In Control of Your Appetite

Do you ever wonder why you can’t seem to stop eating or what it will take to get control over your appetite? If you’ve tried appetite suppressants, you already know that isn’t the answer.

There is an answer that does work. It is doing the opposite of suppressing your appetite. I know that may not be the answer you were expecting, but it is true. The more you try to suppress your desire and need for food, the more you will overeat or feel out of control around food. Right now, as summer approaches, there are lots of advertisements for products to help you avoid feeling hungry so you can eat less and slim down. Nice idea, but that only leads to pigging out when you finally do eat. What ever calories you thought you were saving earlier in the day are fully spent later on.

You are much better off eating when you get hungry and then stopping when you are satisfied, just before you get full. It sounds simple to eat when you are hungry, but if you’ve been ignoring your hunger for a period of time it can be tougher than it sounds. What can be challenging is to recognize when you do get hungry. It can also be hard to know when you get full if you haven’t been paying attention to that either.

Stop and consider how hungry or full you are right now. Do you know? Just what does it feel like when you get hungry? The way hunger feels to you may be different from how it feels to me, so pay attention to how you physically feel or look for other indications you are hungry. For me, I get a gnawing sensation along with some heat in my stomach and if I get too hungry I feel cold and notice I’m getting irritable. This correlates with a fall in my blood sugar levels.

Do you remember feeling hungry recently or do you ignore your hunger signals? If you do a lot of dieting, often skip meals or have a low metabolism, you might not experience feeling hungry. You may think that’s a good thing and helping you lose weight. But it isn’t. If you eat like a bird during the day, you are depressing your metabolism and making it harder to lose weight. You need a certain amount of calories regularly throughout the day to sustain your body’s basic metabolic functioning. Your sensation for being hungry is a metabolic signal indicating a physical need for food. If you eat when you get that hunger signal you stimulate your metabolism, maintain your blood sugar levels and have greater success controlling your appetite.

If you don’t eat when you’re hungry, by the time you do get food you will overeat and have little to no control over your appetite. This is particularly true if you wait until you are ravenous or don’t eat much during the day, thinking you are being good, and waiting to eat until dinner. You almost can’t help yourself at this point. When you are in a deficit of calories to what your body needs, you will feel compelled to make up for what you didn’t eat earlier.

Do you know when you overeat and get full? Do you know what that feels like for you? Is it pressure, heaviness or an ache of some kind? Many people don’t know what fullness feels like, because they are so absorbed in eating, assume fullness is normal, don’t want to feel it, or are using food to avoid feeling anything at all. Yet once you stop to really recognize how it feels, you find it doesn’t feel all that good to keep eating. Awareness of the fullness signal is an appetite suppressant. The more you get in touch with this physical sensation when you eat, the more likely you will want to stop before it feels much worse.

If you aren’t stopping despite how icky it feels, then you are probably dealing with emotional eating. The beauty of knowing you are getting full is the awareness there is something else driving you to keep eating beside the desire for food. That gives you the opportunity to ask yourself what you are really feeling and what aren’t you getting. Until you address your repressed feelings and unmet needs, no appetite suppressant is going to help you stop overeating.

This week pay attention to your hunger levels and let them guide you to eat just the right amount of food your body needs. If you eat when you are hungry and stop before getting full, you won’t need to count calories or points. You will be eating in alignment with your metabolic requirements and feeling in control of your appetite.

Alice Greene is president of Feel Your Personal Best, a healthy lifestyle coaching company located in Newburyport, MA. Contact her at agreene@feelyourpersonalbest.com or 978-465-3555×5.