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Let’s talk about the pendulum.
Our body, when left to its own devices, keeps a pretty tight run of things. It makes sure our body temperature and blood sugar are within specific ranges, for example, among hundreds of other things. The same goes for eating.
The world we live in likes to tell us that WE get to decide how much we will eat of any given food on any given day. However, if that is in conflict with how much our body actually needs, we will see some push back. And it won’t be pretty.
To set the scene…
For example, say you were at a holiday luncheon and there were so many delicious foods to choose from. You wanted to try it all, and by the end of the party, you were feeling the classic “Thanksgiving dinner” level of fullness.
So, you tell yourself, I won’t eat dinner. Dinnertime comes around and you keep telling yourself: I am not going to eat. Maybe that works out fine. But an hour or two later, you find your tummy is rumbling. What do you do?
If you still don’t allow yourself to eat, what happens? You go to bed dreaming of sugar plums and famished. You might even wake up overnight to eat.
What would happen if you allowed yourself to eat, honoring that hunger signal? You may find that you needed just a little food to take the edge off before bed, or you may find that you still needed a normal-sized meal, and that’s okay too.
Being in tune with our body is a two-way street
Our body sends us signals, and by doing so, it is relying on us to act towards those signals in a way to meet the body’s needs.
All too often, I talk with clients who have denied their body’s needs for so long (usually through intentional dieting, but sometimes just because they are very busy and don’t have time to tune into their body or listen to their messages) – they pull the pendulum so far in a restrictive direction, that the body eventually reaches a point where it can’t take the deprivation anymore. It usually results in a binge, which contributes to a lot of guilt and shame – not what we want to feel around food.
If we ignore our body’s hunger or fullness signals too often, it usually ends up that we lose touch with them completely, until we feel extremely full or ravenously hungry. Our pendulum is swinging from one extreme end to the other.
How do we minimize fluctuations for our pendulum?
One way to start is to eat on a consistent schedule. If your gentle hunger and fullness signals are broken, I’d recommend eating something every 4-5 hours. Tuning in to the body at the start and end of these more frequent eating times should help you start to feel an emergence of what hunger and fullness feel like before they are too overwhelming.