Yesterday was a curious day and I find myself thinking about it this morning. Here is what happened, after eating a good breakfast:

(Click the link, if you want to learn how to calculate smart points)

I was very satisfied for a really long time. I kept myself pretty busy throughout the day doing errands and such. I wasn’t aware of my hunger again until 3:00 p.m. I prepared another meal of foods to pick on – an orange, 1/3 cup of shelled pistachios, and a leftover meatloaf muffin. After eating I realized I was still hungry so I ate 7 tortilla chips, Yes, I could have had some vegetables or some other lower-point option but I didn’t feel like washing, peeling, or chopping.

At 6:30 dinnertime rolled around and I ordered a thin-crust pizza and salad with chicken. The restaurant had included that pizza dough bread. I had a small slice, of pizza (I should have weighed it) a lot of salad and a piece of bread. When I looked down at my plate, I realized, there was more food on my dish than I needed.

Connecting Body & Mind

I started this morning browsing the internet for information about hunger cues, and my search led me to a term I wasn’t familiar with: interoception. What did that mean? It turns out Interoception is one of our senses and it helps us understand and feel what’s going on inside the body. So if you feel your heart beating, or are hot or cold it is your Interoceptive sense at work…

“Fascinating!” By the way, I am a big fan of Strange New Worlds check it out on Paramount Plus if you’re into Star Trek.

As it turns out this sense is what signals awareness of internal hunger cues. This makes me also think about mindful eating – it’s an attempt to get in touch with this sense. Great, I just need to fine-tune my interceptive hunger to eat more mindfully. Well, hold on, it’s not so simple,, there are 11 dimensions of interoceptive hunger that are highly idiosyncratic. So if I understand this, it means the perception of interoceptive hunger is contextual to each of us. It’s complex, and the researchers set out to answer the questions:

1. Are hunger sensations multidimensional?
2. If they are, how do people differ?
3. Are such hunger reports reliable?  

This table shows how the study defines the multidimensional nature of interoceptive hunger. It looks like the feelings: of fatigue, irritability, or cold emptiness are moderate to strong indications of this sense:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1148413/full

Another finding was having more beliefs about hunger, and forms of interoceptive hunger were associated with greater uncontrolled eating. Of those, two primary signals were people who had hunger factors of being fatigued or boared tended to eat uncontrollably. People who had greater restraint presented with feelings of cold emptiness. While emotional eaters presented with feelings of irritability. And of course, interoceptive hunger was more intense for the female participants of the study. This all makes sense to me.

I am a learner, and I read these studies because I think they start important conversations and discoveries. It could be that there might be practical implications for learning more about how interoceptive hunger develops.

Having this new learning in my back pocket is already coloring how I see the Hunger Scale l I created:

Now that I know more, I think this scale can help me be aware of interoceptive hunger. During the “Gentle Hunger” phase, my body’s signals are (likely) to be different than yours. The work, if you decide to do it is to identify how your interceptive hunger presents. For me, some signals I am going to pay more careful attention to growing feelings or physical symptoms of cold or emptiness, headache, bad breath, and abdomin noises.