An Analogy For the Hunger Scale

Food is energy. It's purpose is to provide our bodies energy on which to operate.

Much like our cars, our bodies carry us around, using up the fuel we have put into them. But unlike our cars, our bodies do not have an orange hand on a guage or an alarm that tells us to refuel. Instead we are left to figure out for ourselves when we need to refuel our bodies.

Some of us grew up in situations where we needed to eat before we were truly hungry. Perhaps the family's scheduled meal times did not coincide with when we were physically hungry or meal times were haphazard and irregular...so we adapted. We learned to fill up our fuel tanks when our hunger scale said half full instead of waiting until it dropped to a quarter of a tank.

The problem with eating when our hunger guage says half full is that we never really feel hunger and eating becomes something that is disconnected from hunger. It is something we do because it is time to do it, or because everyone else is doing it, or because something looks or smells good, and when our eating is disconnected from the physical cues our body gives us to refuel we are in danger of overeating and gaining weight.

The other down side of filling up a half full fuel tank is that half full is pretty close to satisfaction...which is where we should stop eating...so it leaves us little room to eat before we are pushing the bounds of having eaten too much.

So, where is an appropriate fill up point...and what constitutes full?

Most of the gurus who have written books on the no-diet/intuitive eating approach use a 10 point scale but all eating is ideally confined between 3 and 5 on the scale.

Using our car gas tank analogy...we would fill up when the guage sinks to the 1/4 tank mark...and stop eating at about half full....never getting either to the bottom of the tank or to the top of the tank.

The bottom of the tank is ravenous. It is that stage where we would cheerfully eat anything. We don't much care what it is...we just need food NOW! This level is often marked by crankiness, tiredness, irritability, a lack of ability to focus. We don't want to let our hunger get to this point because when it does we put ourselves in danger of eating past the half full mark where we want to stop pumping fuel into ourselves.

The top of the tank is stuffed...the uncomfortable, bloated feeling we get after a large holiday meal or a binge.

We want to avoid eating at the two extremes. We want to begin eating when we are certain we are hungry, but before we are ravenous. We want to avoid eating to the point that we are stuffed and uncomfortable. That level is beyond satisfaction and satiety and if we routinely eat past satisfaction and satiety we will not lose weight and will probably gain some.

Hunger and satisfaction is like many things in the intuitive eating realm...it is subject to slow and gradual change. What starts out feeling like the ideal level of hunger at which to eat may later be replaced by a deeper level of ideal hunger. What once feels like satiety may over time be replaced by a different level. While early in the process one might need to feel physically full to feel satisfied they may over time find the full feeling not a necessary component of satisfaction.