Sometimes I eat when I'm not hungry

I’m in the home stretch of my 6th pregnancy.  

I won’t miss the heartburn or thigh-high compression socks, but I will miss being pregnant.  

As I continue my anti-diet journey, my pregnancy has helped remind me of an important lesson about intuitive eating.  

One of the 10 principles of intuitive eating is to honor your hunger.  Truly honoring your hunger at any time, much less during pregnancy, can feel scary for anyone who's dieted.  

Like many others who try intuitive eating, I mistakenly used this principle in a way that kept me with a dieter’s mindset for a long time.  I thought that I was doing it "right" by turning this principle into a strict rule that meant I could only eat when I was hungry. 

If I did eat when I wasn’t hungry, I felt like I had failed.  This is what the conversation in my head sounded like: 

What’s wrong with me? 

Why can’t I stop doing this?

Can’t I find something else to do if I’m not really hungry? 

Where’s my strength and willpower? 

What emotional issue(s) do I need to address in order to stop doing this? 

Do any of these questions sound familiar to you? If you’ve dieted (or even restricted a “small” amount of food, for any period of time), I’m sure you’ve asked yourself these same questions.  

So how did I stop asking myself these questions, stop feeling shame and guilt about what I ate and relax around my food?  Here are my top 3 ways...

#1.  Surviving pregnancy.  If you’ve been pregnant, you know that your hunger and eating can, ahem, get a little wacky. Some days you feel like eating something and then 10 minutes later the sight of that very food makes you want to vomit. Some days/weeks/months you’re so nauseated you can only get down saltine crackers while holding the edge of the kitchen counter.  One day nothing tastes good, the next day, you want all the things. Some days there’s a metallic taste in your mouth (or maybe that's just my constant consumption of Tums). One day you want all the high carb, sugary things, the next day you want protein, protein and more protein. Some days you can only eat a little, other days you eat more than you normally would eat.  Some days, you can't keep anything down.

To survive all of these ups and downs, you eat what you can and don’t think twice about what you “should” be doing because you just need to get through the day.  

#2. I learned about the pitfalls of intuitive eating (IE). IE still a great framework that I believe in, as long as you don’t turn it into another diet.  Even the founders of IE, say that It's perfectly ok and normal to eat when you aren’t hungry. Period. Sometimes we take things literally when we're still looking to cling to a past that we're comfortable with (aka restriction). This past likely included a lot of rules as a framework to ease our anxiety.  I also learned that physical hunger doesn't always have to be a growling stomach.  The first signs of hunger can be simply thinking about food, feeling low in energy, having a headache or feeling dizzy.

#3.  I can’t control my food or my body.  You can try, like I did for many years, but you’ll very likely mentally and physically know that you can't continue harming your body, mind and spirit any longer.  

When I committed to truly using IE for my last 3 pregnancies, the questions I used to ask myself if I ate when I wasn’t hungry or ate past a certain point that I had deemed “too much”, changed dramatically. 

The conversations in my head sounded a lot more like this:

Nothing has gone wrong here 

I will eat until I feel satisfied.

I’m trusting my body’s cues and my body knows on a deep level what I need. 

I will honor my hunger cues and not ignore my hunger needs.

I am building trust in myself by caring for myself.

Am I getting enough emotional support in addition to meeting my physical needs?

I went from watching my caloric intake and eliminating food groups to eating like this:

If I know I won’t have access to food for more than a couple of hours, I bring snacks or eat before I leave, even if I’m not feeling hungry.

If I don’t feel hungry after a three hours of eating, I eat anyways because I know if I don’t have something I’ll feel woozy.  

Sometimes I eat a meal or snack and feel hungry 30 minutes later, so I eat again. 

Ultimately, honoring your hunger always comes back to self care and acceptance. Accepting and meeting my body where it is (thigh high socks are awesome) and taking the best possible care of myself (tums at 3am, yes, please) in any given moment which sometimes means eating when I’m not hungry, and that’s ok.