No More Diets

How can I stop feeling hungry? I have hunger all the time even after a real meal.

This type of hunger is quite a common problem if you are trying to cut down on food. You see we are programmed to want to eat - it is part of our survival and if we don’t get enough food (or feel we are depriving ourselves) we just want to eat and eat.

So more often than not this kind of hunger is generally not physical but psychological.

You are fighting your natural instincts to want to eat as much as you can.

In fact even if you are not trying to cut down on food, the causes may be psychological - you may be trying to fill some kind of “gap” that exists in you or in your life. You are eating for comfort - and as food can never offer more than temporary solace you can never quite fill the space in you.

This “gap” can be caused by loneliness, boredom, unhappiness, stress, anger - any emotion which you would like to get rid of, you may try and mask with food.

The answer, of course, is to tackle the root of the problem and not the symptoms - often easier said than done - but until you do something about the root cause of your emotion, you are likely to continue to try and plug the comfort gap with food and remain hungry all the time.

If you feel you can’t tackle the root cause and just have to live with the situation then it’s important to work out how to identify difficult situations and patterns when these emotions will occur and look for other ways to feel better.

See also this 7 part series Hungry all the Time on my Think Slim blog as this may help you too.

How can I stop choosing food as the solution when my morale feels so low?

You know food will never love you back. It will never make you laugh. And in the end it will never cheer you up. It simply offers comfort for the moment it is on your lips and that comfort swiftly turns to dismay when you realise you have eaten too much for all the wrong reasons again.

But you know that don’t you?

The question is how to stop eating the food at those times when you feel low.

Well, you have reached the first stage of changing this habit by being aware of what you do. After that comes the stage of becoming aware that you are about to eat to cheer yourself up at the very moment when you are about to do that. You can then use another strategy instead of food.

Whenever you are about to reach for food, pause for a moment and think “Am I physically hungry?” and if you are not, remind yourself that food is going to make you feel worse, then employ another strategy to cheer yourself up. This takes practise - you won’t succeed every time at first but the more you do it and see progress, without beating yourself up when you don’t manage to do this, the more you will succeed.

Work out your strategies in advance. These will depend on why you are feeling low - whether you are lonely, stressed, bored or whatever - and on what it will take (other than food) to make a difference in your mood. We all have different reasons for feeling low and different ways to cheer ourselves up. The idea is to find all the things which make you feel low and then all the non-food solutions in each situation to feeling better.

Often our moods are simply a reflection of how we are choosing to think about a situation. Different thoughts lead to different moods. How could you think about your situation which would make you feel better? What could you do differently? Who could you speak to?

If you are often in a low mood then look at tackling the problem at source otherwise you are just masking the problem rather than resolving it with your strategies.