The Most Helpful Healthy-Eating Tool

In my previous post about serving sizes I mentioned a tool to help you determine the portion of food that is right for you at any given time. It is by far the most helpful healthy-eating tool I know — an aid for tapping into how hungry or full you feel. I call it the Hunger Continuum and I’ll share it in a minute, but first let me explain why it is so valuable.

Learning (or, I should say, relearning) how to listen and respond to your body’s hunger and satiety cues is an invaluable key to nourishing yourself well and avoiding overeating. It can help you find balance in any situation, from an ordinary Wednesday night to a weekend beach party.

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How we learn to ignore our hunger-satiety cues

Healthy babies are born with fine-tuned hunger-satiety mechanisms. Whether they accept food and how much they eat are internally motivated — they feed when they are hungry and stop when they are satisfied.

But as we grow up and begin to interface with the world, we are influenced more and more by external forces. We are praised for cleaning our plates; we are given candy as a reward for good behavior; we learn to expect a snack during a 45-minute mommy-and-me class; or perhaps we are teased for having a voracious appetite. Before long, these messages take over, and decisions about when and how much to eat become increasingly detached from our physical feelings.

By the time we are adults, we are well-practiced at ignoring our internal cues of hunger and fullness. We eat because we are compelled to finish what is heaped in front of us, because we “deserve” that doughnut after a long day’s work, because plowing through a bucket of popcorn is just what you do at the movies or because a TV ad sparks a chocolate craving.

On the flip side, we also learn to ignore our genuine physical hunger as we accrue years of practice with restrictive diets that tell us our appetite is a beast we have to fight.

The Hunger Continuum can help you recognize internal cues

When I was in private practice as a dietitian, inspired by the book Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, I developed a tool called the Hunger Continuum to help my clients reconnect with and honor their internal sense of hunger and satisfaction, and it proved to be immeasurably helpful. Many have told me it was the one thing that helped them the most — that no matter the circumstances, they were able to stay on a healthy track if they kept the Hunger Continuum in mind.

How to use the Hunger Continuum