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Showing Up Anyway is a podcast about unlearning diet culture, redefining health, and making peace with food, movement, and your body -- without needing to have it all together. Hosted by Coach Adam Wright, an anti diet-culture personal trainer and body-trust educator, each episode dives into the imperfect side of wellness and how to navigate motivation burnout, body image struggles, emotional eating and the pressure to be "healthy". This is your reminder that progress doesn't need to be perfect, and you'll still see progress as long as you show up anyway.
Welcome to Showing Up Anyway,
the podcast for people
who are not perfect.
On this show, we talk
about intuitive eating,
fitness without obsession,
and healing your relationship
with food and your body.
Hi, everyone. Welcome back
to episode four.
Look who showed up - you did!
And for today's topic,
I thought it would be smart
to talk a little about hunger,
which is not as obvious a
feeling as you might think.
I have viewers and listeners
and new clients
who come to me all the time
and tell me things like
how they feel guilty
about getting hungry,
how they try and ignore it
and push it off,
how they can't even tell
they're hungry
until it's, you know, too late
and they're elbow-deep in a box
of whatever they can find -
bag of chips or whatever.
Hunger seems simple
but diet culture and
your food rules have sort of
taught you to mistrust it,
which is why we talked about
food rules in the last episode.
So, today is gonna be about
how to recognize your hunger
and start to rebuild that trust.
Before we get into anything else,
we have to be on the
same page about one thing -
hunger is not your enemy.
That's the title of today's episode.
It's not something you need to
ignore or push past or fight.
Getting hungry
isn't a bad thing,
it's also not a good thing,
it's just a thing.
It's your body's way
of asking for care.
When you get tired,
you go sleep, right?
That's what you need.
When you're thirsty, you go drink.
When you're hungry, you also
need to eat in the same way.
It's just that one big problem
is that a lot of us eat
when we're not hungry too,
but we'll talk about that later.
So, hunger is not the enemy
but it is something that
you need to be aware of.
Think about it like the
gas light in your car, right?
If you're low on fuel,
the little light comes on -
that's an indicator that
you need to get gas soon,
but what happens if you
try and ignore that light?
You're gonna run out of gas, right?
What happens if you
try to keep driving,
or you try and tell yourself
that what you really need isn't gas,
it's actually to put air
in your tires?
It's not gonna work out
for you very well, is it?
And if I can use that gas analogy
just one more time,
have you ever judged yourself
for filling up your gas tank?
You haven't, right?
Well, don't judge yourself
for needing to eat either.
Use those hunger cues as information
and not as ammunition later
to use against yourself.
Healing your
relationship with hunger
starts by seeing it as
an ally and not an enemy.
We can agree that hunger
is instinctive, right?
It's natural, you are born with
the ability to feel hunger.
Babies cry when they need food,
right?
That sense just doesn't disappear
when you get older,
it's just that oftentimes
we're taught we have to fight it,
to suppress it.
Hunger is framed as something
we need to try and trick or ignore.
I'm sure you've been told
if you're hungry,
you should drink water,
you should chew gum
to try and trick your brain
into thinking it's full.
You've probably been praised
before for ignoring it,
you know, skipping breakfast
and instead of eating
to fuel your body
just drinking coffee
to hold you over.
A lot of us fear hunger
because we associate it
with losing control.
This is especially true for people
with a history of
disordered eating
or chronic dieting,
they think eating
equals weight gain,
eating means losing control
It doesn't.
Eating and overeating
are not the same thing.
And if you have a problem
with overeating
it's often times, ironically,
because you waited too long to eat.
Hunger has become moralized
because society is obsessed
with glorifying thinness.
Good people have discipline,
bad people give in, right?
That's what we're told.
You're praised for choosing salad
instead of eating
what you really wanted
and diets that celebrate
skipping meals, like OMAD and IF,
despite my best efforts,
somehow still have a place
in wellness culture.
The harsh truth is that diet culture
rewards hunger denial.
Now that I think about it,
it might even go deeper than that.
For a lot of people,
hunger has a history.
If you've ever lived
with food insecurity,
hunger might feel traumatic.
If you grew up in a home
with chronic dieting,
hunger might feel dangerous.
If you had to earn meals
when you were younger,
hunger might feel like a
punishment or a weakness.
If you've ever been
praised for willpower,
hunger might feel like a failure.
These completely valid
fears get internalized
and we start to believe
that hunger makes us weak
and so we disconnect from it
to feel safe or feel good.
But hunger is a feature, not a bug.
It's not something
you have to outsmart,
it's something
you need to listen to.
It's a daily invitation
to care for yourself
and I encourage you
to look at it that way.
That said,
everyone experiences hunger
a little bit differently.
How do you know you're hungry?
Tummy growls, right?
Yeah, yeah, that's
everyone's answer.
But that's only one way -
how about when you're hangry,
irritated easily?
If you feel an energy drop
mid-day and feel like a nap,
might be a hunger cue.
Light-headedness,
brain fog, dizziness,
nausea, shakiness.
I feel like I'm reading the
side-effects on a pill bottle!
(LAUGHS)
Difficulty concentrating can
also be a sign of hunger,
you start thinking
about food more than normal.
And because hunger cues
can be so complex
and be hard to recognize,
we can't talk about hunger without
also talking about self-care.
If you don't know that
your energy drop at 2pm is
because you're hungry
or because you slept for
four hours last night,
might be time to look at how much
you're prioritizing your sleep.
Understanding and prioritizing
your body's needs really
really, really strengthens
your hunger awareness.
If you sleep enough each night,
you can confidently say
that your need for a nap
in the afternoon
is not because you're tired,
it's actually because
it's a hunger cue.
If you manage your stress well,
you can confidently say that
you're not just stress eating
you're actually hungry.
And if you set proper boundaries
then you can confidently say
that you're eating
cos you're hungry and not just
because someone made you angry
or upset that day.
But, obviously, the opposite
is true too, right?
Not prioritizing your basic needs
and self-care is gonna
make recognizing
your body's natural hunger cues
that much harder.
There's an acronym
that I really like
that I think will help you
with this, it's HALT,
and I'm gonna tell you
what that means.
But, first, if this conversation
resonates with you
and you wanna go deeper,
I do coach clients
through this exact work -
building trust with your body,
reconnecting with hunger
and fullness cues
and learning to eat without guilt.
And I have to tell you that because
I have people all the time who say,
"Adam, I didn't know
you coach clients",
even though I talk about it,
I feel like, constantly.
But if you are ready
to take that next step,
you can apply to work with me by
using the link in the show notes.
All right, now that I've got the
self-promotion out of the way,
HALT - what does it stand for?
Hungry, Angry, Lonely and Tired.
Now, obviously,
these are not the only
four feelings you're gonna feel
before you have an
episode of self-sabotage,
whatever that may be for you,
but this is a really
good place to start
to check in with yourself and
analyze your self-care.
Am I hungry? If that's the case,
if you're actually hungry,
go and eat something.
Are you angry or feeling any other
feeling associated with anger?
Are you lonely
or feeling any other feeling
associated with isolation?
Or are you tired?
So, if you find yourself
eating or restricting
or doing whatever self-sabotage
behavior you might do,
HALT and give yourself
a chance to think about
those four feelings.
Once we've figured that out,
maybe we can find a better way
or a different way to cope
with those feelings.
HALT is not exclusively used
for recognizing hunger,
I like it more as a way to
figure out your body's needs
in a time where maybe
you feel disconnected.
Now, going back to hunger,
if you've ignored your
body's signals for years
it can be hard to feel those again.
Sometimes you might not feel
that growling in your tummy
until you're absolutely starving,
but I hope that now that we've
brought some attention to them,
you can start to look a little
closer and say, "Okay, wow,
"you know, I always get nauseous in
the morning before breakfast.
"Now I'm gonna try and
eat something light
"and see if that helps,"
because maybe it's a hunger cue.
Or, "Maybe I don't need that
second energy drink at 3pm,
"I need to have a snack."
Because it's not your
job to fight hunger,
it's your job to respond to it.
Sometimes you only realize
you were hungry after you eat.
Now, I want to introduce
you to maybe
the most powerful thing
you'll ever use
in reconnecting with your body -
this is the hunger scale.
The hunger scale goes from 0 to 10
and it's really separated into
three different parts.
0, 1 and 2 is your
overly hungry range, okay?
This is where you're starving,
you're shaky, you're dizzy.
Then you have your
normal eating range,
which is 3 through 7, okay?
3 and 4 might be
a polite hunger, you know,
just hungry enough to eat.
5 would be neutral,
6 and 7 that's, like, a
comfortable place to stop,
maybe you're satisfied there,
comfortably full.
Then you have your overly full
range - 8, 9 and 10.
This is where you're
very full, stuffed,
maybe you need to unbutton
your pants
or take off your belt.
Ideally, I want you to start
eating when you're about a 3 or a 4
and stop when you're
about a 6 or 7.
You start eating, let's say, at a 4,
you eat until about a 6
and then you stop eating
and you wait until your hunger
diminishes
until you're about a 3 or a 4 again.
If you wait much longer than that,
you wait until you're a 2
or a 1 or a 0,
then what's gonna happen?
You're probably going to overeat
until you're an 8, 9 or a 10
and then the cycle of binge and
restrict starts.
You skip your next meal
because you're extra full
and then, all of a sudden,
you're at a 0, 1 or 2 again
and it's hard to get
out of that cycle.
So, before you eat,
check in with yourself often
and figure out where
on that scale you are.
The problem is that a lot of people
don't know when to stop eating.
I started with a brand
new client this week
and we talked about this
and they told me,
"Wow, I have been eating
"until I've been uncomfortably
full every meal."
And part of that has to do
with some of the food rules
that we talked about last week,
you know, needing
to finish the plate,
but another part of it is
that they were just never taught
when they should stop eating.
Now, I do want to say
that the hunger scale is
not about perfection, okay?
It is a learning tool,
it's not a pass or fail test.
Part of this is going to be
assessing how you feel, right?
And then the other part
of this is going to be
having to reassess how you felt.
There's going to be times
where you thought you were a 2,
but you were actually at a 4.
And other times where
you thought you were a 3,
but you were actually at a 5.
And this is gonna change
on a day-to-day basis
because there's a lot of factors
that go into
how hungry you are that day.
You can't just separate your hunger
from the rest of your needs,
it doesn't happen in a vacuum.
You're not gonna be hungry at 12:30
every day like clockwork,
things like sleep, hydration,
emotional support,
they're all gonna go
into your appetite,
but how often do we find ourselves
eating lunch at 12:30 every day?
Now, if you have a job
and that's your break time
and that's the only time you can
eat that's a little bit different,
but if you have
some flexibility there,
listen to your body.
You don't have to eat breakfast as
soon as you wake up,
unless you're hungry.
I distinctly remember more than
one of my clients coming to me
once we started implementing
this and saying, "Adam,
"I don't feel hungry until
about 10:30 when I wake up.
"I used to wake up at
seven and have breakfast then
"because that's what I thought
I needed to do."
So, it's gonna take
some self-reflection
and maybe there are times
where you're hungry at 7,
but that might be affected
by the time you ate dinner
last night
or how big that dinner was -
see how those things
might be connected?
This is why listening to
your body is so important.
Unfortunately, most of us
live in our heads
and getting back into our body
takes real practice,
so I suggest doing
some daily check-ins.
Set a reminder to check-in
with yourself
halfway through the day -
how am I doing?
Could these feelings that I'm
feeling, could they be hunger?
Take a pause in between tasks
and think, "Have I eaten?"
If you have something like ADHD
and you forget to eat often,
okay, set some alarms for yourself.
If you're autistic and you struggle
with interoception,
which is an awareness of your body's
internal senses and signals,
do a body scan.
That's something that I actually
learned from a client
who is autistic - I love learning
things from clients.
She said, "I can't tell when
my body is hungry
"as naturally as
neurotypical people.
"I have to do a body scan
from head to toe
"and figure out, do I need to pee?
Am I in danger?
"Or do I need to eat?
Or is it something else?"
And there was some real effort
in having to figure out
whether she was hungry or not.
And so, using some of these tools
I've presented you today
and some of the tools
she already had
that we learned together,
she was able to get much better
in touch with her body.
Now, I will say that hunger is a
very personal, subjective feeling.
Don't let anyone tell you
that you're not hungry.
They don't know.
Don't let anyone shame you
for needing to eat -
not your parents, not your boss,
not your partner, not your friends.
You don't have to justify
being hungry.
You're allowed to eat
when you feel that way.
Just try to listen
to your fullness as well
and we will talk about how to do
that in a future episode,
but, for now, recognizing that
giving yourself unconditional
permission to eat
when you're hungry is healing.
When you can stop using
food as a reward or a punishment,
it just becomes nourishment.
Honoring your hunger is a powerful
act of respect and self-care.
It is not a weakness, it is not
a failure to be disciplined
or something to apologize for.
The people who told you
that you needed to
fight your body were wrong.
You are worthy of nourishment.
Don't try and control your hunger,
instead trust it.
Thank you for tuning in to this
episode of Showing Up Anyway -
you can find it for free on Spotify
or wherever you get your podcasts.
And wherever you're listening,
if you like the show,
I'd love it if you gave me
a five-star review
because that does help
other people find the show
and hopefully it'll help
change their life
just like you're looking
to change yours.
If you're listening
on Spotify, though,
you can follow me and tap
the bell icon
so you get notifications
when new episodes come out.
I'm Coach Adam. Remember,
when things get challenging
keep showing up anyway.