Having trouble figuring out how hungry or full you are? Try using the Intuitive Eating Hunger Full Scale as a tool to help you determine when to eat and how much to eat.
The Hunger Satiety Scale is a tool you can use to help practice two of the ten principles of intuitive eating—honoring hunger and feeling full. As a certified intuitive eating counselor, I find it can be a helpful guide to help you determine how hungry you are (i.e. when you should eat) and how full you are (i.e. when you are likely to stop eating).
If you have a hard time listening to your body or knowing when you’re really hungry or full, you’re not alone! There are many reasons for this (more on that below), but I think one of the most common is that people lose touch with their bodies after years of dieting.
Food culture makes you believe that hunger is bad and that you should overcome it, If you can overcome hunger, congratulations – you have such strong willpower! After so many years of overriding your body’s signals, your body has stopped talking because you’re not listening, right?
You begin to lose interoceptive awareness, the ability to sense physical sensations coming from within the body, and without proper nutrition, dietary consistency, and body trust, these signals become difficult to notice.
This is where intuitive eating comes in – you can practice challenging food culture rhetoric, focus on what’s going on in your body, and eat more fully to restore your body’s trust.
Know your hunger signals
Most people think of hunger pangs or a growling stomach when they think of how hunger manifests itself in the body, but there are many other ways you can experience hunger:
Stomach: Rumbling, grunting, gnawing, or emptiness
Throat/esophagus: Dull pain, biting, drooling
head: Blurred brain, headache, dizziness/dizziness, difficulty concentrating, thinking about food
mood: Irritability (hangers!), anxiety
vitality: Reduction, feeling sleepy, sluggish, apathetic, overall lethargy
This isn’t an exhaustive list either – perhaps you’re noticing other symptoms, physical or emotional?
These symptoms are related to physical hunger signals, but there are other types of hunger, such as gustatory hunger (craving for something specific), emotional hunger (wanting to eat because of strong emotions), and actual hunger or “eating as a form of self-care.” behavior” (eat before going out because you won’t be home for another 3 hours).
If you are interested in learning more about hunger, check out my blog post on the signs of hunger and how to know if you are actually hungry.
Know your satiety cues
Just as everyone experiences hunger differently, people experience satiety in different ways.
Stomach: Slight bloating, heaviness, abdominal distension
head: Thoughts about food/eating decrease and desire to eat disappears
mood: Start to feel happy and/or relaxed
vitality: Some people feel energized, others may feel drowsy
There are also two different types of satiety – physical (satisfaction) and emotional (satisfaction). You need feelings of fullness and satisfaction to feel truly satiated.
For example, you can eat the largest portion of a green salad and feel physically full; however, you may not be satisfied with the meal. You may find that your stomach is bloated, but you’re still thinking about food.
If you add some grains, cheese, nuts, and fruit to your salad, you’ll likely feel full and satisfied and ready to move on to other things from this meal.
How to use the hunger satiety scale
The hunger-satiation scale is numbered from 1 to 10, where 1-4 represents hunger and 6-10 represents satiety (5 is neutral).
1-2: Excessive hunger
3-5: Begin to notice/notice hunger
5-7: Start noticing/noticing fullness
8-10: Overfull
Ideally, when your hunger level reaches 3 or 4, you want to satisfy your hunger (i.e. eat!) before entering the overly hungry zone. Ideally, you want to be able to feel full (i.e. stop eating) when your satiety level is around 7-8.
If you’re okay with journaling (which may be triggering for some people!), maybe you could write down where you are on the scale before and after meals so you remember to check in with yourself before and after meals. This way you can start collecting some data to better understand how and when hunger and fullness feelings appear in your body. You may start to notice the following patterns:
- How long does one meal usually last you?
- How long can a snack usually last you?
- How long does it usually take to reach a comfortable hunger level
- How long does it usually take you to reach an uncomfortable level of hunger
- What types of foods usually make you last longer?
- What types of foods usually leave you still feeling hungry?
- How subtle signs of hunger your body usually shows
- How comfortable your body usually feels when you feel full
I used the word “generally” above intentionally because Hunger and satiety are dynamic, meaning they can change from day to day and week to week. There may be days when you feel hungrier for some reason, and this is completely normal.
Don’t expect your hunger/fullness cues to be the same every day. Every day is different for you—your physical, mental, energy, and mental states are constantly changing—so why would we expect your hunger and fullness cues to always be the same?
When things change and you’re not sure why, practice grace and compassion. Trust the wisdom of your body.
Be careful to use it as a tool, not a rule
Will you always “get it right”? of course not. You are not a robot. You are a human! As a normal/intuitive eater, goals sometimes get lost. Sometimes you forget to eat until you hit a 2 on the hunger scale, and other times you overcompensate because you’re distracted or overly hungry and end up with a 9 on the satiety scale.
It happens. There’s nothing to beat yourself up about. Be curious and ask yourself “What can I learn from this experience?”
Maybe you know you can’t go more than 3 hours without eating, so in addition to listening to your body, you also need to pay attention to the clock. Intuitive eating is about connecting the knowledge of your body with the knowledge of your brain.
After years of dieting, it’s easy to fall into black and white thinking about intuitive eating and the scale. It’s so easy, I even wrote an article on Do You Eat the Hunger-Full Diet?
If you find yourself using this scale as a hard rule or something that needs to be perfected, you may be falling into the trap of an “all or nothing” mentality.
Remind yourself that this scale is only meant to be a tool or guide, not something to refine or emphasize.
If you find that this scale makes you anxious or causes you stress, take a break and maybe try practicing another intuitive eating principle for a while, such as letting go of the diet mentality.Of course, always remember this You don’t have to practice all of this on your own. You deserve support and support. Our team of nutritionists would be happy to assist you on your intuitive eating journey.
Why a scale can be difficult to use
There are several reasons why you may not want to use this scale, or you may not be able to use it at this time.
If you are currently recovering from an eating disorder and working on nutritional recovery, you will need to continue a mechanical/structured diet until you are adequately nourished/recovered long enough to begin eating based on your body’s physical cues.
You can make this decision with your treatment team. That’s not to say you can’t practice intuitive eating at all in recovery – there are other principles you can practice – but hunger and fullness cues aren’t reliable when you’re early in the recovery process.
People with a history of trauma may have difficulty adjusting to their body because it feels unsafe to do so. This is another situation in which a structured diet in conjunction with a trauma-specialized therapist would be most helpful.
Generally speaking, stress disrupts your body’s coordination. If you’re constantly in a state of high arousal, or in fight-flight-freeze-deer mode, you may not be able to notice the sensations in your body. Practicing self-care and/or using tools to help regulate your nervous system may help you better tune inward and listen to your body.
If you have trouble listening to your body because you’ve been neglecting it for so long while dieting, you can start practicing interoceptive awareness in addition to paying attention to hunger and fullness cues.
Maybe you could start noticing a pulse by placing a few fingers on your wrist. Next, maybe you focus on your heartbeat. Maybe you start to notice where in your body you feel a variety of emotions—perhaps your gut feels anxious, your chest feels sad.
These exercises can help increase your interoceptive awareness so that you can slowly begin to notice cues of hunger and fullness again.
Find more support and resources
Please check out the following blog posts for more support and/or schedule an appointment with one of our Intuitive Eating Nutritionists for a nutritional assessment. We’d love to help you heal your relationship with food.
For more blog posts like this, check out:
The Science of Dieting and Weight Loss
A Beginner’s Guide to Intuitive Eating
Am I hungry?Signs of hunger to watch out for
Have I eaten enough? 8 Signs You’re Not Eating Enough
Do you follow a hunger-satisfaction diet?