Your body is really good at communicating with you. If your body needs rest, it makes you sleepy. If you are sick, you might have a fever or a cough. And if you’re hungry or full, your body lets you know. These cues are the body’s most important signals and its best way at letting you know what’s up. But diet culture says you have to ignore these hunger and fullness cues if you want to lose weight and be “healthy.” This creates a distrust between you and your body, and it feels like you don’t know what your body is actually telling you. 

If this sounds familiar, hear this: It is possible to rebuild that trust and connection with your body. Listening to your hunger and fullness cues is a skill you must practice to build and sync up with your mind and body, but it is fully possible, even if you’ve been disconnected from your body for forever. 

Let’s explore how. 

Why Do My Hunger and Fullness Cues Matter?

Pretend you’re going out to brunch. It’s confusing because it’s not breakfast or lunch, so should you eat breakfast? Skip it and save up for brunch? Eat tiny meals at both and still feel hungry after? 

When you trust your hunger and fullness cues, you trust that you can figure out what to eat and how much to eat based on what your body’s signals tell you in that exact moment. For example, if you’re having a day where you’re hungrier than normal, you can notice your appetite is bigger today and honor it instead of freaking out and feeling like you’re going to eat yourself into oblivion. 

Trusting your hunger and fullness cues also makes it easier to plan day-to-day for your eating because you know what to expect. You’ll start having some consistency, and you’ll know how to plan and prepare to give your body what it needs. 

Life gets easier, better, and more enjoyable when you trust your body’s hunger and fullness cues. 

The Underlying Reasons You Lost Trust in Your Body

You were born an intuitive eater who trusted your body. As a baby, you didn’t question your hunger or fullness. You ate when you were hungry and stopped when you were full. But somewhere along the line, through messages from caregivers and society, you learned to not trust your hunger and fullness. Maybe you were told you had to clean your plate to get dessert or you couldn’t have a snack right now because you just ate. 

These well-meaning methods were intended to help keep you healthy as a child, but they had an unintended consequence: a disconnection and disruption from your hunger and fullness cues. Then diet culture reinforces this, saying to suppress hunger cues by drinking water, avoid fullness with portion control, or load up on high-volume/low-calorie foods, like salads. Instead of trusting your body and its signals, diet culture taught you to rely on external rules, like tracking calories, portion sizes, macros, points, or even the portion sizes on food packages. 

But you don’t try to measure the amount of oxygen you get by breathing, right? You trust your body to take what it needs and do its thing. You can have that same level of trust with your hunger. 

The Consequences of Ignoring Hunger and Fullness

Diet culture trains your brain to disconnect from your body’s signals. Instead, it creates an illusion of control, promising that if you eat in a certain way, you can control your body, weight, and health. But disregarding your body’s hunger and fullness signals can have major consequences. 

• Lack of control. Ironically, the more we try to control our eating and our bodies, the more out of control we feel because we’re fighting against our biology instead of working with it. For some, this can develop into emotional eating, disordered eating, or even an eating disorder. 
• Your body’s survival mode kicks in. By repeatedly ignoring your hunger and fullness cues, your body thinks it’s in danger. Its survival mechanism kicks in and compensates for the lack of nutrition by amplifying your hunger cues and increasing your cravings, especially for high carbohydrate and high-calorie foods (a.k.a., quick sources of energy). 
• Your body doesn’t trust you. Trust goes both ways. If you don’t trust your body, eventually it will stop trusting you and slow your metabolism (literally burning fewer calories). A dysregulated metabolism and dysregulated hunger/fullness cycle alters your appetite hormones, affecting your digestive system and creating nutritional deficiencies. 
• You confuse physical and emotional hunger. It will become difficult to tell when your body actually needs food or when you’re just stressed.
• You become too numbed to your body’s sensations. When your hunger and fullness cues are ignored too often, it becomes harder to tune into those sensations, making you feel more detached from your body and all of its signals, like needing to pee, stress, or emotions. 

How to Rebuild Trust with Your Hunger and Fullness 

So how do you start to rebuild that trust in the connection with your hunger and fullness? Let’s break it down.

Step 1: Understand the True Nature of Hunger

First, it’s important to understand how physical hunger — a true physiological need from your body — works versus emotional hunger. Emotional hunger is wanting to eat for reasons that aren’t about fulfilling that physical need. Instead, it can be a form of stress, coping with emotions, boredom, or stress. 

Starting with a consistent eating schedule can help your digestive system and appetite signals back in rhythm. Next, practice tuning into your body’s subtle signals, like growling stomach, lightheadedness, irritability. Eating consistently and tuning into your body’s cues shows your body that fuel is available. (My 5-step guide reconnects with your hunger and fullness cues can help you start to get in touch with the nuances of different degrees of hunger and fullness.) 

Step 2: Let Go of Food Labels and Allow Yourself to Just Eat

This is a hard one: you have to let go of “good” versus “bad” foods, and give yourself permission to just eat. When you neutralize foods — making no food “off limits” — your body feels safe enough to trust its own cues again. One of the most empowering things in this process is you get to honor your food preferences. You don’t have to choke things down that you feel like you should eat. Instead, you get to have food likes and dislikes, and eat what you want to or what your body needs to feel nourished without guilt. 

Step 3: Create a New Relationship with Fullness

Here’s a mindset shift: fullness is a sensation. It’s a normal, natural, helpful biological cue, not a moral test or a way to grade yourself on how well you did with eating. Neutralizing your feelings towards it and appreciating it just as much as hunger is crucial because it is your body’s way of telling you you had enough. 

How full is full? Aim for comfortable/gentle satisfaction or fullness, as opposed to feeling stuffed. Tuning into your body’s subtle cues partway through your meals — just pause and check in — can help you gauge where you’re at and get in touch with your fullness cue. 

Step 4: Gradually Reconnect with Your Body 

Practicing non-judgmental awareness and patience as you learn to retrust your body’s signals is crucial while reconnecting to your hunger and fullness cues. You may need to create some ways to remind yourself to be more mindful when you’re eating. Set out a nice placemat or light a candle, or even add a sticky note that reminds you to do a powerful pause. Creating an environment that fosters mindful awareness will help you be active and intentional with connecting with your hunger and fullness cues. 

Common Roadblocks and How to Overcome Them 

There are a few common roadblocks people face while trying to reconnect with their hunger and fullness cues. Let’s break them down and how to overcome each one. 

• Fear of Overeating: This is a common barrier after years of restriction. Tackle this fear head-on by giving yourself full permission to eat and to acknowledge that your body probably is going to have a strong drive for food. This is normal. Your body can and will self-regulate when you’re allowed to eat freely. 
• The Trap of “Healthy” Eating: The myth of “healthier” foods leading to guilt-free eating. Constantly chasing “health” can still keep you stuck in the dieting mentality. You can be healthy and honor your health while having your cake (and eating it too). Foods nourish in different ways, so focus on honoring your hunger and fullness cues first. 
• Emotional Eating: We all eat in response to emotions, but if turning to food is your only way of coping with uncomfortable emotions, that’s a problem. Recognize when you’re having those urges to eat in response to emotions, and separate out emotional hunger from physical. Leaning into a eating schedule can help you identify when emotions are driving hunger. 
• Feelings of “Not Enough” Progress: If you feel discouraged by your progress, you’re not alone. The learning curve can be steep, but small steps lead to big shifts. I tell my Non-Diet Academy clients the same thing I’ll tell you: you are exactly where you are meant to be.

Key Takeaways

Reconnecting to your hunger and fullness cues is a multi-faceted journey that requires ongoing support, practice, and education. Take that knowledge and use it to make strategic decisions about how you approach your eating, listening to your body, and understanding what it needs. Trusting your body is a process, and it’s okay to take it slow. Celebrate the small victories along the way — every step toward healing is progress. 

What’s next? Take five minutes today to sit with your body and check in with its signals. What is it trying to tell you? Check in with your hunger/fullness cues, then see if there are any other signals your body is giving you. Are any emotions showing up? Be curious and non-judgmental. 

In case no one has told you today, you are worthy just as you are. 

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