Bites & Body Love (v)

How Ignoring Hunger Cues Fuels Primal Hunger and Food Obsession

• Jamie Magdic

Share episode

Discover the hidden connection between ignoring hunger cues and primal hunger in this eye-opening episode of Bites and Body Love. Join us as we delve into the consequences of neglecting our body's subtle signals, leading to intense cravings and a feeling of being out of control around food. Prepare to be amazed as we explore the primal drive to find nourishment when the body senses starvation, unraveling the cycle of overeating and subsequent shame. Our goal is to empower you with the knowledge to better manage your hunger cues and develop a healthier relationship with food and your body. Say goodbye to the "hangry" moments and hello to a more balanced approach to eating.

Ignoring hunger signals can have detrimental effects on both our physical and mental well-being, and we're here to shed light on these dangers. In this episode, we uncover how ignoring hunger can trigger compensatory behaviors like binging and an all-or-nothing mentality, disrupting our body's natural hunger signals and fueling an obsession with food. We emphasize the importance of breaking free from restrictive eating practices and introduce the concept of dietary restraint theory. Prepare to have your mind blown as we share a personal story about the host's daughter and her struggles with food restriction, exploring various theories related to dietary restraint and the negative consequences of strict food rules. Get ready to revolutionize your approach to eating and embrace a healthier, more balanced relationship with your body.

www.jamiethedietitian.com

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Bites and Body Love. This is going to be a special episode, so you are going to be getting a sneak peek into the large program that helps people through the relationship with food and body image, all the way to the finish line no more binging, no more dieting, no more restriction, no more distrust with food. I mean, it has it all. So you can learn more about that on jamiethedieticiancom, but I just wanted to introduce this to you to let you know that this is part of that program, and the purpose of giving you an inside peek into the program is so that you can take this tool that you learned today, this knowledge that you learned today, and apply it to your journey. Learned today, this knowledge that you learned today, and apply it to your journey. And, in addition, if it is helpful for you, if you have found that this could really benefit for you, it gives you a little bit of an idea of what the program may look like and or what it does look like and how it can help you. So, without further ado, let's dive in. You're going to be hearing one of the recordings from the program. Enjoy and reach out with any questions you may have.

Speaker 1:

Okay, let's talk about what happens when we ignore hunger cues, and I want you to sit back and reflect for yourself what happens when you ignore hunger cues. Okay, what can happen, for people can be very unpleasant. One thing that happens is this, quote unquote primal hunger and and what this means, what primal hunger can be. You can describe it as like urgent hunger, intense hunger. Um, we're naming it primal hunger because it comes from a primal drive to eat, because we are ignoring it, and so it's pushing that urgency, okay, becomes urgent and intense need to eat. It's usually accompanied by, maybe like the feeling of feeling hangry, hungry and angry, and then feeling overly hungry right Now. What happens, too, is when we that combination of that primal hunger plus the combo of shame when it comes to eating, distrust of the hunger, fear of how much we're going to eat, just afraid of food and having a distrustful relationship with it. What happens is we feel then start to feel out of control and we start to eat whatever we can find, and then shame happens, which causes us to over, overeat in ways that don't make us feel good, and our body does this.

Speaker 1:

Our body has this primal drive for food because we're it's interpreting our ignoring its hunger for like starvation, like there's no food around. We need to make this the most important thing. So we go find food, right it? It interprets us ignoring our hunger as starvation, so it leads us to the food, to any food that's available and to foods that are going to provide us the quickest energy to ward off that starvation. Right, it's almost like you can consider this primal hunger, kind of like when you're underwater and you finally come up and breathe air. You're like finally breathe air, you're trying to take in all the air that you can. It's that primal drive, when it goes for too long, of ignoring hunger cues and ignoring those subtle hunger cues and getting to just those big hunger cues like okay, well, now I'm hungry because we were ignoring subtle ones, because we feel like we need to make sure we're hungry and get the real, real big hunger cues to know that we can eat. We're going to talk about the big, the larger hunger cues and smaller hunger cues and what there are for you and the importance later.

Speaker 1:

So what else happens with the backlash of hunger. So I'm sure you can all relate to that first one, or many of you can, and that's might be a big reason why you are here, because you wanted to take this program, because you have a poor relationship with food and maybe possibly binging and that primal need, and then it creates a negative relationship with your body and a distrust, distrusting relationship with your body. So we're going to go over that and we're going to, we're going to conquer that shortly. But what else happens with ignoring hunger? Well, what happens is it becomes this kind of overlaps with what we just chatted about, but it becomes compensatory, which doesn't feel good in your body and we have a lot of shame around that and intentions are thrown out the window with taking care of ourselves in a way that feels good because we just need to eat. Now we get this all bets off mentality.

Speaker 1:

When something goes wrong, we start, we start to, um, like have this start over mentality or fuck it mentality. Sorry, I think that was the first time I swore on this course. I'm not going to edit that out because that takes a lot of work. There's a lot to do, so I'm sorry. The effort mentality so we have this start over mentality or this effort mentality. Like, oh, might as well, I might as well eat everything in the house even though that doesn't feel good. But that's what happens when we ignore hunger. What happens is we get this binge. We binge or overeat. We get part of this binge restrict cycle which we're going to talk about later. The meals can feel like our last when we ignore hunger. Another thing that happens is it's super.

Speaker 1:

We confuse our body. Ignoring hunger confuses our body. It messes with our hunger cues. Our body starts to like, our hunger cues start to get out of whack. They can stop sending them. Many times they stop sending them because it's like well, you're not listening to me anyway, so I don't know what to do. These signals are not working. So then we totally screw up that interoceptive awareness and being able to understand. We second guess our needs.

Speaker 1:

We have distrust the rules of our mind of these diets and ignoring hunger. They conflict with the experience of our body and the cues it has, which causes us to fully fall out of tune with our body's natural mechanisms of hunger, which already knows internally what we need to do. It makes us question our body's natural drive to fuel our bodies, while causing us to distrust them and ourselves around food. It keeps your mind on food, keeps you obsessed with food when we ignore hunger, because it doesn't want that. That hunger signal is like I'm going to make you keep thinking about food because you need it. So even if you're ignoring is like I'm going to make you keep thinking about food because you need it. So, even if you're ignoring me, I'm not going to get that thought of food out of your head. It keeps you lethargic, it raises anxiety and it's disrespectful to us. It causes us to live in our head and we have the deprivation effect, which we're going to talk a lot about here shortly, and the dietary restraint theories which is about to come up.

Speaker 1:

So, anyways, why does it matter if we're restricting? So in case you're still wondering well, why, why? Why can't I just continue to restrict if I really want to and I can still have a better relationship with food. I can still have a better relationship with my body. I can't just continue to restrict if I really want to and I can still have a better relationship with food. I can still have a better relationship with my body. I don't need to get rid of restriction for that. No, unfortunately we can't have all of those together.

Speaker 1:

Restricting impacts your relationship with your food and body. Completely, completely it's. I don't know if I've seen someone move forward without giving up restriction, and I don't know if I've seen someone give up restriction and have a better relationship with food in their body or be at the place that they want to. They've definitely, if they, you know, when they've reduced restriction has helped them to have a better relationship with food and body, but not completely better still holding them back from life, still causing them to not have that wonderful like fully trusting relationship with their body. Sometimes people go halfway and they rid of some restriction, but going through all of it is really scary. So they might only do half, like go halfway, and they might feel like they definitely feel some benefits, some good benefits, but they're never able to truly feel what it feels like to have this mutual respect for trusting relationship with our body, cause they didn't go fully. So we have to address restriction fully. Restriction has a impact on our relationship with food and body. Just, just period it does.

Speaker 1:

Now let's go into some of the science. I want to go into some theories that are out there and share those with you. Okay, let's talk about dietary restraint theory. What happens when we take off with the table? What happens when we take off with the table? What happens when we take food off the table? I spoke too fast and say that we can't have something. What happens when we mentally restrict ourselves and we shame ourselves with food? The same thing I'll give you. That. I'll give you that. I'll give you that answer. Whether it's actually taking food off the table or shaming yourself about the food you are allowing on the table, they both have effects and we're going to talk about that with these theories that we're going to be talking about.

Speaker 1:

But before we do, I want to tell you a story of my daughter. So when I came into my daughter's life she is not my biological daughter, so I came into her life at around five Food, certain foods, were not allowed in the house or just were not in the house often and I saw this as a problem, like right away, like Ooh, I wonder how she's going to interact with with food, that food when it is around. So one time we went to dinner and we ordered a fried ice cream. We ordered it to share. Oh, my goodness, she couldn't eat that ice cream fast enough. She was literally taking ice cream off our spoons. She was taking ice cream off of our spoons. She wasn't even aware that she was doing that. I remember telling my now husband after we left, like okay, did you see that? Do you know that's from? That's because she doesn't have fried ice cream enough. Husband, we need to change that. Also, one time at christmas she was just hanging out around the um, like there are tons of things to do, children to interact with games. She was hanging out around around the dessert table just shoveling dessert in, like in a way that she might have threw up later. I'm not, I don't remember. She's done that before too. She doesn't do that anymore because now we have all foods in the house.

Speaker 1:

But what happens is you, you'll notice, with the kids that are not allowed foods, when they are, like when they go to a friend's house and their friend has chips, soda, what have you? They can go, they just want it all. Right, they might stop doing what they usually. They might be excited to like hang out with friends and and interact with them. But when they're at their house and they know that food is there, that's all they can think of, right. But for people that have all food and are taught about all foods fitting and what makes when, when we to, how to listen to our body, to have a good relationship with all of those and eat in a way that feels good. That doesn't happen for those kids. So why? Let's go through these theories, okay, so we're going over four theories. The first theory, the what the hell effect.

Speaker 1:

This can also be called the restraint overeating cycle. So restraint, overeating, or it can be called the binge restrict cycle. Just because I'm so used to calling this the binge restrict cycle, you're going to hear me call it the binge restrict cycle, even though you might not identify with binging. You might call it the overeating restrict cycle, but this is just what I call it. It's where you're restricting food and then you're having a lot of it or you're feeling out of control with it, right, okay? So what this means is success. You label success as requiring. Success requires getting through the day without any violations of your rules, and violating those rules will mean that you have blown your diet or blown your way of eating, the rules that you set and it's enough to trigger you to quote unquote fall off the wagon and totally disconnect from hunger and fullness and binge. So we're going to go over this cycle in the future, but this is when you you say, hey, I'm going to only eat this way during the today, I'm only gonna have X amount of calories, I'm only gonna have this kind of food. So maybe you're saying I'm just throwing out an example there, like of a typical diet, like I'm only gonna allow myself 1800 calories, I'm not gonna allow myself to snack at all, I'm going to have three meals and one snack and they're going to contain X, y and Z quote unquote healthy foods, right? So if someone with this kind of having this what the hell factor binge, restrict cycle, they may feel fully unsatisfied and hungry and then come home from their day, have a Hershey kiss and then say, oh, I broke the rule, I'm going to have all the Hershey kisses, right? That's an example. I'm going to have all the Hershey kisses, right, that's, that's an example.

Speaker 1:

Another theory for the dietary restraint theories is perception. So what is that? Is perception overeating or perception binging at even the perception of breaking a rule? So that means like you may binge and overeat just at the perceived perception of breaking the rule. So that means like you may binge and overeat just at the perceived perception of breaking the rule, even if you didn't break the rule. So an example of this is a research shut up a sneaky taste testing study and dieters were only told that they were having high calorie foods. And the mere perception that they were having high calorie foods caused them to a triggered overeating and binging, right. So feeling like, let's say, you go to a restaurant, right, and you don't know what's in the food, and then you're starting to get really anxious about it because you are. You created these rules for yourself and maybe you thought this, this, this went over your calorie limit, even if it didn't went over your calorie limit, even if it didn't go over your calorie limit, that perception of it going over your calorie limit and breaking a rule is enough to trigger a binge.

Speaker 1:

Next one anticipation of food restriction. So, anticipation of food restriction. What happens is and here's an example of the study when chocolate restriction was imposed for three weeks, it triggered an increase in chocolate consumption before and after in anticipation to this diet, kind of like a farewell to this food feast. Restrained eaters do not really end up eating less food overall. A high restraint eating score seems to be more accurately reflecting eating-related guilt rather than actual food consumption. So anticipation of food restriction can cause binging and overeating just at the mere anticipation of that restriction happening. Are you seeing the? Are you noticing how restriction, in no matter what form, is always going to get you is never going to be helpful? An example of this like, let's say, you say, okay, after Valentine's day is done or Halloween, if you celebrate Halloween after Halloween's done, there's going to be no chocolate, no candy in the house. What's going to happen is you're going to try and get all the candy you can in before Halloween ends and then also it can trigger you to eat more, even after Halloween. That's what this theory says, and I'm sure you have similar experiences. Okay, I think this is the last one.

Speaker 1:

The irony of thought suppression. The irony of thought suppression. This is that don't think of this. What are you going to think about? So if I said, hey, don't you picture, don't think of an elephant, what are you going to think about? So if I said, hey, don't you picture, don't think of an elephant, you probably all thought of an elephant.

Speaker 1:

Research has similarly shown that trying to suppress food-related thoughts not only increases thinking about the food, but also increases in eating it. So what's the problem? Is the problem the food or is it restricting the food? What are you thinking right now? Are you starting to see that? What's the problem? Is it restriction of the food or the food? What came first, restriction or binging? Is binging what we need to get rid of first, or is restriction what we need to get rid of in order to get rid of the binging?

Speaker 1:

Okay, oh, there's another one the forbidden fruit phenomenon. I think I said that wrong Phenomenon, forbidden fruit phenomenon. So think of children for this. And actually the study shows it represents a group of children and they told them don't eat yellow M&Ms, you just can't eat the yellow ones. Eat all the rest, but don't eat the yellow. Guess what they ate the most of Yellow? Because it's a forbidden fruit.

Speaker 1:

What happens is, when you make something forbidden or take something off limits, you give it a charge. It's no longer neutral and you can make a decision from a neutral place. You can make a decision from a neutral place. It's charged up. Now you're going to be making these decisions based off this charge.

Speaker 1:

We're going to talk more about charged foods in a little bit, okay, so all right, as you can see, there were some parts cut out and it was cut off early, and that's because this is just a really big part of the program. It's all. There's a lot to it so we can't include all of that, so it's an edited down version. But I hope you took a lot away from today's episode, from that sneak peek. If it's something that you're vibing with that you feel like, wow, that has helped you. We have tons more of where that came from that can help you through your recovery journey to achieve that full freedom, confidence, respect and compassion with food and your body. You deserve it. It's there for you. I can't wait to hear from you. If you feel like you might be a good fit for this program, you can email us at hello at jamierdcom or visit wwwjamiethedieticiancom. I look forward to seeing you there and I wish you all the best until next time.