I am Katy Harvey, your host, and today on the show, we’re gonna talk about trusting your body again after years, or maybe even decades, of ignoring your hunger and fullness. Wanting to trust your body is such a great thing to be aiming for; that’s literally what I teach on this podcast. But it can be frustrating when you feel like you don’t know what your body is actually telling you, or when you can’t recognize the true signals for hunger and fullness. I hear this from people all the time: they want to listen to their body, they love the idea of doing that, but they’re not sure how because it’s so confusing.

Let me give you an example. One of the most common questions I get is whether or not you should eat breakfast if you’re not hungry. A lot of people wake up and they’ll say, “Katy, I don’t intuitively feel hungry for breakfast. I don’t feel hungry until late morning or midday. But I’ve also heard about the benefits of breakfast, so should I force myself to eat it even though I’m not hungry, or do I wait until I’m hungry?” We’re gonna dig into this later in the episode, because the way I approach this with my clients is somewhat counterintuitive for a lot of you, and it’s going to help you get more connected with your hunger and fullness. We’re going to leverage some science and some physiology about how your body and appetite signals work.

I really want you to hear that even if it feels like you’ve been disconnected from and distrusting of your body for forever, it is possible for you to rebuild that trust and connection. Think of it this way: my oldest son is one of those kids for whom swimming did not come naturally, while my youngest son was like a fish when you put him in the water. It’s so funny how different it can be. For my oldest, it really required a lot of practice and repetition because it didn’t come naturally. He needed his mind and his body to click with what he needed to do, when and where to put his arms and legs, and how to build those skills around swimming. And it happened by taking lessons, getting guidance from an instructor, and practicing different skills that allowed him to learn how to properly connect with his body and how to do the motions in a way that results in the outcome we are looking for: not drowning!

I want you to think of it similarly with hunger and fullness. It’s a skill you must practice in order to build, and as we connect your mind and body with those signals, we’re going to get them synced up. It’s going to become more intuitive over time, just like swimming becomes more intuitive over time. And we’re not just doing this for the sake of doing it. Let’s cast that vision for why this matters and what it does for you in your life. Imagine yourself going on vacation—maybe you’re getting ready for spring break, or perhaps you’ve got a summer vacation coming up. Think about what it’s like to go on vacation when you don’t trust yourself with food. You might feel like you have to diet leading up to the vacation, knowing that you’re going to indulge more on the trip. You might feel like you have to take special foods with you on the trip so you don’t eat all the “bad foods.” You might feel like you have to be really controlled and rigid with food on the trip, trying to eat as healthily as possible.

You might do that thing where you restrict and save up throughout the day so you can go out and have a big dinner at night. It takes away from the vacation. It takes you away from being able to just spontaneously enjoy the local ice cream shop or taste the local cuisine without feeling guilty or trying to add up the calories in your mind. It’s very hard to travel when we don’t trust ourselves because we’re still trying to be in control, and that’s bumping up against the many ways it’s difficult to control our food while traveling.

Another good example is going out for brunch. I have so many people say, “Katy, brunch is the most confusing thing because it’s not breakfast, it’s not lunch, it’s not when my body’s used to eating. Should I eat breakfast, or do I skip breakfast and save up for brunch, but then I’m starving by the time brunch rolls around?” When you trust your hunger and fullness, you trust that you can do something like go on a trip or go to brunch, and that in any given moment, in any given location, with any given type of food, you can figure out what to eat and how much of it to eat based on what your body is telling you in that exact moment. You start to realize that your body is always right there with you. Those signals are always there to tell you what you need.

You’ll also notice that when you have those days where you’re hungrier than normal—where you’re just like, “Oh my gosh, I’m just hungry over and over again, more than usual”—instead of that freaking you out and making you feel like you’re going to eat yourself into oblivion, you’ll be able to say, “Okay, I’m noticing my appetite’s bigger today. We’re going to roll with that. We’re going to honor that.” Sometimes what I’ll do is try to add more protein to what I’m eating to increase that satiety and give my body that sense of enoughness with the food.

You’ll also find that it’s easier to plan day-to-day for your eating when you really trust your hunger and fullness because you know what to expect. It makes it more predictable because you’ll find that you start to have some consistency, and you know how to plan and prepare to give your body what it needs. So, your life gets easier, better, and more enjoyable when you have that trust with your hunger and fullness.

Okay, before we go any further, you know what time it is! We’ve got some wellness woo to talk about. Wellness woo is the stuff that diet and wellness culture tells us we should do in the name of health but is really based on pseudoscience, exaggerated claims, or just nonsense. Today’s wellness woo is a recent hot topic: Red Dye 3. You may have seen in the news headlines that the FDA in the United States banned Red Dye 3. The FDA doing this really has led the public to believe that Red Dye 3 is actually dangerous for our health because why would they ban it if it’s not dangerous? Good question. Well, the reason it is being banned is out of an abundance of caution because when they tested this in rats, they gave them massive amounts of Red Dye 3, and it was shown to cause thyroid cancer. However, it is important that you know that this has not been shown to occur in humans.

We need to understand the limitations of the research. Of course, people are very relieved to hear that the FDA has banned it, and the public has been led to believe that this is great for public health, and it’s going to help with things like ADHD. Side note: that’s not even Red Dye 3 we’re talking about—that’s Red Dye 40 in the ADHD conversation. But a lot of people don’t understand the nitty-gritty of this and are jumping to conclusions based on the headlines. Here’s the reality: the data suggesting that Red Dye 3 is harmful comes from a study in rats, where they ate 4% of their body weight in red dye for months on end. This would be the equivalent of a human eating over 100 grams of red dye every single day for months. It’s an amount that nobody is realistically going to consume. It is also noteworthy that these rats were bred with genetics that predisposed them to thyroid tumors. The average person consumes less than 1 milligram of red dye per day, let alone 100 grams.

There is no evidence that this minuscule amount of red dye is a risk to human health. You might be wondering why it’s banned in Europe and other countries. Other countries do have lower acceptable daily intake limits set than the US, and this was done in response to public outcry from the fearmongering about this rat study. In Europe, for example, they have the threshold set at 0.1 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day. Even that is still far below what an average person could realistically eat. The unintended consequence of this ban is that food manufacturers will likely replace Red Dye 3 with natural alternatives, which are likely to be less shelf-stable and more expensive. This means the food is going to cost more, and that cost will get passed on to consumers.

The bottom line is that the literature does not show actual safety risks associated with Red Dye 3 at the doses humans are consuming. This change, this policy, this ban, is not going to move the needle for health. It feels like a big, huge distraction—a red herring. The other thing it does, which I believe is harmful, is that it spreads the fearmongering about food and chemicals. It’s a narrative rooted in fear, not science, leading people to believe they need to be afraid of food in ways that are inaccurate. It creates unnecessary stress, unnecessary food restrictions, unnecessary guilt and fear, and it ends up costing more money. People are out there trying to avoid foods with this in it, buying alternatives, stressing about it, and spending more money. But it’s not actually improving their health.

This perpetuates the narrative about chemicals in food. All food—even foods that grow in nature—is made up of chemicals. The fearmongering around chemicals, especially ones for which there is no science behind it being harmful at realistic doses, needs to stop. Anything can be toxic if consumed in excess, even water. So, yes, I get that extremes could probably be harmful, but it would have to be so extreme that it’s not realistic or feasible for humans to be consuming in that quantity. The whole Red Dye 3 thing is wellness woo. It’s not something you need to be worrying about.

If you have an example of wellness woo that you want to share, send it my way! Shoot me a DM or an email at RebuildingTrustWithYourBody@gmail.com. Alright, that’s enough of that. Let’s get back to today’s main topic: how to trust your body again after years of ignoring your hunger and fullness. We need to go back and understand the underlying reasons that you lost trust with your body in the first place. You were born an intuitive eater who trusted your body. As a baby, you didn’t question your hunger and fullness. Even as a toddler, you didn’t. You just ate when you were hungry and stopped when you were full. Somewhere along the line, through messages from caregivers and society, you learned not to trust your hunger and fullness. Maybe you were told that you had to clean your plate to get dessert, or that you couldn’t have a snack right now because you couldn’t possibly be hungry—you just ate an hour ago—or you were told you couldn’t have second helpings because you’d already had enough.

These little ways in which caregivers are trying to help a child be healthy have an unintended consequence: they create a disruption and disconnection with hunger and fullness and honoring and trusting those signals. As you get older, through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, you become more influenced by and aware of diet culture and those messages about ignoring internal cues—about ignoring your hunger or suppressing it by drinking a bunch of water, apple cider vinegar, Diet Coke, or coffee. We try to avoid fullness as well, doing things like portion control, measuring, or weighing our food. We try to avoid “eating too much” by putting external limitations around food quantities in the first place. Or we might try to trick our fullness by loading up on high-volume, low-calorie foods like salads, vegetables, and rice cakes. We’re taught by diet culture to rely on external rules—tracking calories, portion sizes, macros, points—even portion sizes listed on food packages.

She was like, “Is that what I’m supposed to eat?” and we talked through like, no, that’s not a reflection of what your body needs in this exact moment, and you don’t need the food label to tell you how much to have. You get to go inward and determine how much to have based on what your body actually needs in that moment, because in that moment, it might be different than another moment that you were eating that food.

So we’re taught to look external because we don’t trust ourselves internally. Think about this – this is kind of a silly example – but you aren’t measuring the amount of oxygen you’re consuming and limiting or rationing yourself. You just trust, and you don’t even think about it, that your body knows how to breathe, and you just let your body do its thing. And we don’t second guess whether our body is accurately breathing.

So we want to get to where you have that level of trust with your hunger. Because all of this impact of the messages we’ve received in the diets we’ve done, in the ways we’ve tried to control our food, it trains your brain to disconnect from your body and to disregard what your body is saying. It creates the illusion of control because diet culture tells us that if we just control our eating and we do our eating a certain way, that we can control our bodies, we can control our weight, we can control our health, even the messages around being able to control our youthfulness and to prevent aging.

Ironically, the more that we try to control our eating and our bodies, often the more out of control we feel because we’re fighting against our biology rather than working with it. For some people, this is where they develop disordered eating or an eating disorder. And at that point, when they’re trying to follow these rules, and now they’ve got this eating disorder voice in their head telling them what to do and making them feel extremely distressed and ashamed if they don’t follow the rules, in that situation, you’re not in control of what’s going on anymore. The eating disorder, the disordered eating, is what’s in control.

Or for a lot of you listening to this, honestly, some tough love here – diet culture is still very much in control of your relationship with food. And that can be hard to reckon with, but I think it’s important that we acknowledge it and that we give ourselves compassion for why and how we got here. The ways that diet culture has just been so ever-present, omnipresent, all around us for basically our entire lives.

And the more you fight against food in your body, and the more you are trying to restrict your eating, and the more you are trying to avoid binge eating, but you find yourself doing it, and you find yourself emotionally eating, the more disconnected you progressively become from your body. And then what this does is it further damages the trust with your body because you’re trying to be in control, but then you find yourself out of control. And so you don’t trust your body, you don’t trust yourself with food, you don’t trust yourself as a human being, and you feel like you’re some food addict or some out-of-control being.

And it translates in how we end up not only not trusting our bodies, but we don’t trust our own reality with our thoughts or our emotions or how we experience the world. This disconnect creates this deep sense of distrust within ourselves. And another reason here that I don’t want to overlook, that you don’t trust yourself with food, is the food morality trap.

Because when food is getting morally characterized in your brain as being good or bad, this is impacting your relationship with those foods and it’s causing further disconnection from your physical cues. Because it makes your eating feel like a test of your willpower rather than a response to what your body needs. Because when you’re all stuck up in your head about what you should eat and shouldn’t eat, and this was good, this is bad, I should eat more of this, I should eat less of this, it’s disconnection from your body because it’s all about the shoulds and the shouldn’ts.

And when the food is neutral, you can actually listen to your body. It doesn’t mean ignore nutrition, but when you don’t have all of the drama about food in your head, you are much more free and able to listen to your body. Now, okay, so we understand why we’re disconnected, right? We can have an appreciation for that and compassion for that. Next, I want us to look at the consequences of ignoring your hunger and fullness because we need to understand the negative ramifications of this, and then we’re going to talk about what do you do, how do you get reconnected.

By repeatedly ignoring your hunger and fullness and trying to trick yourself into not eating or into eating less and striving to ignore your cravings in order to eat healthy, what ends up happening is your body’s survival mechanisms kick in, and your body compensates for this by amplifying your hunger cues and increasing your cravings, especially for high carbohydrate and high-calorie foods, which are quick sources of energy and are going to be something that your body can kind of hold on to.

And then we misinterpret these cravings as, oh my gosh, I must be addicted to food or I’m a carpooler or I have no discipline or I have no willpower. But really what’s happening is your body is perceiving the food restriction and the ignoring of your biological cues for hunger and fullness. Your body perceives that as a threat to your survival. Your body thinks, you know, there’s no logical reason that we wouldn’t eat when we’re hungry. This must mean there’s not enough food available. Your body thinks very primitively as a survival machine.

And so we can understand from that vantage point the reason that, okay, if your body thinks that there’s not enough food available, of course, it’s gonna ramp up your hunger signals and increase your cravings. It’s trying to prompt you to eat more. And of course, when you do eat, you’re gonna inhale that food and probably eat more than you need because we don’t know when the food will be available again later.

So what happens here is not only do you not trust your body and your hunger and fullness, frankly, your body now doesn’t trust you either. And we need to start there because what happens is your body then is slowing its metabolism, which means it’s literally burning fewer calories. It’s increasing those urges for you to overeat and to binge eat. You can, over time, I’ve seen this over and over again, when you’re being restrictive and controlling with your eating, it can cause nutrient deficiencies, it can cause nutritional imbalances, it can cause blood sugar issues, it can cause cholesterol issues, it can cause health issues in many ways. Digestive issues is another common one.

And what happens here is this disregulated metabolism and this disregulated hunger and fullness cycle makes it very difficult for you to identify your true hunger signals. Because part of what happens is those appetite hormones are altered because your body is trying to get you to eat more. So now we’ve got increased levels of things like ghrelin, and we’ve got leptin suppression, and these hormones are designed to help keep you in energy balance. So now we’ve got those all messed up. It can alter your digestive system, which then makes it hard to eat normally when you’re having all sorts of digestive symptoms.

It can alter the rates at which your body is secreting digestive enzymes that help break down your food. Like why would your body waste its time and energy and resources creating something like the lactase enzyme, which breaks down lactose? And so then people will think, oh my gosh, I’m lactose intolerant. And they are because they’ve been restricting dairy from their diet, and so, yeah, when you eat it, you’re gonna be bloated. Your body doesn’t have the enzyme to break it down. We have to retrain your body to produce that enzyme again by showing your body that it needs to.

And this dysregulated metabolism and hunger and fullness cycle, it creates that strong biological drive to overeat. And so what we need to do is to prove to your body that there are consistent, reliable, adequate opportunities to eat. We need to get out ahead of this by proactively providing your body with those eating instances at regular intervals every few hours throughout the day.

The other thing that often happens as part of this equation is it now becomes also very difficult to distinguish between physical hunger and emotional hunger. And so then you’re eating and you’re like, I don’t know why I’m eating. I don’t know if I’m hungry, I don’t know if I’m stressed, maybe I’m both at the same time. And there’s all of this shaming guilt around it. And we can also get to a place where we basically numbed our body sensations. When your hunger is ignored too often and when your fullness is ignored too often, it becomes harder to tune into these sensations, and you become more and more detached from your body.

And you become only able to recognize the very extreme levels of hunger and fullness, and you might, as part of that numbing and disconnection process, also become disconnected from other physical sensations, like knowing when you need to pee.

Telling you that you’re stressed or the way that emotions show up as sensations in our body, we get disconnected from all of it or walking around like a head without a body because we’re so disconnected. So how do we start to rebuild that trust in that connection with your hunger and fullness? Well, it starts with understanding how your hunger works, how physiological hunger works. We have to be able to differentiate between physical hunger—a true physiological need from your body—and emotional hunger, which is wanting to eat for reasons that aren’t about fulfilling that physical need. It can be a form of coping with emotions or from stress, or with boredom, it can be a way of numbing or distracting yourself from emotions. So we’ve got to tease those two things apart, and a resource that I want you to get a hold of because it walks you through a 5-step process to get you reconnected with your body is my hunger and fullness guide. I want you to go to nondietacademy.com/forward/hunger. I will put it in the show notes as well, and it’s my five simple steps to getting you reconnected. It’s the steps you need to take and put in place inside that guide. There is a copy of the hunger and fullness scale as well, which is a 0 to 10 point continuum upon which hunger and fullness occur, helping you visualize and start to get in touch with the nuances of the different degrees of hunger and fullness.

Here’s where we’re gonna start in terms of getting reconnected with your physiological hunger. This is the counterintuitive part that I teach, and here’s why. So, inside NDA and with my private clients, we start with a consistent eating schedule to help get their digestive system and their appetite signals back in rhythm. I teach this through the SCA framework. So, S stands for schedule, C stands for composition, and A stands for amount. So, the first part of this framework is schedule, and this is where people are like, “Wait, so you want me to eat on a schedule? That doesn’t sound very intuitive!” And yes, I do because in the beginning, most of you can’t eat intuitively, no matter how badly you want to from a hunger-fullness standpoint, because of all of the reasons we have just discussed. Because of all the ways that you are disconnected and distrusting of your hunger and fullness, and because of physiologically how your digestive system and your appetite hormones are jacked up, we need to get those back into proper rhythm in order for you to be able to listen to your hunger and fullness and to trust it. So, with the schedule we put in place, we start with breakfast within an hour of waking up. Let’s get that breakfast going. Let’s get your digestive system going. Let’s get your appetite hormones going. Let’s show your body that fuel is available. And then from there, try not to go any longer than about three or four hours without food. What I help my clients do is we create a custom eating schedule that fits in with the reality of their day-to-day life because everybody’s life and schedules are different. And so we come up with that schedule that is personalized to your everyday life, and it might look different on different days of the week. That is okay.

So, that is the first thing inside Non-Diet Academy, and with a private client that I am doing, is the schedule part when it comes to food. From there, we are going to practice tuning into the subtle signals of your hunger, so noticing, “Okay, when does your stomach start to feel kind of that gnawing or that emptiness or that wanting of food?” A lot of people assume that they’re supposed to wait until their stomach is actually growling in order to eat, and I would argue that is a pretty extreme sign of hunger. We wanna catch it before you get to growling. So, we wanna notice what are those sensations in your stomach that happened before the growling occurs. It might be that you’re feeling a little bit more lightheaded or unclear or unfocused in your thinking. You might be thinking about food more. You might be getting a little restless or irritable. These are signs that you’re needing to eat, and I want you to also understand and be able to normalize for yourself that hunger and fullness are gonna fluctuate day-to-day. You don’t literally need the exact same amount of calories and carbs and proteins and fats every single day. You are not a robot. Part of being a human is that there’s gonna be some fluctuation with your hunger and fullness, and that’s okay. That’s normal. And when you’re connected to it and when you trust it, it’s no big deal.

The other thing we have to do, so we’ve got the schedule put in place, and the rest of that framework, the C is for composition, where I help my clients figure out how to pair together carbs and proteins and fats so that they’re getting a good balance of what they’re craving and what tastes good but also nutritionally what their body needs. And then the A is for the amount, which we want your hunger and fullness to determine. We want you listening to your body. Another part of this though is the mental side. We’ve got to also dismantle the food morality and your ability to give yourself permission to eat. So, we’ve got to work on letting go of the food labels of good versus bad. And I know how hard that is, and I know that you feel deep down within your soul that there absolutely are foods that are good and foods that are bad, and I am here to tell you I spent six years in college studying the ins and outs of nutrition, medical nutrition, human physiology, health, six years of biology, biochemistry, all the things, and there is not a shred of doubt in my soul that there is no food that is inherently good or bad all the time. Context matters, balance matters, variety matters. Any food that you want to be able to eat, provided that you are not allergic to it, you can eat, and we can find a way to do that in a way that supports your health. But when you are stuck labeling those foods as good and bad, you are keeping yourself disconnected from your body, and ironically, you’re actually increasing your cravings for the bad foods, and you are making yourself less likely to want to eat the good foods. So, that thought process is interfering with your ability to listen to your body in an accurate way, and so we’ve got to work on neutralizing those foods and making it so that there’s no off-limits foods. All foods fit because this is gonna help your body feel safe enough to trust its own cues again, and you get to, as part of this process, this is one of the most empowering things, you get to honor your food preferences. You get to have food likes and dislikes, and you don’t have to choke down things that you feel like you should eat, but rather you get to eat what you want to eat or what your body needs you to eat in order to feel nourished. And you get to do that in a way that is unapologetic and that supports you and your life, regardless of what others are doing, and you get to choose to include foods in ways that are satisfying to you.

You don’t have to choke down tasteless steamed vegetables if you don’t like them that way. Let’s roast them. Let’s put some Parmesan cheese on it. Let’s give it some flavor. Let’s dip our carrots in the ranch dressing. Let’s do things to make the food enjoyable while we’re giving ourselves the nutrition, and what this is gonna allow you to do is start to eat without those guilty feelings because for a lot of you, eating without guilt feels impossible. You just can’t even imagine a world where you could eat something like a brownie and not feel guilty afterward. I have had people who told me they were addicted to sugar, addicted to chocolate, who can now have brownies in their house, and they throw out part of the panda brownies because they got stale. So, the guilt-free eating, this is an essential part of rebuilding trust with your body, and we can’t overlook the mental side of it. Some things that are gonna help you to be able to do this, I want you to use that powerful pause—that’s that strategy I teach where you take a pause and take three deep breaths before you eat your meal. It’s gonna help you calm down. It’s gonna help you become more present. It’s gonna help you get more mindful and connected with your body, and it gives you a moment to be able to challenge any food judgments and food guilt thoughts that you’re having and to reframe it as neutral. And then you can eat and talk yourself through it. You have to coach yourself through it and continually reframe the food as neutral and continue to reassure yourself that you can trust your body.

I want to give you a real-life example of how this works to show you that it’s possible because, again, I know that there are so many of you who are like, “That sounds great, but it’s just—that’s not gonna happen for me. I’m too far gone.” You are not too far gone. I can promise you that this—the intuitive eating framework and this non-diet approach—it’s gonna help clear that mental clutter and that noise in your brain and allow your body to guide you more effectively. So, one of my clients who recently took Non Diet Academy, she came to me, and she had been struggling for a very long time with feeling like she had to eat healthy foods, and she was subsisting on a lot of diet foods because in her mind she had kind of merged together, like, healthy and low-calorie, right? And so something like going out to eat with her family or going to a party—these events were super stressful because she’s so worried about what food is gonna be there. Am I gonna let myself eat it? Am I gonna have to make up for it afterward? Am I gonna just have to sit with the guilt? Or maybe I’m not gonna let myself eat it so I don’t have to deal with the guilt, but then I’m gonna feel deprived, and I’m gonna obsess about food the whole time. She was afraid of her hunger, and she didn’t trust her body. She shouldn’t trust herself with food. Now, she has rebuilt trust with her body and with her hunger and fullness signals. And here’s what she told me recently. She said, “I don’t eat diet foods anymore. I just eat the real thing. I trust myself to do that. Truth be told, it’s more satisfying.” She said, “I get exactly what I want when I go out to eat, and I don’t overeat.” She keeps her cupboards and her fridge full of snacks and foods that she loves. Nothing is off-limits anymore, and she’s not binging. She found a love for baking. She can bake and trust herself to have those food sitting on her counter. She no longer fears her hunger. She said to me, “Katie, I have a lot more trust that my body knows what to do, and I am enjoying foods and social gatherings more than I ever have. Like, life is literally more enjoyable now.” This is what’s possible for you too, and I know it. This person’s not a unicorn. I know that this is possible for you listening as well because I see it every single day with my clients inside NDA, with the people inside Non-Dieters Club, the people who have done the work to make peace with food and to reconnect with their bodies.

We also need to not just focus on hunger, but we’ve also got to focus on fullness. We don’t want to overlook the fullness side of the equation. Fullness, here’s a mindset shift that may be powerful for you. Fullness is a sensation. It is a normal, natural, helpful biological cue, not a moral test or a way to grade yourself on how you did with eating. A lot of my clients fear fullness because of their past dieting experiences. They feel like if they’re getting full, they ate too much, or that they’re only allowed to feel full on low-calorie foods. But if they’re eating something that’s more calorically dense, then fullness means, “Oh my gosh, shame on me. I ate way too much. Now I’m gonna gain weight,” blah blah blah. What we want to do with fullness is neutralize our feelings towards it and just appreciate it. It’s your body telling you when you’ve had enough. And we want to aim for comfortable satisfaction or comfortable fullness, or some of you might resonate with the concept of gentle fullness, as opposed to feeling stuffed when you’re done eating. And so, I want you to practice tuning into your body’s subtle cues partway through your meals to just kind of pause and check in and try to gauge where you’re at. And that’s where that hunger-fullness scale that I was talking about in the Hunger Guide earlier—that hunger it’s going to help you get in touch with what gentle fullness and comfortable satisfaction feel like and what you’re aiming for there, so you can start to visualize that as you’re connecting with your body. So, I want you to practice this skill-building process just like my son was practicing his swimming skills, and so you’re going to have to continue to show up for the process over and over again. The great news is that you get multiple opportunities per day, and I want you to practice slowly listening to your hunger cues, allowing yourself to be more mindful. Yes, it’s going to feel like more work when you’re eating for a while, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes more intuitive. And so you’ve got to practice non-judgmental awareness and patience as you learn to retrust your body’s signals.

You may need to create some ways to remind yourself to be more mindful when you’re eating, like you could set yourself a nice little placemat and maybe a little candle or some cute little decor on your table. You may even need a sticky note that reminds you to do the powerful pause and just creating an environment that fosters that mindful awareness while you’re working actively and intentionally on it. It doesn’t have to be super mindful at every single meal and every snack of the day. I get that that’s not always feasible, and there’s going to be times where you have to eat on the go or you’re eating at your desk while you’re working, but maybe if you could once a day try to do a mindful meal or a mindful snack, that is going to help you get to where you want to be so much faster. If you can have a daily intentional practice around this, let’s tackle a few roadblocks, and then we will wrap up.

One of the biggest roadblocks that I hear when people are working on their hunger fullness is that fear of overeating and the fear that letting themselves eat when they are hungry and letting themselves eat as much as they are hungry for is going to cause them to eat too much. This is a really common barrier after years of restriction and dieting, and part of it may be rooted in that experience of feeling out of control with food or that when you did let yourself eat as much as you wanted, that you did go overboard and then you were stuffed and miserable. So, we’ve got to 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, and that makes sense. It’s like you’ve been underwater holding your breath, and now you’re coming to the surface for air, and you’re going to gasp for air at first, and then your breathing will return to normal levels. Your appetite may do the same thing. Your body can and will self-regulate when you are allowed to eat freely, and I need you to keep reminding yourself, you might have to write this down so that you can see it as a reminder: restriction will lead to overcompensation. Restriction will lead you to overeat. So we’re getting away from the restriction, and the overeating will start to settle down.

The other roadblock that often comes up is that mindset trap around healthy eating and the food judgment and this good food/bad food thinking because here’s what we’ve been told. There are so many marketing messages around this, that if you eat the quote-unquote healthier version of something, it’s guilt-free eating. How many times have you heard that in a commercial or on the packaging that this is a guilt-free way of eating a food, and what that reinforces is that if you ate the regular version of it, that you should feel guilty? We need to move away from that. We’ve got to continue challenging that mindset, and if you’re obsessing over the healthfulness of your eating, it’s going to probably keep you stuck in that diet mentality where you’re trying to control your food, and then you end up out of control with food. You can be healthy and honor your health. You can have your cake and eat it too. That’s one of my frameworks that I teach, is how to have your cake and eat it too with food and with your health, and you do that by finding peace with food and honoring your hunger and fullness, and then we get to bring in the gentle nutrition. But if we’re focusing too much on the gentle nutrition side of things at first, it can prevent us from getting all of those pieces in place—the foundational pieces in place with recognizing and trusting your hunger and fullness and making peace with food. Those things need to occur first.

Another roadblock that can make this tricky is emotional eating, and here’s the deal. I don’t want to overly pathologize emotional eating. We all eat in response to emotions. Sometimes that is part of normal eating, but if turning to food when you feel uncomfortable emotions is your only way of coping, then yeah, that’s going to be a problem. Same thing if your only way of coping with emotions is that you go to Target or fill up your Amazon cart and, you know, buy a whole bunch of stuff, or if you open up a bottle of wine, or if you go to the casino and go gambling. Like, if those are your only ways of coping, then yes, that’s a problem. If you’re doing it from time to time, it’s fine. So, we want to recognize when you’re having those urges to eat in response to emotions and to separate out emotional hunger from physical hunger, and that can be tricky, but it becomes much easier to do when we have tackled the physical hunger side of things first by using the strategies that I have talked about here and by using that SCA framework and by doing that eating schedule to get you reconnected and to get your biology back into rhythm with your circadian rhythm and your appetite cues the way they’re supposed to be. Once you have clarity on the physical hunger, it becomes so much easier to know when it’s emotional hunger. If you’re not clear on physical hunger, you’re going to have a hard time teasing apart the emotional side of things.

And then the last barrier that I see over and over again is the judgment of yourself for not making enough progress or by feeling discouraged and frustrated along the way, and that you feeling like it’s not going fast enough or that you’re not doing it right or that you’re just hopeless. And this is what will lead people to go back into the welcoming arms of dieting. The reality here is that the learning curve can be steep, and we’ve got to take small steps and have consistency and stay with it through the ups and the downs because it’s those small steps over time that lead to the big shifts, and you’ve got to persist through the ups and downs because they will happen—it’s not if, it’s when—and if you’re one of my NDA clients, you’re going to hear me say over and over again, you probably get tired of it, you are exactly where you’re meant to be, and I want you to hear that right now: you are exactly where you are meant to be, and you get to choose your next steps for how you move forward. So, as we wrap up, I want us to really acknowledge that this is a complex and a nuanced journey, and it can be really beautiful. You learn so much about yourself along the way, and it’s going to require practice and the right strategies and guidance and understanding how your body works and understanding what’s going on physiologically and being able to take that knowledge and to then use it to make some strategic decisions about how you’re approaching your eating and how you’re listening to your body and understanding what your body’s telling you, what your body needs.

So, don’t forget to go grab that hunger and fullness guide. That is going to help you with those 5 steps to getting going with reconnecting with your hunger fullness, getting that clarity. It’s at nondietacademy.com/forward/hunger. And I want to remind you, this is a process. It is okay to take it slow, and I want you to celebrate the small victories along the way and to give yourself a pat on the back when you have a mindful moment with food and when you honor your hunger when you normally would have ignored it or pushed it off, or when you honor your comfortable fullness when part of you wanted to keep eating because it tasted so good but your body’s telling you that you’re full. I want you to celebrate those moments because each step toward healing is progress. So, a great thing that you can practice today—I love giving little action steps because we can talk about this stuff all day long, but if you don’t do anything with it and take action, then nothing changes. So, I want you to take five minutes today to sit with your body and do a check-in, to do a body scan and to check in with what your body is telling you. So, of course, check in with your hunger fullness, but I also want you to scan your body and see what else is your body telling you. Are you holding on to any stress or tension? Is your body sore or fatigued? Are there other signals your body is giving you? Are there emotions showing up in your body? And I just want you to be curious and non-judgmental about that. Just set a timer for 5 minutes and sit with your body and notice your body. And as always, if you need more support, my DMs are open. Do not hesitate to reach out. And in case nobody has told you today, you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.