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Physical Hunger - The Lost Skill and Missing Key to Weight Loss

  • Writer: Susan Armstrong
    Susan Armstrong
  • Apr 1, 2024
  • 3 min read



When was the last time you truly felt the sensation of physical hunger? Not just a craving or an urge to eat out of boredom or habit, but that deep, gnawing ache in your stomach crying out for nourishment. So often in our hectic, crazy world we live in, we've become disconnected and out of touch with our body's innate signals and needs. Especially physical hunger. 


Surrounded by an abundance of food options and bombarded with dieting messages, it's easy to lose touch with our inner hunger and fullness cues.


Our busy, overscheduled lifestyles mean we're frequently eating on-the-go, mindlessly snacking, or skipping meals entirely until we're ravenously overeating. We're prioritizing convenience and accessibility over checking in with our bodies about what and how much we actually need.  


On top of that, diet culture has conditioned us to ignore or override our natural hunger in pursuit of arbitrary food rules. We restrict entire food groups, obsessively count calories, and adhere to rigid eating windows - all tactics that cause us to become deaf to our body's biological hunger signals.


In this state of disconnection, it's no wonder so many of us struggle with issues like emotional eating, binge eating, and food cravings. Without listening to our bodies, we're left with no inner guidance system. So we turn to external cues like trendy diets, food labeling, and even our emotions to decide when and what to eat.


But our bodies are designed to tell us when real physical hunger kicks in and when we've had enough. It's an innate biological system that was perfected through thousands of years of evolution to keep us nourished and alive. Our ancient ancestors didn't have the luxury of plentiful food sources, so being able to recognize and respond to true hunger cues was essential for survival.


Those instinctual hunger and fullness signals still exist within each of us, guiding us on how much fuel our body needs and when we've taken in enough. We're born with this intuitive biological wisdom hard-wired into our systems. It's only through our modern disconnected lifestyles that we've become deaf to those inner cues.


By re-attuning to these innate hunger signals through mindful practices like hunger mapping, we can get back in touch with that primal intuition around eating. We can escape the noise of dieting culture and food rules that drown out our body's voice of truth. Even in our fast-paced, overstimulating world, our physiology still holds this evolutionary guidance about nourishment - we just have to commit to listening again.


Imagine rediscovering that intuitive ease around eating that babies and young children naturally possess before societal influences intervene. Remembering how to fuel yourself from the inside out, not based on external rules. Hunger mapping helps us shed all the diet debris to reunite with our body's inner biological blueprint for eating.


While our modern comforts may have made us disconnected, that ancient biological wisdom still lives within our physical forms, waiting to be tapped into once more. All it takes is turning our attention inward and trusting the innate hunger signals our bodies are sending. The roadmap back to intuitive eating was inside us all along.


Over the years, we've allowed dieting culture, busy lifestyles, and emotional disconnects to drown out our body's intuitive signals about eating. We've overridden and ignored our natural hunger in pursuit of arbitrary food rules or self-soothing with food for comfort instead of fuel. In doing so, we've lost touch with one of our most primal, evolutionary guidance systems for maintaining health and nourishment.


But it doesn't have to stay that way. By committing to practices like hunger mapping, you can reconnect to the intuitive biological wisdom about eating that still lives within you. You can escape the diet noise and relearn to understand and honor your body's unique hunger and fullness signals. 


Imagine making peace with food and your body. Of effortlessly consuming enough to feel energized without overeating from deprivation. Of not wasting precious mental energy on calorie counting or labeling foods as "good" or "bad." That's the freedom that comes from intuitive eating guided by your innate hunger cues.


So when did you lose touch with knowing true hunger? It's time to find your way back to that inner roadmap. To escape the dieting cycle and food struggles for good. Your body has held this intuitive wisdom all along - you just need to start listening to it again. A happier, healthier relationship with food and yourself awaits when you do.


 
 
 

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