We’re all familiar with the concept of feeling hungry, but sometimes we lose touch with why we are hungry. Not all hunger pangs are real hunger, and when we can understand the different causes and types of hunger, we can meet our body’s needs and cultivate a intuitive and mindful way of eating.
What Is Hunger?
While hunger can be an ambiguous term, it is primarily defined as “the sensation or state of weakness caused by the need of food.” Appetite, on the other hand, refers to the desire for food, perhaps even when there is no need.
The most important distinction is that hunger is physical. Hunger is not a thought, a craving, or a rationalization. Having said that; hunger or the desire to eat can be triggered by more than the actual reason of needing to fuel. Understanding these different triggers will enable you to assess what is causing you to eat certain types of food, and how to ensure that your eating habits are healthfully aligned. Hunger is a legitimate need for food, but can often be mistaken for appetite.
I have read a book by Jan Chozen Bays – “Mindful Eating – A guide to rediscovering a healthy and joyful relationship with food”. In the book she talks about the 7 hungers, she later added an 8th hunger. I find her valuable teachings so helpful with my clients and in my practice.
The Hunger Games
EYE HUNGER
Eye hunger is triggered by food that you see - whether on a screen, people eating in front of you, or just going through a recipe book. Think of a time when you ordered a delicious-looking chocolate cake just as you saw the waiter passing it to the table next to you in.a restaurant; you suddenly felt the need to have it only because you saw it.
NOSE HUNGER
The smell of food can actually make you think you need to eat. Think of the smell of baking or coffee. Even though you might have just had a meal; you would smell freshly baked bread and still want to eat it.
EAR HUNGER
The sound of packets opening can trigger ear hunger, to the sound of the popcorn crunch might urge you to get your own popcorn even though you were not hungry.
MOUTH HUNGER
Mouth hunger is the mouth’s desire for a variety of pleasurable sensations. Salt, sweet, then salty and then sweet, and the loop never ends. Mouth hunger is the most difficult to satisfy, because the mouth is satisfied by sensation, it desires variety in flavour and texture and it bores easily. It keeps chasing the dopamine, be it soft food, cold, crunchy, and so on.. regardless of fullness in the stomach.
STOMACH HUNGER
This is the physical biological hunger - as we experience sensations in the stomach depending on hunger levels. A rumbling tummy is one of the main ways we recognise hunger. And yet, it doesn’t necessarily mean our body needs food. The hunger cues from the stomach are self-taught and linked to the schedule we have give our imposed upon it. It takes practice to sense when a grumbling stomach means actual hunger.
Often, we can confuse the sensation with other feelings that affect our stomach such as anxiety or nervousness. If we feed anxiety with junk food, then get more anxious about our diet, we can spark off a negative spiral of emotional eating.
What sensations tell you that your stomach is uncomfortably empty? comfortably empty? Empty? Satisfied? Pleasantly full? Stuffed? we satisfy this type of hunger by eating and tuning in to our levels of fullness and stopping at a comfortable point; which we alone can define as we learn how to trust our body and its cues.
MIND HUNGER
This type of hunger is a product of the diet culture. We're constantly influenced by the current fad diet, the latest nutritional guidelines or research paper. We are deafened by our inner voice telling us that one type of food is good and one type bad. This can make it very difficult to pick up on our body’s natural cues. The mind is very difficult to satisfy; it is fickle and will find something new to focus on if one craving is satisfied; as the Buddhist saying goes: "Like an archer, an arrow, the wise man steadies his trembling mind, a fickle and restless weapon"
“I should eat more protein”, “I should drink more water”, “I should fast”, “oil is going to make me fat, it is high in calories”, “eggs are good for you they have lots of protein”, “I need to have green juice everyday”… etc.
It is vert important to know about healthy eating and good nutrition, there is no doubt, but when we become victims of these rules and live our life like a robot, not knowing how to be free around food, that is when we need to step back and work on expanding our awareness around food habits, so that we can make more conscious decisions about what we eat and when
Mind hunger changes – many years ago butter was considered bad, now margarine is bad. Fat was the enemy but now sugar and wheat are the enemy. Pay attention to the voices in your head about food – they normally come in the form of a “should or shouldn’t”…
CELLULAR HUNGER
Cellular hunger is what the body needs, and not what the mind needs. Essential elements satisfy cellular hunger – water, salt, protein, fat, minerals, vitamins, carbohydrates and trace minerals. This is true hunger.. time to fuel! If you’re actually hungry, you’ll experience true hunger cues, such as stomach growling, low energy, shakiness, headaches and problems focusing. To master the game of hunger, and how to eat when you really need to eat; this takes practice and tuning in to your bodily sensations and self-observation.
Some ways to check in with your body about your hunger levels include:
Pausing and asking yourself if you’re truly hungry – and doing your best to be honest and not neglect real hunger.
Doing a head-to-toe body scan to evaluate your physical state and mood
Eating more slowly and allowing your body time to let you know when you have had enough
It's worth mentioning as well the role of hormones in shaping our appetite and hunger signals. Leptin and ghrelin are the big players in regulating appetite. Leptin is secreted primarily in fat cells, in addition to the stomach, heart, placenta, and skeletal muscle. Leptin decreases hunger. Ghrelin on the other hand is secreted primarily in the lining of the stomach. Ghrelin increases hunger.
What is interesting to shed light on is that leptin takes approximately 20 minutes from the time you start eating for your brain to send out signals of fullness. When you're really hungry, ghrelin sends those messages every 20 or 30 minutes. That is why it is very helpful to eat slowly and mindfully, this way you can allow those signals to reach your brain; resulting in eating less.
HEART HUNGER
Most of us call it emotional hunger; that's when you reach out to comfort food when you have feelings that you do not want to deal with - be it sadness, loneliness, anger and so on. Comfort foods do raise dopamine and give us a feeling of safety, warmth and connection. That is not a problem - the real problem is when we start to reach out to food to numb our feelings when they arise; which overtime creates a habit and a familiarity around emotional eating.
No food can truly satisfy heart hunger. Heart hunger is satisfied by connection with ourselves, self-knowledge and compassion.
Healthy eating is all about balance. It is not a sin if you overeat sometimes - regardless of the reason, but when it becomes a problem and a habit that is dominating your life; perhaps you would like to dig deeper and ask yourself; what is this cycle trying to tell me? What do I need to look at within myself that needs my attention, love and compassion.
The below is a paragraph from a book I read earlier by Gabor Maté and I had highlighted the below a reminder how curiosity, compassion and self-awareness are the keys to healing and a mindful peaceful life:
“The other mind entity is what we call the impartial observer. This mind of present- moment awareness stands outside the preprogrammed physiological determinants and is alive to the present. It works through the brain but is not limited to the brain. It may be dormant in many of us, but it is never completely absent. It transcends the automatic functioning of past-conditioned brain circuits. ‘In the end,...I conclude that there is no good evidence… that the brain alone can carry out the work that the mind does.”
Knowing oneself comes from attending with compassionate curiosity to what is happening within.
Methods for gaining self-knowledge and self-mastery through conscious awareness strengthen the mind’s capacity to act as its own impartial observer. Among the simplest and most skilful of the meditative techniques taught in many spiritual traditions is the disciplined practice of what Buddhists call ‘bare attention’. Nietzsche called Buddha ‘that profound physiologist’ and his teachings less a religion than a ‘kind of hygiene’...’ Many of our automatic brain processes have to do with either wanting something or not wanting something else – very much the way a small child’s mental life functions. We are forever desiring or longing, or judging and rejecting. Mental hygiene consists of noticing the ebb and flow of all those automatic grasping or rejecting impulses without being hooked by then. Bare attention is directed not only toward what’s happening on the outside, but also to what’s taking place on the inside.
‘Be at least interested in your reactions as in the person or situation that triggers them.’... In a mindful state one can choose to be aware of the ebb and flow of emotions and thought patterns instead of brooding on their content. Not ‘he did this to me therefore I’m suffering’ but ‘I notice that feelings of resentment and a desire for vengeance keep flooding my mind.’... ‘Bare Attention is the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception,’... ‘It is called ‘Bare’ because it attends just to the bare facts of a perception as presented either through the five physical senses of through the mind without reacting to them.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
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