12/04/2025
Eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full sounds like such a simple concept, but it can actually be challenging for many people.
With eating disorders, and disordered eating in general, hunger and fullness can often get off track.
What I mean by this is that there may be a time that hunger and fullness are hard to identify or they are unreliable.
If someone has been restricting, it will slow down digestion, meaning that food will sit in the stomach longer, take longer to digest and can lead to early satiety.
Some people have been so used to ignoring signs of hunger or pushing it off, that those cues may completely go away for a while.
Some people are so used to letting their head call the shots (with food rules and calorie counting) that they become disconnected from their body and start to believe their body cannot be trusted (hence more food rules).
Emotionally, some people may ignore hunger or fullness due to the desire to control, escape or numb.
Some people may not recognize gentle signs of fullness and continue eating until they are past the point of discomfort.
With food freedom, you are able to learn how to slowly connect with your body again as you relearn internal hunger and fullness signals and practice honoring those cues.
Sometimes, this starts with eating by the clock which may seem counterintuitive, but it can help to recalibrate internal signals.
Just like you’re placed in a cast when you break a bone in order to help reset the bone as part of the healing process, a meal plan is sometimes used to help “reset” hunger and fullness cues in eating disorder recovery.
We are born intuitive eaters and it is possible to learn to listen to our bodies again.
This way, you can have your Christmas cookies and eat them too! 🥂🎅
❤️💜
