Why does hunger hurt? Because you get the pain from stomach contraction. Hunger can sometimes be quite gentle or straight-up unpleasant. That’s one reason the hunger scale exists, and you need to know how to check your hunger scale to come up with solutions for your body.
You might be asking yourself: “Why don’t I feel hungry?”, or “Why do I never feel full no matter how much I eat?”, or even “What does hunger feel like?” And here’s why.
Our body always signals to us the signs of hunger that show it’s time to consume some food. But there is a problem, and frankly, it’s also why we are underweight or overweight. That is we often ignore or fail to recognize physical signs of hunger or mistaken psychological hunger.
With that being said, let’s take a look at how to tell if you are hungry, as well as how to properly respond to those signals.
Before checking the hunger scale
Firstly, record your eating process during a period of time, 2 weeks should be enough, but if you want to, you can always extend the recording time.
During the process, you need to write down the time in the day you are eating and what you eat. Furthermore, you also have to take notes of what you were doing and how you felt before and after eating.
After 2 weeks or your desired time period, take a look at the data you collected, you might see some interesting eating patterns.
For example, you may realize that you always eat at one specific time, not necessarily because of hunger; you may also see that you often eat snacks even after you feel full, or you may even find that you just eat at a random time for no apparent reason.
Now you are ready to move to the next step
Use a hunger scale
A hunger scale measured how “hungry” you are using various symptoms of hunger from 1 to 10.
It is useful in telling whether you have physical hunger or psychological hunger. The difference between hunger and appetite is that hunger leaves physical signals to your body, while appetite is the desire to eat simply because of emotions.
The emotions affecting your eating desire can include sadness, happiness, boredom, or even stress. It doesn’t necessarily connect to your actual hunger, so check if your feeling is caused by something psychological when you still feel hungry even after eating.
Every time you feel like you want to eat something, use the symptoms you get to rate your hunger on the hunger scale from 1 being starving to 10 being definitely full. Here’s the scale with associated physical sensations at each rating
1. Starving, need to eat immediately, pain, light-headed, shaky
2. Very hungry, cranky, slight pain in the stomach, hard to concentrate
3. Beginning to show physical signs of hunger, stomach growls a little
4. A little hungry, may eat if suggested
5. Satisfied or neutral, neither full nor hungry
6. Slightly full, pleasantly full
7. Feeling food in the stomach or slightly uncomfortable
8. Feeling really full, the stomach bulges out a bit
9. Bloated, tight clothes, stomach hurts, feeling hurt in the stomach, sleepy, and drained
10. Definitely full, very uncomfortable stomach, feeling sick physically.
Respond to the signals
Now that you know how hungry you are, how to keep yourself pleasantly full and not overeat?
Ideally, your hunger should be between 3 and 6 on the hunger scale. If your hunger is at 3 or 4, you should start getting something to eat. Don’t let the rating hit 1 or 2, since you could over eat when being too hungry.
When it’s time for a scheduled meal, take a look at the scale and rate how hungry you are. If the rate sits somewhere between 4 or 5, which indicates you feel less hungry than usual, try to eat less accordingly. When you reach 6 on the scale, stop eating.
Eat healthily
No matter how much you eat, your meals should be balanced to fulfill your body’s satisfaction. So try to get food with these important nutrients:
Carbohydrate: grains, fruits, and vegetables are rich in carbohydrates.
Protein: It can come from meat, fish, eggs, dry beans, nuts, lentils, tofu, milk, cheese, and yogurt.
Fat: There are many sources of fat with each gives different types of fat
- Omega-3 fatty acid: you can get it from fish, flaxseeds, or walnut.
- Monounsaturated fats: you can find these fats in canola, olive, most nuts, avocados, peanut oils, etc.
- Polyunsaturated fats: these can be found in corn, soybean, sesame, safflower, and more.
You can mix and match food to get the taste you like. Good taste food also contributes to the satisfying feeling.
Stop eating when you are full
You feel cranky because you’re hungry, so you want to get to the food sources and eat as much as you want. But we recommend against that thought.
As mentioned before, you should stop eating when you reach 6 on the scale since if you are too full, it can be quite uncomfortable. Also, being too full means you overate.
So how to tell if your body is pleasantly full or satisfied?
First, relax before starting your meal, and then eat slowly. Keep in mind that your stomach needs some time to tell the brain that you are full.
When you have finished about 3/4 of your meal, stop and check the scale, if it is still at 3 or 4, continue eating, then stop halfway, check the scale, and continue again if you are still hungry, repeat these steps until your hunger scale reaches 5 or 6.
Don’t deny yourself
Satisfaction is just as important as having sufficient nutrients. You can easily reach the satisfied level by eating food that we enjoy. If you cut off all your tasty food in the meals, you won’t stick to those meals for too long.
So try to eat the food that you like or want, just keep in mind that you should only do so when you are showing true, physical signs of hunger.
Conclusion
By this time, you should have a full grasp of how to check your hunger scale, as well as ways to keep your body satisfied and full. Now, go ahead and grab something to eat if you feel hungry physically after, of course, checking the hunger scale.
We hope you find this article informative, and thanks for reading it.
