Mental hunger

I used to twist myself up in knots trying to understand mental hunger. I didn’t think I really had it. Sure, I’d think about food but I didn’t think it was any more than a normal person (who on earth could quantify that?). My thoughts around food felt so disconnected to my actual hunger that I didn’t think it was related. But one day, after I’d been doing proper recovery for a few months, I noticed my brain just sending me thoughts of a croissant. It wasn’t screaming for one, I wasn’t even really sure I fancied one and my ED was convinced that without a “real craving” it would go away. But it didn’t. I just found myself thinking about it a lot. So I went to the bakery and I got one. And all of a sudden I wasn’t thinking about croissants anymore. It really was as simple as that.

It got me thinking about how subtle hunger can sometimes be, especially when you’ve started to properly nourish your body. If you’ve had an ED for a long time it’s likely that you’ve normalised overriding signals of hunger. To the point that when they come back, physically or mentally, it can be hard to actually recognise them. Through a lot of experience I had to learn my own signs of hunger. And once I did, they were pretty consistent while I was in an energy deficit, but these signs still exist now in a fully nourished state. Because, turns out, hunger signals are always there and our body is always on our side. Here are some, maybe more subtle signs that your body is hungry:

• Thinking about a particular food, even if it doesn’t feel like a craving

• Obvious cravings!

• Thinking about all the food, even without something in particular

• Being hyperaware of what people around you are eating

• Noticing what characters are eating on TV or in books

• Opening and closing kitchen cupboards or the fridge

• Planning meals, or full days of eating, days in advance

• Considering what you’ve had earlier, or will have later, when it comes to a meal time

• Reading recipe books

• Seeking out recovery content

• An inability to sit still

This is not an exhaustive list and everyone has their own signals. The important thing to note is that if I hadn’t started paying attention to these mental hunger cues I never would be here fully recovered. I was already eating to a point where I was physically satisfied, but mentally I was still very very hungry. I still had a big energy deficit to correct which required an awful lot more food than my physical hunger cues were capable of sending. By starting to act on my mental hunger cues they became much easier to spot. My body started to trust that if it sent me some hunger signals then I would respond. From a recovery perspective the scariest part was that once I really listened there was no escaping the mental hunger. It was, quite rightly, ever present. This felt wild considering I genuinely believed I had pretty normal hunger levels. And I guess the truth is that when you’ve lived with mental hunger like that for years, perhaps even decades, it does just feel so normal. It doesn’t feel like hunger - it just feels like normal thoughts that a brain would do day in day out. But it’s really not. And happily, these mental hunger thoughts can be significantly diminished to the point where they only show up at pretty reasonable and appropriate times. 

So start tapping into these things and if I’ve learnt anything it’s the more you act on them the easier they are to understand - it’s just like learning a language!