How to tap into hunger

I think one of the biggest misconceptions I had when starting real recovery was that I’d be able to just tap into my hunger. That it was there and obvious and really if I listened it would be crystal clear what I had to do. But for me, that’s not how it went. Now, with the heady combination of nutritional rehabilitation, neural rewiring and hindsight of course I can see the hunger signals - constant preoccupation with food, a desire to make another meal plan, reading cookbooks for fun, being hypervigilant about the food others were eating - but at the time that felt so disconnected from anything I would would have called hunger. And given that I’d ignored these signals for more than 17 years it’s no wonder I didn’t recognise them!

My ED loved this when I started recovery; see, you really don’t even want more than this much food! Anything else felt “unnecessary” - it wasn’t like I was hungry. Despite having understood that my body needed abundance, it suddenly dawned on me one day that in the beginning I was going to have to FORCE it. No, I couldn’t tune into my hunger. Or certainly not what I understood hunger to be. That connection to my core self had been severed long ago. I couldn’t trust that I would passively make pro-recovery choices. If I was going to get out of a scarcity mindset and start listening to my body properly I was going to have to force it to have more food. What did that force feeding look like?

• Forcing myself to have juice and milky coffee and pastry with my usual breakfast

• Forcing myself to sit on the sofa and eat a family bag of crisps

• Forcing myself to finish a pack of chocolate digestives in one sitting

• Forcing myself to double up my sandwich for lunch

• Forcing myself to have dessert after dinner every night

• Forcing myself to graze on crisps and nuts and chocolate all day long

• Forcing myself to take a biscuit from the jar each time I walked past it

Not a single one of these things felt like something I wanted to do. I didn’t feel hungry for it. It all felt entirely “unnecessary”. And you know what? It was ENTIRELY NECESSARY to fully recover from my ED. If I had continued to eat the bare minimum of what was necessary to stave off physical hunger then I would have never recovered. Doing this not only nutritionally rehabilitated me but also went a long way for my neural rewiring. By forcing myself to eat far above what my ED deemed necessary I was able to rewire that belief so that, when the time came, I truly could listen to my core self and what she was hungry for. I won’t sugar coat it - going against those deeply ingrained ED beliefs is hard! Using pro-recovery distractions and being able to sit with those difficult emotions is a big part of this journey and helped me so much during that force feeding phase. The best part is that this unpleasant process allows for the very important reconnection with your core self. It will eventually allow you to tune into your hunger cues, both physical and mental, so that you can trust yourself to look after yourself for the rest of your life.

So, if you’re in recovery and not feeling like you are hungry enough for more food, then I see you. I hear you. I understand the struggle. But I promise you that the only way through this is to FORCE the change.