Why You're Afraid of Feeling Hungry

I feel like it has been forever since I put out a solo episode. So hi! How are you? How are we all doing? Did you know there was research that showed that eating disorders tripled at the beginning of the pandemic? So if you have recently noticed your food coping mechanisms increase, I just want to say, it makes a lot of sense.

Not only may you be navigating a trauma response in your body where your body has been stuck in the sympathetic nervous system, but you may also not be receiving a lot of safety cues externally that it is alright to be here and come back into your body. If things have felt tough recently, I just hope you can feel my virtual hug or presence, if hugs aren't your thing, that I'm here for you in all of it.

When you're feeling threatened in your body, hunger and fullness cues can feel wonky and also frightening. Hunger can come out of nowhere and remind you how little control you may feel in your life right now. When you feel hungry, what is that like for you? How do you notice your body respond to the felt sense of hunger?

Felt sense is a term that was coined by Eugene Gendlin. He described felt sense as:

"an internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time–encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail."

Your felt sense of hunger is a somatic and cognitive experience.

Cognitively, you may have learned from diet culture or family who were immersed in dieting that hunger is something to do battle with. You're supposed to drink water, chew gum, snack on celery sticks, and do whatever you can do to ignore hunger until you decide not to ignore it anymore with a low calorie, low fat meal.

Somatically, when hunger has been paired with threat, you might notice your energy increase or decrease, your heart rate go up, your breath get shallow, and your body become tight.

How does hunger get associated with danger?

The felt sense of hunger can be similar to past experiences you've had that left you feeling unsafe. The empty feeling may remind you of being abandoned as a child and the hurt and pain of not feeling held the way you needed to be. If you ignore hunger, you can also ignore the pain that hunger reminds you of.

Hunger can be an intense sensory experience in your body. All sorts of bodily reactions start to occur, where you have stomach gurgles, mood changes, and tension as your body relays the message that it needs more food and soon to keep going. When being in your body has felt dangerous because of what your body has been through in the past, all sensations can start to move you into an overwhelmed, hypervigilant state. You may ignore hunger because it just feels like too much to be reminded that you have a body that has needs when it has never felt safe to have a body to begin with.

When you've also been taught that you're not allowed to have needs because those around you can't meet them, you learned you needed to shut down and dissociate from every need you have, and that includes the need for food. Hunger becomes threatening because it is a need that your body has to exist. You may find yourself trying to disconnect from the sensations of hunger or constantly nibbling and snacking all day, to never have to connect with what feels like your needy body.

When hunger has been paired with danger and threat, you may find yourself trying to ignore, numb out, dissociate, or override hunger. You may eat all day long to never have to feel hungry at all. You may oscillate between the two, where you go as long as you can, ignoring hunger, and then feeling depleted and exhausted by that battle, that you eat and eat and eat to banish it away, to hopefully never feel it ever again. Of course, hunger always comes back eventually because you need those cues from your body to let you know what, when, and how much nutrition your body needs to thrive.

Hunger exists as your biological ally to maintain your survival.

You need nutrients for your brain to function, for muscular activity, for your organs, for cell repair and growth. Yet to embody your hunger may bring you into contact with your emotional hungers for connection, belonging, touch, and safety. Sometimes it can feel like you're a bottomless pit of hunger. When you perhaps try to satiate your physical hungers with food, you still feel a sense of emptiness. This can become confusing, where you may find yourself eating more, sensing that there is an emptiness that needs to be filled.

In these moments when physical hunger has been satiated, emotional hunger now has space to speak to you and tell you of what it needs. And when food became the answer to every physical and emotional hunger you had as a child, you can start to resent hunger and feel like it can never truly be satisfied.

So, where do you start to shift this for yourself?

You might have kept yourself at a distance from hunger for a long time, so we want to go very slowly as you practice connecting with hunger. Before you even feel hungry, you might remember the last time you felt hunger. The body doesn't know the difference between real or perceived, so you can remember what hunger felt like and notice how your body responds. You can spend a second with that response and then move on with your day. The next time you're about to eat, you might practice connecting with the subtle experience of hunger and linger with the felt sense of hunger for a second. When you sit with the sensations of hunger for a second, you might get curious if that bodily experience reminds you of anything or any memories. 

After every time you sit with the experience of hunger, scan the room, feel your feet on the floor, and show your body that you are safe. All of these seconds with hunger and updating the associations with feeling it will add up over time to change your body's story of hunger.

Last, on a cognitive note, you might journal about what you want to believe about hunger. If you were speaking to your 5-year-old self and teaching them about hunger, what would you want them to know? This might sound like, "Hi dear one. I want you to know that hunger is your tummy saying hello. Hunger is like your best friend knocking from the inside, saying it simply needs more food. You can trust this. This is safe to feel. And you can listen to this knock every single time.

If you're looking for support to update your body's story of hunger, come join the Somatic Eating® Program. We start on May 22nd and spend three months together, where you will learn the language of your body and how it is speaking to you through your food impulses. Your food behaviors have never been the "problem," they have always been the answer. You will discover what your food patterns have been answering for you and how to meet the call in food and non-food ways. Go to somaticeating.com to learn more and sign up!