HELP - I don’t understand hunger & fullness cues!

Do you know what hunger feels like? Fullness? Not just ravenous hunger or Thanksgiving full - but normal, everyday hunger and fullness?  One of the most common barriers with eating intuitively is that people genuinely don’t know how to tell (or trust) that they are hungry or full. Some people don’t even experience hunger cues or fullness cues! Like they feel endlessly hungry, unable to be satisfied, out of control. Sound familiar?


Being out of touch with your body’s regulation system is a bit stressful, as I’m sure you can imagine, and makes eating intuitively essentially impossible. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to be a true intuitive eater if you don’t know how to appropriately recognize & address your cues. 

This is because:

  1. You’ll probably try to reduce intuitive eating to a hunger-fullness diet - which ultimately will end in another disappointment because

  2. You don’t know what normal physical hunger and fullness are

How can you base good nutrition on something you don’t even know how to identify or trust? Trick question, you can’t.

Why We Need to Start Listening

The goal of dieting is to separate you from your body’s communications. The goal of IE is to repair and fortify your ability to listen to your body’s communications.  Although IE can’t be reduced to just listening to hunger and fullness cues, it is a critical part. Listening to your hunger and fullness requires you to be in tune with your body, aware of your cravings, and aware of the overall “outcome” of eating a food (outcome in the sense of how it makes you feel). When we are truly able to listen to hunger and fullness cues & separate them from disordered eating, shoulds/shouldn’ts, medications, and illnesses - we can:

  • ensure we’re nourishing our bodies really well

  • escape food shame and guilt

  • have confidence in our food choices

  • resist influence of other people’s opinions of how we “should” be caring for ourselves

  • find satisfaction in the foods we eat

  • feel physically and mentally great :)

  • prevent overeating

  • prevent underrating

  • normalize our menstrual cycles

  • maintain a healthy weight

Sounds magical, right? Trust me - it is! I have been on this journey and the end result is the feeling of an enormous weight being lifted off of your shoulders. If you want to experience this too, the first step to getting back in tune with your body’s signals is practicing noticing your hunger and fullness cues.

Signs of hunger

If you’re going to know how to listen to your cues, first you need to know what you’re listening for. Here are some common hunger cues - note that the cues closer to the bottom on the list are cues indicating you’ve waited too long to eat. Usually 1-2 cues are a reliable indicator of hunger.

  • Increased thoughts about food

  • Pit in your stomach

  • Growling in the stomach

  • Decreased alertness

  • Decreased ability to concentration

  • Decreased mood (i.e. irritability, easily annoyed, hanger)

  • Increased fatigue

  • Increased saliva production

  • Headache

  • Nausea

  • Dizziness

  • Seeing spots

  • Tingling in the fingertips or around the mouth

  • >3-4 hours since you last ate

Signs of fullness

You’ll obviously want to know what common signs of fullness are as well. Whereas hunger may demonstrate more as “stand alone” symptoms, you’ll likely recognize true fullness as a combination of the following symptoms. It’s most important to note is that true fullness is not just the absence of hunger or absence of more severe hunger symptoms like being dizzy. 

  • Resolved pit in stomach

  • Resolved thoughts about food

  • Food losing its enticing flavor

  • Losing interest in the food you’re eating (i.e. being tired of chewing or “over it”)

  • Restored alertness

  • Restored ability to concentration

  • Improved mood (i.e. feeling social, calm, at ease)

  • Restored energy

  • Increased bandwidth to handle life/things outside of food

  • Feeling satisfied with the food eaten based on flavor, cravings, nutrients, mood, physical feelings, etc

  • Feelings of being overly full resemble - fatigue, intense bloating, discomfort, headache, nausea, etc


I encourage you to practice identifying these cues throughout the week. Take it a step further by letting those cues be ok & honoring what your body is communicating to you. That’s the real work! 

xx Desa 

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Emotional Hunger vs. Physical Hunger

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