Back to Basics: The Hunger Scale 2.0 [Ep. 63]

This is the eat well. I think, well, live well podcast. I'm Lisa Salsbury, and this is episode 63 back to basics the hunger scale 2.0. Welcome to Eat Well, Think Well, Live Well; the podcast for women who want to lose weight, but are tired of counting and calculating all the food. I'm your host, Lisa Salsbury. I'm a certified health and weight loss coach and life coach, and most importantly a recovered chronic dieter. I'll teach you to figure out why you are eating when you aren't hungry, instead of worrying so much about what you are eating. Welcome to the first of the back to basics series. I'm going to be doing here in October. I know with the 1st of October, we're all thinking that the holidays are coming or that they are here. Even if you do a lot for Halloween. I know I have an extremely busy fall with two Brattle showers and two weddings, all of which are out of town in the next six weeks. So I'm going to be gone for over the next six weekends from my home and then right into Thanksgiving. So it's a busy season for me, for sure. And I'm guessing the fall is no different for you. So it's usually about this time that women think well, I didn't lose weight again this year. I guess I just have to wait until the new year or I still have a terrible relationship with food, or however you describe it. And you know, I'm just going to be eating all the Christmas cookies again, but I'm here to tell you that you do not have to do that. This is really what I've designed this back to basics series around these next few episodes are really going to hone in on the very simple basics you can do year round at any meal at any time and anywhere in the world that you are, whether you're home or out of town like me, whether you're at a dinner party, a holiday get together. Really anywhere. So be sure to subscribe if you haven't already done. So, so this series lands right in your favorite podcast app each week. So here's the thing. I really hope that you lose your first five pounds listening to the podcast. It's honestly my aim for you to see success with the tools I give you here for free each and every week. I hope that on my solo episodes, especially I'm clear with something you can implement each week to lose weight. Listen for those things. I often say, Hey, this week do this because I want you to improve your health in some way, improve your relationship with food, or just get more sleep, which by the way, will improve all of the above. If you have seen that success, then Bravo, I am so happy. That's my goal with the podcast. If you haven't though. It's time to schedule a free session with me so I can see, or you are getting stuck. So I want to introduce you to my limited time offer the get unstuck session. This is a 50 minute session on zoom that is completely free. More free stuff for you. To my podcast listeners, if you are trying to improve your relationship with food or your body, or you're trying to drop a little weight, but you just haven't figured out. Where you are going wrong with these tools. This session is for you. These concepts can be difficult to implement. When all along, all you've ever been given is a calorie count or a macro count, and then sent off to do your best. Here's a meal plan, eat all of this and you'll lose weight. Just hit these numbers and like magic. You'll be cured. They never tell you though what to do when you have a bad day or when you feel like there just aren't any good choices in quotes. On the menu or maybe just when your willpower has run out. I want to help you take a look at your thoughts and also your current food journal. If you have that, bring that to this session and see where we might be getting stuck at either a plateau or maybe you're just unable to even begin. You might be stuck just trying to figure out where to start. I have 10 slots on my calendar in the next six weeks. I already told you I'm going to be out of town a lot over the next six weeks. So the slots are earlier in the week. None on Fridays. So if you want help go now and secure one of these spots. Today. I have the first of my back to basic series though. And it is truly the foundation of what I teach. It's the hunger scale. And it's going to sound familiar if you've been around a while, because this is also episode one, much of the same content, the way I teach it hasn't really changed a lot, but I have added some things here and there and because it's so foundational to determining how much your body needs without the use of a diet app, without counting and calculating your food and calories. It really is worth studying and implementing because we all want to say, I just eat like a normal person. A lot of my clients come and say, I just, I just want to eat. Like normally I don't want to be constantly worrying about food. I don't want to be constantly worrying about my calories. It's so annoying to count macros and have to enter it all into an app. But then you're also thinking if I don't do all these things. I'm sure I'm going to gain weight or at least never be able to lose weight if I'm not willing to do those things. So how in the world do you lose weight? Do you improve your relationship with food without counting calories, calculating macros, or managing points? This tool is the way. Like I said, and as I'm sure, you know, if you are a listener for any length of time, it's called the hunger scale. And it's honestly so simple. I was hesitant that it was even worthy of a title when I first learned it. There are several ways to think about a hunger scale. So I'm going to teach you mine. If you are somewhere, you can write, then do this with me on a piece of paper. If not, you can just visualize in your mind. Picture a number line that goes from negative 10 through zero to positive 10. On the negative side is hunger and on the positive side is fullness. Negative 10 is a super hungry. This is like you've been fasting all day for a medical test or religious reason. And you have multiple physical symptoms that tell you you are hungry. Your stomach is painful and tight and cramped up your head hurts. You might feel a little dizzy. This is not the hungry you feel, where you didn't eat a great breakfast and it's lunchtime. And you tell your friend, oh, I'm starving. Not that you can't be hungry after a few hours after your last meal, but when we're talking about negative 10 hunger, it's probably been upwards of 10, 12 hours of wakefulness that you haven't eaten. It's very uncomfortable and zero fun. Positive 10 full is equally as uncomfortable. This is like Thanksgiving dinner, two or three pieces of pie. I don't have to lay down in a dark room and unbutton your pants. Your stomach is painful and distended, and you may have other signs of being overly full, such as heartburn or burping or cramping and nausea. Also zero fun. Many people use a hunger scale that goes from one to 10, where one is hungry and 10 is full. But the main reason I like to use the negative 10. Through zero to positive 10 scale. Is because you can see how that number equal, distant from zero. Or from neutral are equally uncomfortable. Or comfortable as we'll get to when we get to those smaller numbers, but the negative 10 and the positive 10 are both not fun at all and are probably equally uncomfortable in the body. Zero is completely neutral. You are neither hungry. Norful you don't feel food or fullness in your stomach. But also you don't feel any physical need for food. There are no physical symptoms. And your body just feels like what you might call quote unquote, normal. This neutral feeling is usually sometime one to two hours after you've eaten. And we want to aim to spend most of the hours of the day here at this neutral spot we want to spend most of our day here in this neutral area. Most of the time, we will not be feeling food in our stomach, but we also won't be feeling hunger. This is really the ideal kind of goal is to get to where most of the hours of the day you are feeling fairly neutral, maybe just slightly to the positive or negative side, you know, positive half, right when or negative half, just, we want to feel pretty normal and neutral most of the day. But as we start to move down into hunger from. From neutral. You start to feel the suggestion of hunger. Your body starts to whisper that it might be time to think about food. At negative one, you're feeling pretty light. And at negative two, you want to consider starting to prepare food? And then I'd like you to start eating at a negative three. At a negative three, you are definitely thinking, okay. I am hungry. It's not overwhelming. But it's definitely a good time to eat. Your stomach is giving you physical signals. That it's empty and ready. Yay. Now's the time to eat. This is the most comfortable time to eat. So just like I was talking about negative 10, being really uncomfortable, you know, when you start to eat, when you're really, really hungry, your stomach is already cramped up. It's not actually that enjoyable to start eating. It's a while until that food kind of eases that. And it's a really not comfortable. Negative three is a very comfortable time to eat. You're looking forward to food because you're ready. But you haven't started to develop any of the hunger signals. Like cramping are painful stomach that makes starting to eat also painful. So, this is significant because so many of us eat so often throughout the day. That we don't actually ever feel this physical hunger. We often feel snacky or like we just need a little something, something to tide us over. But the true feeling of physical hunger is really important to recognize and wait for. So you have your food prepared. You sit down to eat and you'll want to pay attention here because just like we waited until negative three to eat. We want to stop eating at a positive three. It will take practice and awareness and you'll overshoot as you start learning this skill, most likely it's fine. Don't panic. But that positive three feeling is adjust. Right. Kind of feeling it's really, before you feel any sense of fullness where your food is pushing on your stomach. You don't feel any heaviness from the food? But you do feel physically satisfied, like there's enough in there. It's sort of a comfortable. Amount of fullness in that there isn't any discomfort in your body in any way at this positive three, you, for sure aren't hungry anymore. And it feels like you could not eat again for several hours. I also call this enough meaning it's enough to sustain you, but it's well, before we might describe ourselves as full, when we are full that's likely at least a six or seven on this scale. Okay. Now here's the tricky part. I say that tongue in cheek. I have a really technical term for what it means to go from a negative three to a positive three. It's called a meal. But really this is so important. If you are hungry enough to eat. E wholemeal and get positive three. That means, of course, I'm asking you not to constantly be eating a snack. Snacking for the most part is totally unnecessary for adults. Our bodies are made to eat. And then stop eating. And then eat again. None of our ancestors grazed all day or ate six small meals a day. There wasn't time for that. And just not how human bodies were designed to be fueled. It's really. Not necessary. I will say, if you want to reference the episode on preventative eating, I do talk about at the very end, when you might want to begin eating prior to physical hunger, but there's very few reasons to do that. So you could check that episode out if you're thinking, oh, but I have to eat because of this reason. It might be in there so you can get some ideas. The problem though, with snacking is that we think we need a snack around a negative one feeling of hunger, and then we eat a little something and get up to zero or maybe positive one. And then shortly after we find ourselves back at negative one, or maybe we're down to negative two and worried that we're getting hungry. And then we spend all day jumping around the negative one, zero positive one, and wonder why we felt hungry all day. Because we confuse eating with feeling hungry. So there's two main problems here. Number one, we never feel true. Physical hunger. It's a good thing to start trying to feel as most of us don't feel it that often. We overeat our meals. And when the clock tells us it's time for the next we eat again, regardless of what our body is telling us. Number two. We don't get to feel satisfied. When we just graze our snack all day, we don't get that comfortable. Satisfying enough feeling. That helps us be emotionally satisfied as well. When we never feel satisfied with our food, we are far more likely to overeat in the evening after a full day of stacking. Whenever my clients tell me, you know, it was just a hungry day. If other factors like menstrual cycle are ruled out, then I ask them where they were on the hunger scale after their meals. More often than not. It was because they spent the day snacking Often standing up or in the car or never actually ate a negative three to positive three meal. If we simply eat three negative three to positive three meals, as I'm describing. You would lose weight. I know it sounds sort of crazy. But if we truly ate to our physical hunger, we would be at our natural weight. This is how our great grandmothers ate. They worked and they waited and to eat until meal time, then they just ate enough to be satisfied because likely that was all there was. Or maybe that was their share in a big family. But they didn't have to weigh their portions or log them into an app. They just ate according to what their bodies needed. So why doesn't everyone do this now? What's changed. It seems really simple, right. Eat when you're hungry. Stop. When you've just had enough. The reason we don't do this is because our brain and the reward center in particular. Is very involved in eating. We get quite a bit of dopamine from eating and especially if that food is highly palatable or concentrated in some way as a lot of our food today is it's quite difficult to stop eating because our brains are encouraging us to continue to keep eating keep eating because that means more dopamine It will be very uncomfortable to stop at just enough because your brain won't think it's enough. Your brain will be like, oh, well we always eat more volume than that. And we can keep getting dopamine if we keep eating. So your brain. We'll work very hard to get you to do this. And this, by the way, is your lower brain, that animal instinct part. And the part that often sounds like a toddler. So highly palatable food and simply portion habits will get in the way of using the hunger scale. One thing I want to remind you of when you are eating is that there is a point of diminishing returns. At some point in your very enjoyable meal, when your lower brain is encouraging you to continue eating and you're finding it difficult to stop because the enjoyment is so high from eating. I want you to remember. That beyond about a positive five, you're going to start getting some physical symptoms that are uncomfortable. You're going to start experiencing a full stomach and then carrying into that positive seven and eight, you're going to have actual physical pain from the amount you have eaten. This is partly how we know that these thoughts to continue are coming from your lower brain because your higher brain always has your best interest in your future self. In mind. When we eat past enough, instead of experiencing the mental discomfort of stopping. We will experience the physical discomfort of being overly full. The ideal is to stop eating when the enjoyment is at the peak. You've enjoyed what you've eaten. It's delicious. And then you stop before that food creates any unwanted digestive symptoms, including a full and painful stomach. So I usually sum this up. Just by saying more of this food or overeating, this food is not going to increase the enjoyment of it. Likewise on the hunger side, it's the most enjoyable. To begin eating when you are physically hungry. Not when you are so hungry that you feel like you can't get food in fast enough. But when you are physically ready to eat that also is the best time to start eating physically and mentally. So eating between the threes actually adds to the overall enjoyment of the meal. I know this feels way too simple because physical hunger is not the only reason that we eat. And being overweight is more than just calories in versus calories out. But to get really honest with yourself and really look at your habits and notice if you are overeating at mealtime consistently. Or over eating throughout the day with many, many small snacks. We will get to emotional eating and celebratory eating and all the reasons we eat that isn't physical hunger in future back to basics episodes this month. And I've also covered those topics extensively over the last year in the podcast as well. But the truth is the vast majority of your meals can be eaten. In this way, where we really pay attention. Two physical hunger and physical fullness. And this is really one of those things I want to emphasize that it can be done anywhere. This is one of those tools that can be done when there's nothing good on the menu. For example. Or when you're out of town. When you're out with friends or when you're cooking at home. In 21 meals per week. If you are a three meal a day, kind of person. If one of them is out with friends and another is a celebration lunch after a soccer game, when and you choose to eat past physical hunger, or maybe you eat before, you're actually hungry on these times. That's still 19 out of 21 meals in a week that can be eaten according to physical hunger. I think we really downplay some of these sort of ho-hum meals that we eat on autopilot, things like breakfast and lunch, which are often eaten by ourselves. Or just kind of the same things every day. These count these meals count when we are talking about number of meals we're eating in a week. So you're eating 18 or 19. Well, in 19 out of 21 meals is 90% of the time. And 17 out of 21 meals is 80% of the time, which most. Professionals will tell you if you are on track 80% of the time, you will lose weight. So that means even if you're overeating a few meals a week, If you are paying attention, the majority of the time, 80 or 90% of the time. That's plenty of, of meals to make a difference. I know I said, I wouldn't be talking about emotional hunger in this episode. Um, and that is totally different, but eating to physical hunger will bring up emotions. So when you're waiting for hunger, current Crabtree says it activates and triggers restriction and deprivation fears. Because of all your other diets. Basically your brain naturally goes to this thinking that you have always used when you've tried to lose weight in the past. So this is normal for your brain to do. But this time you can gently remind yourself that waiting for normal physical hunger to appear is what your body was designed to do. That's actually totally safe. Nothing has gone wrong. Waiting for physical hunger and eating to satisfied is meeting. Your human needs that is meeting your physical needs. You aren't in restriction, you aren't in deprivation. We aren't trying to survive on a 1200 calorie diet or enough food for a toddler. Right. So though it's normal for fear and restrictive worries to come up. That is your past diet trauma, and you do not have to live your life. At a weight you don't prefer, or with a relationship to food that feels very one-sided because the food always seems to be in control. Just because your brain is offering you thoughts like, oh no, this might be restriction. You can do the work on that. Your work is to rewire that part of your brain. One of the ways we do that aside from just reminding ourselves that physical hunger is normal and nothing has gone wrong. Is to create abundance by planning your meals. That's our next back-to-basics episode. So be sure to tune in for that next week. So that's all I have for you today. So go forth this week, experiment with a little physical hunger and physical fullness, both sides. What does it feel like to be at a positive two versus a positive four? And when you overeat this week, give that a rating too. Don't be like, ah, there I go again. Just be like, okay, here's a chance. To rate this. I think this might be a positive seven. Here's how it feels. Here's how long it took for me to get hungry. Again. Here's the physical symptoms. No, what these numbers mean so that you can recognize them. and use those times to learn about your hunger scale rating this week. Let yourself get hungry. Let it go tell its actual physical hunger cues. A lot of us have not let ourselves feel physical hunger. Mostly for fear. Of what is going to happen. I might get hungry, so I definitely should eat. So allow yourself to get down to that negative three negative four or on the flip side, if you're a person that goes long spaces between meals. And gets down to like negative seven or eight and is very uncomfortable and then tends to overeat. This is also for you. It's like tying to eat at a negative three. It's not scary to eat a little bit more often. So the depends on where you are again. When I'm doing these episodes, I'm kind of going off the average person, but that's why. It's really important. you are feeling stuck or you're not sure how to implement this with the way you have been working on it. Please grab one of those 10 sessions that I mentioned, those get on stuck sessions so we can dive a little deeper. And get into what specifically you're experiencing, whether you wait too long for hunger, or you're not waiting long enough, or we're consistently overeating, or maybe you're consistently only, ever eating a little bit, but multiple times a day. Like let's get your relationship with food much more healthy. Let's get it to where you want it. And in doing so, you know, probably drop a little bit of weight as well, if that is your goal. So again, Thanks for listening to the eat. Well think, well live well podcast.