Is your fullness gauge broken?
Learning how to feel your fullness is a principle of Intuitive Eating which can be a great tool to help you reach your health goals.
I bet you can easily describe to me the feeling of being overstuffed but can you describe the feeling of comfortable satiety?
In this week’s post, I explore how you can tune into your body and learn how to stop eating before you feel uncomfortable and offer some tips to support you in doing this.
Honouring Your Fullness
Honouring your fullness can be difficult if you are more accustomed to honouring values such as;
- Cleaning our plate
- Eating to completion
- Not wanting to waste food
- Food insecurity, not knowing when your next meal will be
Many long-term and chronic dieters have trouble knowing when they are full because they aren’t listening to what their body wants, instead, they are following RULES about when what and how much they can eat.
Deprivation often leads to overeating. This has nothing to do with willpower it is biological.
When you have ‘permission to eat’, for instance when the diet rules allow you to OR when you have a ‘F%*k-it’ moment you may find yourself eating past comfortable fullness.
Eating past comfortable fullness causes bloating and can make you feel uncomfortable and even nauseous and that’s not including the emotional distress this kind of disordered eating can bring.
If your sense of deprivation is high it can override the ability to feel your fullness
Is this you?
It was definitely me before I ditched diet culture and started honouring my body’s natural signals and nourishing it effectively.
What is the solution?
Making peace with food and giving yourself unconditional permission to eat will help you learn to feel your fullness.
When you know you can have a particular food or meal again, whenever you want, it removes the urgency to make the most of it while you can.
Intuitive Eating teaches us to approach the learning of ‘feeling our fullness’ with curiosity, not judgement.
If you begin eating when you are too hungry you may find that you overeat before you are satiated, and that is ok.
Learn from this experience, what did you eat earlier in the day, was it enough? How can you prevent becoming too hungry again?
Finding foods that satisfy you is key to feeling your fullness.
If you are not satisfied you will continue to think about and search your cupboards for something to scratch that itch whether you are hungry or not.
Eating well-balanced meals containing enough protein, good fats and fibre will support your satisfaction and fullness along with improving menopause symptoms by regulating your hormones naturally.
You can read more about which foods to eat to create hormone harmony naturally HERE.
Recognising Comfortable Fullness
We women are great overachievers.
We are naturally busy people, juggling all of our responsibilities and multitasking.
Multitasking can be your worst enemy.
The more research and reading I do about organisation and being productive (I know, a little sad) the more I learn that it is far MORE productive to focus on one task at a time and find your FLOW.
Not even supercomputers multi-task, they do one task after another, just very fast!
Even if you have a few tasks to complete, using a strategy such as the Pomodoro Technique to focus your time blocks on one task at a time instead of multitasking is found to be more productive.
Anyway, back to our stomachs, focusing on what you are eating and nothing else can help you regain the ability to feel your fullness.
Here are some ideas:
Eat without distraction
Limit reading or watching TV or filling the dishwasher as you spoon another mouthful of breakfast in. Engage in mindful eating, and think about the sight, taste, smell, and texture of the food.
Pause during your meal
During your meal put your utensils or food down and check in with yourself. How do you feel? How full are you? How does your food taste? This isn’t a threat to stop eating it’s just an observation.
Decide to stop
When you have reached your last bite limit, stop. Do something to signal to yourself that you have finished, put your utensils together, and push the plate away an inch or two. If your ‘don’t waste food’ value kicks in, can you save the leftovers for later or tomorrow? If you are eating out can you ask to ‘take away’ your leftover portion?
What does Comfortable Fullness feel like?
Everyone will feel something different. Explore what this feels like for you:
- Pleasant completeness?
- Not needing anything more?
- No longer feeling hunger?
- Pain-free – from hunger or being too full
This can take a while to learn.
Approach this part of Intuitive Eating with curiosity and kindness towards yourself.
Many women have had years of conditioning with thoughts and values that have disconnected them from being able to recognise fullness within their bodies.
Honouring your Hunger/Fullness level
Have you ever felt hungry, looked at the time and thought “I can’t be hungry! It’s only been 2 hours since I ate!”
A statement like this comes from following diet rules.
An external force telling you when you can and can’t be hungry or full.
This is how we disconnect from our intuition.
The ability to recognise when we need to eat again can depend on many factors:
When was the last time you ate? The more often you eat you might feel less hungry, however being a grazer or a snacker elevates your insulin more regularly and puts you body into fat storage mode rather than fat burning. Try to eat enough at each meal so that you don’t start to feel hunger for at least 4 hours.
What did your last meal/snack comprise? The macronutrient makeup of a meal can affect how long the food will remain in your stomach and the rate at which the glucose enters your bloodstream. Was it ‘air food’? Popcorn, rice cakes, fat-free crackers, calorie-free beverages. These are ways we can try to ‘trick’ our body into feeling full but our body is smart and it knows it hasn’t had enough to eat.
What have you been doing? Have you been sedentary or have you been physically active? Your body will have different energy needs depending on these factors.
What if you can’t stop eating?
If you practice this principle alongside the other principles and find that you just can’t stop eating, there is a good chance you are;
- Using food as a coping mechanism.
- Not eating enough.
- Not eating the right balance of nutrients.
Over the years of supporting women with their health and well-being goals and now with hormone health, I have developed the SHIFT system.
This SHIFT System comprises of 8-steps that empower you with the knowledge and understanding to take control of your health and well-being in a holistic way.
Part of this 8-step pathway includes learning more about intuitive eating and how to incorporate these principles into your lifestyle.
To learn more about my 1-2-1 calls and programs click HERE.
I currently have 10 spaces available in my last beta test of The Menopause SHIFT System Program.
This 12-week program will be priced at £495, however for the last test run it is half price, £247.50 with the code TEST until 24th December 2024.
The program starts on 6th January 2025. It includes 10, 1-2-1 sessions with me and 24/7 access to the online resource hub. To learn more about the program and if it could be a good fit for you view this document.
If you have any questions, contact me via DM or email to get your questions answered.