Hungry or bored or thirsty?

"Sure, your stomach is growling, but do you really need food or are you just bored?" - Diet culture

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It’s not lost on me how we as a society have been taught to constantly question whether or not we are hungry. In other words, second-guess the act of feeding ourselves food, which is something that our bodies need in order to survive. There is no getting around it, we need food in order to function. If someone isn’t eating, this means that they are in a dire situation, and we should be concerned. But somehow, we have gotten to the point in society where “not eating” is said like a badge of honor.

Notice how I said “not eating,” not “not hungry”. Because, along with wearing that badge of honor, comes ignoring hunger signals. Yes, sometimes we are hyper-focused on work or life, and we are so stressed that our fight-or-flight adrenaline kicks in, and our hunger is suppressed until we realize it’s too late. I’m not talking about this situation. I am talking about intentionally ignoring being hungry because we think we should.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

“I don’t know why I’m so hungry, I just ate.” This is the start of a conversation that I once had with a coworker. Here’s the setting: it was about 11:00 AM, and we had just come out of a 2-hour meeting. On our way back to our cubicles, my coworker held her hands over her stomach, saying that she felt her stomach growling. This was before I was a dietitian and was working in fashion, but even back then, I knew this was a signal that the body needed food. I asked her if she was going to grab an early lunch because I would absolutely join her, and that’s when she looked at me, puzzled. Absolutely not, as it was “too early for lunch,” and as stated above, “she just ate.” And you are probably wondering what this meal was that she “just ate.” Friends, it was a container of Activia yogurt that she had early in the morning. Yes, that was the meal in question that left her puzzled as to why she might still be hungry and, in actuality, denying her hunger altogether.

This isn’t a unique case because it is not lost on me how the concept of eating is treated as a taboo subject. You can Google how to suppress your hunger, and there will be hundreds of options on the search engine. Go for a walk. Drink some water. Chew some gum. Try any of those options because actually eating food to suppress your appetite is out of the question. *Sarcasm, but you get the idea.* We are made to believe that we can’t possibly be as hungry as much as we think we are. We eat too much and are too consumed with food all the time, apparently. Not to mention that we are also told that we have too many options of foods, AKA processed packaged foods, available to us, which is why we are always hungry and eat too much. Funny enough, we never talk about why we need processed foods, and that we live in a society that requires processed foods, and that there are many processed foods that are, in fact, nutritious… but I digress.

As I said earlier, we need food in order to survive. Period, point blank, and I know this sounds like a very “duh” thing to say, but I truly believe that we forget this sometimes. If we truly recognized that we needed to eat, why do we constantly see so much rhetoric telling us otherwise? We are told that we are bored, thirsty, tired, stressed, and not at all really hungry. And don’t get me wrong, we can indeed also be these things, but we can also very well be hungry. We are also made to feel as though there are certain times when we should eat only. Hence, in my story above, about my coworker who didn’t want to eat “too early” for lunch at 11 AM. Who decides what times we have to abide by in order to consume food? Because I can tell you as a dietitian that our stomachs and digestive systems don’t have an open and close time. Our bodies are constantly working, thank goodness.

I constantly talk about how food represents so many different aspects and is not limited to just providing nutrients, but what if I also told you that there are different types of hunger? We recognize the physical feeling, but that is not the only time we consume food. You may have heard of different types of hunger from many sources, as