How to honor your hunger with principle 2 of intuitive eating

Becoming an intuitive eater means developing a sense of flexibility and nuance around food. While the idea of honoring your hunger can be liberating, it can also present a great challenge to those still wrestling with the rigid rules of diet culture.

The 10 principles of intuitive eating offer a guide and framework for healing your relationship with food and body image. While the steps are numbered, they don’t need to be followed in order. For instance, working on the second principle – honoring your hunger – can make the other principles, like making peace with food, more accessible.

What we’ll cover:

How dieting affects our hunger

Dieting and food restriction trick our bodies into believing that food is scarce. Even though we may have easy and regular access to food, (unless you are food insecure, a very real and unjust issue) dieting can lead our bodies to think that it is starving given the caloric deficit that many diets encourage. Our bodies are biologically wired to operate in this way. Our ancestors had to hunt and gather food and would have periods of feast and famine. Their bodies had to be efficient at storing energy (aka: calories) so they could survive. An insufficient amount of calories naturally signals to our body that food is scarce.

When food is restricted (either physically or mentally), it is common to feel more preoccupied with food. Lack of food causes your body to trigger a number of mechanisms that put it in primal hunger mode signaling to your brain that food is scarce. When you suddenly have access to food again, your body intuitively overeats as a way to protect and nourish itself. There is nothing wrong with that! It’s just your body trying to protect you. Thanks, body!

Ignoring hunger can have a number of detrimental effects on our body. As mentioned above, it can have the immediate effect of pushing our bodies towards overeating to compensate for the restriction of food caused by dieting. Overtime, it can also damage our interoceptive awareness, making our hunger cues more difficult to notice. This is one of the reasons dieting can be so harmful: it forces you to follow arbitrary rules about when and what to eat, rather than listening to the natural signals from your body. As a result, truly honoring your hunger becomes difficult.

How to honor your hunger

Here are a few ways you can work on following the 2nd principle of intuitive eating – honoring your hunger.

Ditch the diet. Diets encourage food restriction and impose external rules that override your internal hunger cues.
Feed your body regularly throughout the day. Regular meals help prevent primal hunger and build trust between you and your body. It is much easier to stop eating when you truly know you will be able to eat again.
Balance your meals. Have a combination of carbs, fat, and protein that will help make your meals or snacks filling and satisfying.
Don’t skimp on carbs. Carbohydrates, which break down into glucose, are particularly important because they are our bodies preferred source of energy. Our brain, for example, relies on glucose exclusively – an important fact that diet culture forgets since it encourages us to limit or cut them out completely. If we don’t eat enough carbs, our bodies breakdown and transform our muscles (protein) for energy which is inefficient and harmful in the long run. Simply eating more protein won’t prevent this from happening.
Use the hunger/fullness scale as a guide. This tool helps you tune into your body’s hunger signals and differentiate between mild hunger and extreme hunger.

Important Note: This scale isn’t meant to be followed “perfectly” and it may not be appropriate for someone who is in recovery from an eating disorder or chronic dieting. It’s a guide, not a rule.

If all of this seems overwhelming, know that you don’t have to do this alone! Working with an intuitive eating aligned dietitian can be very helpful.

Different types of hunger

One caveat: while it is important to honor your hunger, this doesn’t mean that you should only eat when you’re physically hungry. Some people become overly focused on this idea, turning intuitive eating into the hunger-fullness diet, which is another form of rigidity. There are different types of hunger: taste hunger, practical hunger, and emotional hunger—all of which deserve to be honored because food is so much more than just nourishment.

Taste hunger describes the desire to eat food for the pleasure it brings even though you’re not physically hungry. It involves enjoying food as a source of joy, like when you attend a special occasion or simply getting dessert after dinner because it just sounds delicious!
Practical hunger is about logistics and working with your schedule. For example, you may have a meeting at 12:30 PM, but that’s usually around the time you get hungry. You know you won’t be able to eat until after, but that might cause you to feel uncomfortably hungry. So you eat before the meeting even though you weren’t physically hungry.
Emotional hunger involves eating to soothe difficult and complex feelings. Food is comforting – we all have certain foods that we turn to when we are feeling emotional and that’s fine. Coping with our emotions with kindness (principle 7 of intuitive eating) encourages you to have multiple tools in addition to food to help alleviate intense emotions.

For some people, this can be one of the challenging areas of intuitive eating because it’s asking you to actively unlearn diet culture. Honoring your hunger and adequately nourishing our bodies is a vital step to making peace with all foods.

Edited October 14, 2024

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Author Bio

This article was written by Jasmine Hormati, MS, RD, CDN, a registered dietitian and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, and reviewed by Thanh Thanh Nguyen, MS, RD, CDN. They specialize in eating disorder recovery, healing from chronic dieting, and body image work using a weight-inclusive and intuitive eating approach. Jasmine earned her Bachelors of Science in Conservation and Resource Studies form University of California, Berkeley and her Master of Science in Nutrition and Public Health from Teachers College, Columbia University. Thanh Thanh earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Nutritional Sciences from Cornell University, and her Master of Science in Nutrition Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Hi, I'm Jasmine

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