Eating Disorders - fieldi

patient who binges, it may be helpful to plan strategy, that is, behavior
modification.
Lesson 6: Hunger
Recovery Through Nutritional Counseling 31
Hunger is experienced as something scary and therefore needs to be
addressed frequently. What, then, is hunger? Is it safe? Can I trust
it? For many people it is the enemy. Some would call it thin guilt: a
painful reminder that one does not deserve food. All this may lead to
a discussion about the strength of self: How long can I make it without
food?
Personally I love hunger. It is a safe signal that tells me that whatever
I ate earlier has now been used up. Every single calorie has been
used for bodily functions like metabolism, body temperature, or
perhaps maintenance and growth. I do not know exactly what the
calories were used for, but I know that they were not stored as fat and
that it is my responsibility to nourish my body again, now that it has
told me through its hunger that it needs to be refueled.
If we only ate when we were hungry, we would have nothing to
fear. Only when we eat when we are not hungry (because of habitual
or emotional eating) do we get more than we need and the excess is
stored as fat. “But what if I eat too much when I am hungry?” I am
asked. How often have we said: “Why did I eat so much?” It is difficult
to know just when the body has had enough and is satisfied—
especially after restriction, when the body seems to have an insatiable
hunger. “When should I stop eating?” I am asked. “Just how
should it feel when we have reached physiological satiety?” I answer
in the following way: This is something that takes practice and experience,
and we each have to learn our own levels of satiety. It should
be a comfortable feeling and give us a sense of control. But it does not
really matter if you underate or overate as long as you respond appropriately
to hunger the next time it comes. In other words, if you overate,
your body is likely to get hungrier later, and therefore you should
wait and eat no sooner than when you are hungry again. This could
be an hour or two later than you had planned. When the body is
physiologically hungry it is letting you know that it has used up all
the calories for physiological needs. It is when we respond to hunger
in a natural way—by eating (or we might call it refueling)—that the