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Why Your Hunger Cues Are All Out Of Whack And How To Fix It · Your Strongest Body

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: You are listening to your strongest body.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Betsy Foster, a certified strength and conditioning specialist and certified nutrition coach.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: I've worked as a personal trainer for over a decade, helping people build strength, speed, muscles, as well as a deep appreciation for their bodies and confidence that helps them live their life to the fullest.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Now I'm sharing what I know with you fitness, nutrition and all the deeper stuff to help you discover your strongest body.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Hello, hello, welcome back to another episode of your strongest body.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: We are doing a little experiment here.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: My daughter walks to school with my other daughter and my husband, for they walk to school and then my husband and my youngest come back.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: That's a window in the day where there's nobody in the house.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: I have working hours where nobody is in here and I can record, but sometimes it just does not work out that way.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: I am trying a morning recording session while they're out.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: It's going to force me to be what's the word I'm looking for concise and a little rapid here with my thoughts.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: Let's go for it.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: We're talking about hunger cues.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: What I mean is talking about how you listen to your body and what your body communicates to you about hunger, fullness, satiety and what it can do to transform your relationship with food, your relationship with dieting and the way you eat to live your fullest life, one in which it helps fuel your performance as well as brings pleasure and connection and all the things that I have spoken so regularly about.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: When it comes to food and nutrition.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: If you know me, you know that nutrition for me, is more big picture than fuel for your workouts.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: That's one aspect.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: There are so many things, so many pieces to it.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: I believe that if you are a person who has struggled with a constant feeling that you need to diet, that you need to restrict, that you need to control your food consumption, discovering a more intuitive approach, a more relaxed and, what I almost want to say is connected but a more mindful approach that connects you with the reasons why you eat, the reasons why you like the foods you like and the ways in which you can include sound nutrition with joy and pleasure and things is going to make you a happier person, help you experience some freedom around food and be able to reach your fitness goals.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: When I'm talking about hunger cues, I'm going to talk about hunger cues.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: What I'm talking about is how your body signals to you that it's ready to eat and then how it signals to you that it's full and how it signals to you what you need or want to eat.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: And the truth is, if you are not connecting with that phrase, it is likely because you are not connected to your hunger queues.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: We are all out of whack, or so many people get out of whack.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: They're hunger queues because we have been conditioned to not listen to our bodies when it comes to food.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: We have been conditioned to ignore signs of hunger and restrict food from ourselves or ignore signs that our body is craving complex carbohydrates and we have decided in our mind that that is something that we can't eat.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: We also have become distracted people in general.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: I mean, we are in a culture in which we are busy for the sake of being busy all the time and there isn't a lot of brain space or mental energy or even physical energy oftentimes left for connecting with those thoughts, those signals.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: If you think about it, any kind of dieting, and when I'm talking so, there are two kinds of diet Diet, one just describing what your nutrition is, that's what is your diet.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: But dieting, the act of manipulating food intake, that can be.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: You can diet to increase food or diet to decrease food.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: Any kind of intentional diet is intentionally circumventing hunger queues.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: That's the point of it, because if you go with what your body is hungry for, and how much, and all of that, you will maintain the place where you are.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: Our body is always seeking homostasis, homeostasis, and in that we will always try.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: All the mechanisms in our body are going to try to get back to that spot.
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: That's why adding muscle or losing weight or losing fat is a difficult thing oftentimes, because our body has a natural set point.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Now you can make intentional choices that help support and if those choices are such that they are done slowly, progressively, with all the tools to help you make it sustainable, you can actually transition that set point to something else.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: And because you made it easier, you didn't feel resistance the whole time and so you're likely able to stay there.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: You weren't swimming upstream in the same way, but regardless, anytime we limit or add or anything like that, we are intentionally circumventing those hunger cues.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: If we want to be able to do that for an intentional weight gain or weight loss or fat loss or muscle gain, we have to know where our baseline is and we have to learn where we are comfortable to start with.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: We have to actually learn our hunger cues so that we can decide which ones we need to be listening to.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: And if the goal is your healthiest lifestyle, where you just want to feel more energy, where you want to exercise, to feel good, to look as strong as you can, to feel as strong as you can, if you want to have satiating meals, all of that, if you're just wanting to live a full and healthy life, then we actually just want to work on learning those hunger cues so we can listen to them.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: Learning those fullness cues so we can listen to them.
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: So let me just clarify that one more time.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: We want to cultivate a mindfulness around our body signals so that we can either listen to them and focus on them with such intentionality or, if we are being thoughtful about it, if we are being intentional, if we are doing it in a sustainable way, with some assistance, oftentimes we can learn how to hear those hunger cues and make decisions that work best for the kind of change we are trying to create in our bodies.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: But the best thing we can do is learn about our bodies.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: So if you have, at any point in your life, been a human being living in this world, you have probably gotten your hunger cues out of whack.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: We have been taught that eating after a certain time is bad, so you've ignored those hunger cues.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: We've heard that eating first thing when you wake up is the thing you have to do, so you might have ignored those not hungry cues.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: You may have ignored cues that are letting your body is needing some kind of like.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: There are moments where your body craves sugar for the point of the energy that it provides, but we have been taught that we can't have that.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: There are so many kinds of hunger cues.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: The other thing is we have decided, or we've been taught, that some foods are off limits, and so when we do allow ourselves to have them, we don't listen to those fullness cues that let us know I am finished with this and our, our hoarder mentality of I'll never have this again.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: I don't know if that's the right word for it, really, but you know what I'm getting at the idea that if I can't have this again, I'm going to override those hunger cues and just go with eating as much as I possibly can.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: Now there are cases where eating till you're stuffed is entirely like fine it's.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: It's whether or not you made the choice to do it intentionally and you've, and you are happy with that choice Like we're not always going to perfectly address our hunger or perfectly address our fullness, but what we want to do is create mindfulness around that.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: Here are some ways in which we can do that.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: First, trying to limit distractions when you are eating.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: This feels like one that is talked about a lot and feels like it should be a lot easier than it is, but life gets in the way.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: If you cannot do it at every meal to start, figure out ways you can do it at one meal a day.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: To start, that means sitting down at a table, not standing up over the counter.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: It means not in front of a TV.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: Having conversation is good, but making sure that while while you're having that conversation, you take a few moments to stop and chill.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you're if you're a parent, you may resonate with this.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: I get up from the table like nine times a meal to get something that somebody forgot or needs, or we spilled, or we're getting more food, or we're having a you know, a little meltdown.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: There are just many needs that I am addressing between that meal, and sometimes I'm sitting down and I think I don't even remember eating all that that I just ate because I wasn't present with it.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: So cultivating some mindfulness is going to be really important.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: Slowing down, removing those distractions.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Slowing down is a big one, and I often encourage people to set a timer just to see start, to see how quickly you eat and whether or not you are aware of how quickly you eat.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: You know, I think people would assume that it takes them about a half an hour to eat, and then they set a timer and it took seven minutes.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: So you don't have to set a timer for every meal, but you might want to bring some awareness to when you're starting to eat and when you're finished.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: Another great thing is journaling, so some kind of journal that helps you without trying to manipulate anything.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: Yet you're not trying to change anything.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: You're simply addressing the sensations and feelings that you get before and after meals or during the day, and some of those can be things that I think you wouldn't even associate with food intake, like oh, I'm having a drastic like crash and energy at this time.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: I feel really, really tired.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: I feel really hungry.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: The thing that I'm craving is this I didn't notice that I was hungry until this point and I'm already at an 11 out of 10 on hunger, bringing some awareness by using a some kind of journaling method so you can start to see patterns and so you can intentionally start to think about these cues Again.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: We have been trying to not listen to our bodies for so long that we have done a good job of tuning them out, and half of the battle here is starting to tune into them.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: Tune into them so that we can make decisions that feel better, decisions that make us feel fuller, make us feel more satisfied, decisions that make us enjoy a meal more or have energy for longer parts of the day, and then we can make the decision to listen to those hunger cues or not.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: Sometimes you here's a great example of something If you are not feeling hungry but you know you are going into a five-hour meeting without breaks to eat, you are probably going to just eat.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: You're just going to eat at that time, regardless of the fact that you don't feel hungry, so that you can have the energy to get through those that meeting, and that's a perfectly great reason to choose to eat, even if you aren't full or hungry.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Hungry is the word.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: I'm hungry.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: Hungry is the word I'm looking for.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: So there are a lot.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: So there are reasons.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: But even in that situation you were mindful about the fact that you weren't hungry, but you were also thinking about what your day was.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: And all of this sometimes feels like it's a lot to think about.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: But the more you practice it, the more it becomes a little bit like on autopilot, because you have created some routine in it.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: I know what feels good after a workout now in terms of nutrition, so I have go-tos.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: It's not always exactly that and I can't make it happen every single time with the exact timing that works the best for me.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: But for the most part that's on autopilot because I don't really have to make those decisions.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: This will also help with that nutrition decision fatigue, because as you learn your hunger cues and learn what foods satiate that hunger at a given time or give you the energy that you need to attack the next three things, or bring you the comfort, you stop stressing over making the decision and you just have decisions already formulated for yourself.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: So it can really take away some of that stress.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: In the beginning it might take a lot of energy to create this awareness, but sometimes that happens.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: It is worth it in the end if you have a relationship with food that allows you to enjoy it and allows you to think about it in terms of your health.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: Both of those things can coexist and there's a way to make that work for you, and you just have to start to trust your body, trust it enough to tell you information and then trust your decision making to make choices around food that check all those boxes.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: I also want to quickly note that sometimes, when we get into this sort of intuitive eating space and we think about, like, listen to your body, what does your body really want?
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: We get attached to the idea of perfect meals.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: So, like, my body right now wants this carbohydrate and this protein and I want these taste, flavors and things.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: Sometimes we can't access that with either time or money or simply like it just doesn't work out that day.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: You also can go without having the perfect meal or the perfect timing, and your body is not going to give up on you because you couldn't meet its exact needs.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: So, letting go of perfect nutrition, aiming for as good as it gets and checking all the boxes, we want to live beyond food stressing us out.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: We want to live beyond food being tasteless because we think that's healthier.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: We want to live beyond the idea that we we have to look to someone else to tell us what to eat, rather than making choices that support our health and that we really love to eat.
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: So your body is telling you lots of things.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: If the first thing you do is simply slow down and bring some mindfulness to each meal or as many meals as you can, snacks as you can I would do that Then I would go with journaling and then, from that journaling, I would look at the places that seem to consistently cause you mental anguish or, in general, you feel too hungry or too full or things like that, and then you can approach one at a time.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: One thing at a time.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: If breakfast is the challenge, start with breakfast.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Figure out the time that works best.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: Figure out the foods that work best.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: If snacks are the challenge, figure out what snacks are fulfilling.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: Talking about those mini meals that I had talked about in the snacking episode, I'll have to figure out which episode that was.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, tackle one thing at a time.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: Do it enough so that it becomes a little easier, and then tackle the next thing.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: The other thing is.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: I'm hoping that you live a long and fulfilling life so you do not have to magically wave your hands or snap your fingers and have nutrition figured out tomorrow.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: If you've got questions about this or any other kinds of nutrition things, I'd love to hear about it, because I want to know what kinds of nutrition questions you have as we move forward and into 2024.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: We're going to have guests.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: We're going to have different subject matter.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: We're going to address listener questions.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: I'm so excited, as always.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: I'm very thankful that you would listen.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: You can reach me via email, betsy, at bfosterstrongcom that's a letter, bfosterstrongcom or you can send me an Instagram DM at foster underscore strength.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: If you need anything, you know where to find me.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: I posted on my Instagram stories that the holiday schedule for these episodes is a little different, just because I have a few less episodes, but hopefully you stay tuned.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: This is a great time.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: If you're hanging at home and want to go back and listen to episodes that you haven't listened to yet, you can do that too.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: Okay, I'm like, I think I did it.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: I think I made it in the window and they haven't come back yet.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: Until next time, go build your strongest body and I'll talk to you later.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: Bye.