Are you on your intuitive eating journey and struggling with eating past fullness? Are you ashamed of feeling uncomfortably full? Do you spend time worrying about how much you are eating? Do you feel out of control around foods? Do you want to be able to trust your hunger fullness cues but just don’t know where to start? If you find yourself asking these questions you’re in the right place!
Honoring your Fullness
Honoring and respecting your fullness is an important principle of intuitive eating, just as honoring your hunger is. However, you might find that feeling full and respecting that feeling is more difficult than respecting your hunger cues. That’s okay and totally normal! Learning how to listen to these cues takes time, be patient with yourself.
Learning how to honor hunger usually happens pretty quickly. You feel hungry, you eat. However, honoring fullness is a bit more tricky. You might be thinking “How full am I? How full is too full? Am I even full?”
At the beginning of your intuitive eating journey, you may not be quite sure how much food your body needs to feel satisfied. In order to learn this you may find yourself eating past full a bunch of times before you start recognizing what your body feels like when it is comfortably satisfied. That is normal!
It Takes Time
You are not going to be amazing at recognizing and respecting your fullness right away. That is OKAY.
This principle takes time! Although it may not seem like it right now, your body is capable of eating food and stopping when you feel full and satisfied. It takes practice and time to get used to knowing how much food YOU need to feel satisfied.
Give Yourself Grace
Think about it… before you embarked on your intuitive eating journey, diet culture made so many rules for you about when to eat, what to eat, how much to eat, and when to stop eating. You didn’t have to listen to what your body was saying and what your body truly needed, diet culture was controlling your every decision.
Now that you are on this journey to become an intuitive eater, diet culture rules no longer apply! You don’t have to eat a certain amount, a certain food, at a certain time. You are now listening to cues from your body that you haven’t listened to in a long time. This may leave you feeling unsure of what your body is trying to tell you.
Give yourself grace! You are learning. Practicing curiosity and patience with yourself when you are eating is a great way to learn what feeling comfortably full in YOUR body feels like.
Ask yourself:
“What does it feel like for me to eat this?”
“What am I feeling when I’m halfway through?”
“Do I feel satisfied? Do I feel like I want more?”
If you feel overfull you may ask yourself “What did this teach me?”
Making the Choice
Guess what? You are allowed to eat even when you feel full.
Say you’re out to eat with your friends or eating your favorite meal, you can make the CHOICE to continue eating although you are full. By doing so, you are simply making the decision to continue enjoying whatever is going on around you and there is no shame in doing so!
Are you Satisfied?
A huge part of intuitive eating is eating to feel satisfied, not just to feel full.
You could make the choice to eat a salad with salmon even though that’s not really what you want. This meal could leave you feeling full BUT are you really satisfied?
Maybe not.
If this situation feels familiar to you, you may find yourself searching for food after the meal is over because you aren’t mentally satisfied. You didn’t give your body what it was asking for!
Intuitive eating emphasizes physical and mental satisfaction with equal importance!
Respecting your Fullness
Chances are if you are reading this, you have spent years listening to diet culture to tell you when to eat and when to stop eating. Diet culture was dictating your hunger and fullness cues. But not anymore. As you embark on this journey, one in which YOU make those decisions for yourself. Give yourself grace, you haven’t been in control of feeling your fullness in a long time.
You WILL learn what satisfaction feels like and you WILL be able to make the choice to eat past fullness if you want to! Or not and stop eating once you feel fully satisfied.
Remember, you have free reign to do what you want with intuitive eating. There is no pass fail. You can’t fuck it up.
If you enjoyed this post, we think you would also enjoy our podcast episode titled “How to Honor your Fullness.” Click here to check it out!
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