Embracing Appetite: Your Guide to Unlocking Natural Eating Cues for Lasting Success
Aug 10, 2023
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In this insightful discussion, coaches Georgie Fear and Ariel Faulkner explore how to embrace natural hunger cues for healthier eating. They dive into the differences between physical and psychological hunger, urging listeners to move beyond restrictive diets. Personal stories highlight the transformative power of listening to your body, while they tackle the impact of processed foods and emotional eating. With humor and real-life examples, they encourage a balanced approach that empowers individuals to reclaim their relationship with food.
Traditional dieting practices can lead to an unhealthy preoccupation with food, often resulting in a cycle of overeating and anxiety.
Tuning into hunger and satiety signals promotes more natural eating behaviors, proving more effective for weight management than restrictive diets.
Challenging cultural beliefs around hunger empowers individuals to embrace it as a natural function, leading to a healthier relationship with food.
Deep dives
The Cycle of Restriction and Overeating
The podcast emphasizes how traditional dieting approaches, which focus on calorie counting and strict food tracking, can lead to an unhealthy preoccupation with food. Both hosts share personal experiences of how they became obsessed with food when trying to control their intake, often leading to overeating. They illustrate how this anxiety around food can result in an endless cycle where individuals obsess over safe foods, inadvertently leading to weight gain instead of loss. By becoming more aware of their body signals and respecting hunger cues, they argue that individuals can break free from this cycle and achieve better control over their eating habits.
Listening to Hunger and Satiety Signals
The importance of tuning into one's hunger and satiety signals is presented as a more effective strategy for weight management than traditional restrictive diets. The hosts explain that recognizing the signals of hunger—such as an empty stomach or cravings—can allow for more natural eating behaviors. They address common misconceptions about hunger, particularly the fear around feeling hungry, and stress that this fear often leads individuals to eat based on emotions rather than physical needs. By understanding the body's signals and responding appropriately, individuals can achieve a balanced relationship with food.
Challenging Diet Culture Perceptions
The podcast challenges prevailing diet culture perceptions that equate hunger with weakness or an inability to maintain self-control. The hosts discuss how cultural messages often encourage avoidance of hunger through various means, such as diet supplements or shakes marketed to suppress appetite. This cultural conditioning can lead to individuals misinterpreting their body's hunger signals, often avoiding meals until they become overly hungry and overeat later. They encourage listeners to confront these ingrained beliefs about hunger and recognize it as a natural and necessary bodily function.
The Role of Food Quality in Hunger Management
Listeners are informed about the significant impact of food quality on hunger, with research indicating that unprocessed foods provide better satiety than processed options. The discussion includes findings from studies showing that individuals consuming a diet high in processed foods experienced increased hunger and weight gain despite greater caloric intake. By transitioning to more unprocessed, nutrient-rich foods, individuals can stabilize their hunger and maintain energy levels more effectively. This shift fosters a more natural approach to food intake based on genuine hunger rather than emotional cravings.
Emotional Eating and the Need for Mindfulness
The hosts address the challenge of emotional eating, which often stems from unresolved feelings rather than physical hunger. They highlight the importance of distinguishing between physical hunger and emotional desires, encouraging listeners to engage in mindfulness practices around eating. This awareness can lead to deeper insights into one’s eating patterns, uncovering why they may reach for food at certain times or in response to specific emotions. By fostering a more mindful relationship with food, individuals can learn to meet their emotional needs without resorting to overeating.
In this episode, coaches Georgie Fear and Ariel Faulkner discuss the topic of appetite. Specifically, how you can harness hunger for long term success as a confident eater. People relate to their appetite in a variety of different ways. Maybe you have ignored hunger for a long time, relying on calorie counting, tracking macros, or restrictive diet programs to manage your weight in the past. Maybe hunger has been uncomfortable for you, so you avoid it like the plague. Or maybe you feel like your appetite is out of control, and you feel lost.
We are here to shed some light on the nuances at play when we start to tune into our natural appetite cues. What is the difference between physical hunger and psychological hunger? How do emotions, biology, and certain medications affect our hunger?
We will share personal stories, client examples, how to personalize it for you, and which populations of folks may need to leverage hunger in a different way. Join us in this episode as we breakdown how to use hunger to your advantage, with simple steps you can start today to get reacquainted with the body's superpower.
Connect with Georgie and the Confident Eaters Coaches:
Have you ever thought, "I know what to do, I just need to consistently do it"? Who hasn't? Sometimes we need accountability. Sometimes we need specific strategies, new tools, or a bit of help. If you want help to personalize how to use hunger in your weight management journey, become a confident, sensible eater with 1:1 shame-free personalized attention, sign up here.
If you are someone who struggles with binge eating or emotional eating, be sure to check out Coach Georgie's other podcast Breaking Up With Binge Eating.
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