hunger vs. appetite

Hunger signals the body and brain [biological, 🕺+ 🧠] need for food. It’s a sign your body needs a refill of energy in the near-ish future; EXAMPLE - rumbling, inability to focus, lightheadedness.

Appetite is a psychological [mental/sensational 👃🏼+ 🧠] desire for food; EXAMPLE - “time” for lunch, smell of pizza in the air).

We’ve been conditioned to disregard our innate hunger/fullness cues. Some of us struggle to tell when we’re actually hungry versus when we are experiencing appetite. As we know, hunger is a helpful, biologically evolved sensation from your body designed to keep us nourished. Looking back to our Alphabet Nutrition series, "peptide YY" plays a big role in the delicate dance that our hunger hormones play.

FINDING GOLDILOCKS

The goal is to find that “goldilocks”: not waiting to consume food until you are absolutely ravenous, but simultaneously not mindlessly shoveling food into your mouth until you feel ill-full. This “goldilocks” point might actually feel like a different threshold every single day or even every single meal.

PRACTICE 

A way to practice finding balanced gauges might be: pause while eating when you feel ~80% full OR you could step away from your grub and walk or do some high knees without wanting to vom!! For me, it’s different each day and even just 2-3 more bites can send me into sluggish mode.

CAVEAT 

There are of course times when we cannot necessarily pause, tap into our yogi soul breath while sitting criss-cross-applesauce and put an ear to our stomach - hoping it will tell us “to feast or not to feast”!! For example, sometimes you’re going to want to eat according to your appetite (out with friends, popcorn + chocolate at a movie, etc.!)...this is A OK!!! And other times you’re going to have to eat before you’re actually hungry (at work lunch, before an event where you know you won’t have another opportunity to eat for several hours, etc.).

IN SUMMARY

Hunger is biological (🕺+ 🧠) need for food = rumbling, inability to focus, lightheadedness.

Appetite is mental/sesational (🧠) want for food = “time” for lunch, smell of pizza in the air.

WHAT IS INTUITIVE EATING

Intuitive Eating is essentially the innate 'hunger-satiety' system that we are born with. It's something we all have access to, is free of membership fees, payment plans, or special requirements to meet. This system is hard-wired into each and every one of us; no download, data entry, or macronutrient required (source).

In a nutshell, with this system you eat only after you’ve experienced belly hunger, and stop when you’ve had just enough. It sounds easy...but, as we know, we've been primed to ignore these primitive signals from our belly and instead listen to social media "fit tea" ads, celebrities, etc...so this internal regulating system is much easier said than done.

Your energy expenditure ebbs and flows depending on what you have going on during the day. When you depend on your hunger and satiation signals to take the lead, your food intake will naturally adjust as necessary to coincide with your energy output, or how many calories your body is using. PYY and ghrelin will work in perfect harmony via their ''hunger-satiety system" to ensure your tum and brain are thriving...it's legitimately the system humans were born to survive with! To learn more about it, I love this Girls Gone Strong article that breaks it down with advice and tactical take away.