Let’s be honest - How often do you find yourself walking to the refrigerator or pantry for food when you aren’t really hungry?

 I counted 10 !

Typically “Hunger” is your body’s natural cue that it needs food. But most of the time, we don’t eat because of genuine hunger.

Our food cravings are a lot of times linked to things that have nothing to do with whether we are actually hungry like having a emotional response to food commercials, IG posts, or smelling something we walk by. 

This is one of the reasons why it can be difficult to actually get pounds off as we often eat in line with our emotions and senses.

Knowing when you anticipate hunger and when your mind is just playing tricks on you can be a huge challenge but not impossible.

You can start, by learning about the 4 different hunger cues:

PHYSICAL HUNGER - AKA “True” hunger and the biological need to eat. It’s your body’s cue in the form of low energy, headache, or that “hangry” cue that your body is in need of fuel. Kinda like your gas light; as the gas light turns on as a warning to stop and refuel, hunger turns on as a reminder to stop and eat.

TASTE HUNGER - AKA “sounds good” food. It’s when you crave a specific food or flavor of food. This is a valid hunger feeling but where people go wrong is that they over indulge. Get out of the mindset of giving yourself permission to choose the food that you feel like eating and instead control how much you eat of it. 

EMOTIONAL HUNGER - AKA “makes me happy” food . Food can give us pleasure and comfort BUT we shouldn’t use food as a coping mechanisms for things that aren’t going well in life. Because, let’s face it, food rarely meets our emotional need or addresses the root cause of why we are feeling that way.

PRACTICAL HUNGER - AKA “best kind of eating” because this is when you anticipate hunger and eat because it’s good idea. You don’t want to wait until you feel hungry to eat because you are more likely to make bad decisions because you want the hunger feeling to go away. Practical hunger means you are eating in a preparative or preventative way, such as having prep meals.

Once you become more aware of these different types of hunger and their reasons, you learn to respond consciously and more appropriately to satisfy them.

So what’s your hunger language?