I used to fear hunger, but now that feeling gets me pretty excited. In the past, being hungry was a fate worse than death. That gnawing feeling, all wrapped up with a sense of anxiety or dread, seemed to drill its way up from my stomach through my chest and into my brain.
I also used to play a lot of games with hunger. I once believed that I should eat in such a way that I wouldn’t feel that ghastly sensation, which usually meant snacking throughout the day. This was based on some weight loss guru’s assertion that “hunger is the enemy and will destroy your weight loss efforts”.
Here’s the weird thing though: I have learned that there is not necessarily a direct correlation between my sensation of hunger and my need for food. In fact, it seems quite the opposite. The truth is that the more I eat, the more I want to eat. The less I eat, the less I want to eat.
And this is a paradox. It doesn’t make any sense. But let me offer some “N=1” proof.
I have been on about a dozen cruises in my life. Cruise ships are essentially floating parades of palate-pleasing ecstasy. While on these debaucherous dreadnoughts, my wife and I would eat like Hobbits: Breakfast, second-breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and late-night supper! In spite of the constant barrage of culinary excess, I can truthfully tell you that I would still feel hungry after two hours. I had trained my body to expect food at those times in those amounts. In fact, when we would occasionally skip (first) breakfast, I would feel uncomfortable with the huge amount of expectant stomach acid my body had produced in anticipation of my first princely meal of the day.
Conversely, I have maintained low calorie diets for time periods of more than a year while losing 100 pounds and I can also confirm that after a few days, my hunger declines to almost nothing. I have even fasted for up to four days at a time and again felt little to no hunger after the first two days.
The fact that we can train our appetites in this way is truly fantastic news. What it means is that WE are in charge of our bodies. We are not their hapless victims. We are not subject to the whims of the flesh if we do not want to be. It also means that if you identify as a compulsive eater like me, you can now remove “hunger” as a “reason” to binge. This signal is just another voice produced by what I call the mind of the flesh or the lower self. Fortunately, this dynamic holds true for compulsively-consumed substances like sugar and flour as well. The less sugar I eat, the less I want to eat. Like begets like.
This matters in a big way because it means that YOU are in charge of what you eat. It means that you can make decisions about food that are based on your higher self; what the Apostle Paul referred to as his “inner being” (Romans 7:22-23).
Finally, I am not saying that there is no role for natural appetite in the long term. Homeostatic eating is a thing and God gave us these sensations for a reason (I’m looking at you, Gwen Shamblin). It’s just that if you have been given to chronic excess consumption and dysregulated eating for some time, your appetite likely requires some calibration.
Let’s just make sure we are calibrating our hunger, rather than it calibrating us.