This is the kind of hunger that says “I WANT TO EAT ALL THE THINGS!”. It’s emotional in that the original impetuous is a strong feeling that only food will help me feel better when I feel lousy, and then it is an idea sensation because my brain willfully neglects to keep track of how much it has put in it’s mouth. It’s the opening a bag of cookies and plowing through the entire bag while watching television. It is the barrel of popcorn at the movies; I know I should order the small or put the barrel down, but I just can’t. It’s a hunger that can almost only be satisfied with the repetitive motion of hand to mouth, hand to mouth while the brain is being distracted doing other things.
H5: Idea This type of hunger is a mind/idea sensation almost entirely. It is my brain going: “Dude. It’s Noon. I know the rest of you is not listening, and I know you are already late to a meeting but you really should eat something or you will regret it later. Are you listening to me? Look. A candy bar. Grab that. ” H5 is the time keeper and the one interested in routine. This voice responded well to training. I re-taught myself portion control and basic nutrition on Weight Watchers. Now when I feel it and respond it, H5 will accept a banana over a candy bar.
H6: Idea/Physical This type of hunger is a strong idea sensation, but it wants the body to believe it is a physical sensation so that it gets satisfied. This hunger tries damn hard to mask itself as H2. I spent a lot of time claiming I was experiencing H2 “I must NEED the salt in this bag of salt and vinegar chips!” while I was using the H6 sensation of hunger to justify the consumption of the item in question. Why? In the H6 experience it was mostly that I had gotten an idea or a vision of food in my head and could not shake the idea of eating it. The idea of a particular food would overwhelm my brain until I could not think of anything else. If I did not satisfy the idea sensation, a physical sensation would kick in making me feel panicky or weak from lack of nutrients. Note: the ideas for food that I would have a hunger for were at their core all ideas that were sugary, salty or fatty, so this was hardly likely.
Knowing that hunger is so multi-facetted, that I can feel the sensation "hunger" for so many different reasons, I can confidently say that there are times when I perceive the sensation of hunger, and depending on what type it is, I gently and lovingly refuse to indulge my body’s request for food. This is the current conversation:
I listen to H1. I had to teach myself how to hear it, but now I recognize it’s voice, I listen to it and respond to it. It's generally pretty sane. It is easiest to hear this voice when there is not a ton of sugar in my system.
I listen to H2, but carefully. I don’t generally believe exactly what it is telling me. I have to interpret this one because it does not know how to communicate appropriately with me. I respond tentatively and carefully to it's messaging.
I needed therapy for H3. This is mostly a silent voice now.
I argue with H4. I tell it to go chill out. I explain patiently it is being irrational. I get stubborn. I tell it to fuck off. I go running instead of eating. If I loose the argument I ensure that I am making good choices in what I am consuming. “You wanna eat automatically? Fine, have a bag of carrot sticks. Eat it all. Go for it. Party on. You let me know when you are over it, ok?” I do not loose this fight with a box of cookies. I do not loose this fight with cheesecake. I do not loose this fight with a bag of Peanut M&Ms. If I have to back down at all, I concede the argurment in my own way. (Although I will be honest, I do sometimes loose it with a bag of corn chips… if that happens I try to make them little bags)
I listen to H5, but not always. Sometimes I had a big breakfast, and my normal lunch is not appropriate. I’ll tell H5 “I’m grabbing an apple, which will service my routine and keep the calorie count low, is that okay with you?” And H5 is generally okay with it.
I ignore H6. H6 is liar. H6 is worse than H3. H6 is like the guy at the party who wants to get into your pants and it seems exciting and desirable and exactly what you want and need at the time, but you have nothing but shame inside you in the morning.
I could pretty much write a post about each voice, but I think you get the idea. I might delve into this in a series of future posts, and flesh those voices out. There is a lot of weight loss advice I see out in the wider world that is trying to speak to these voices, but the authors don't really get it. That's the advice like "You have to understand the reason why you eat. So think about it and figure it out. Okay ready to work out?" and "Check in with you body and see how hungry you are!" On Weight Watchers web site on the food log there is a little link called "Track Hunger". You click on it and you can rate you hunger 1 - 6 before and after your meal. This is nice, but I don't think they mean H1 - H6. I think they mean on a scale of 1 - 6 how "hungry" are you? Before I can answer that, I have to figure out which voice is talking.
Note: I believe these ideas apply to me and my experience of the world, I am not making blanket statements about others or passing judgment about how other people feel hunger or how they eat in response. If you take away something from this awesome. if not, thanks for reading!