When many people first hear of Intuitive Eating, they tend to think it is simply about eating when you are hungry and stopping when you are full. While this is certainly an important part of being an intuitive eater, eating intuitively goes well beyond responding to our physiological hunger/fullness cues. In this post we will explore some of the other kinds of “hungers.”
This concept of “types of hungers” is introduced in the Intuitive Eating book and I will elaborate and expand a bit more in terms of how I tend to think about it. Of course, generally when we think of feeling hungry we are talking about a physiological drive to eat. Everyone experiences physiological hunger in slightly different ways, often some combination of a grumbling stomach, lightheadedness, irritability, difficulty concentrating, etc. For the purposes of this post, we will explore hunger as a concept of various drives/reasons to eat including and beyond just physical hunger.
Let’s explore some of the different types of hunger!