At the end of a meal
If you are in the habit of finishing off overly large meals, one specific change to how you eat – learning how to stop when just full – may help you feel much more satisfied, both physically and mentally.
Eating more than you need can leave you feeling overly full and lethargic, and perhaps rather out of control around food. This was something Anouk often experienced, but she didn’t know how to change.
Anouk’s story
Anouk was worried that her attempts at eating less were not working.
Although she had been on a diet of one sort or another for 30 years, she had never found anything that she could stick with.
With a recent promotion, her career as a corporate lawyer was going from strength to strength. But her stress levels were rising and as they did, she felt increasingly unable to stop eating.
As Anouk put it, “I have trouble with not having an off-switch for eating. It’s like the switch is faulty and I’m worried that it might be altogether broken. I don’t know when I’m full and I can’t stop”
One of her goals was to lose half a stone.
But it felt much more important to her to establish an “off-switch” for eating.
Not only did corporate law mean long hours in the office, but when a case was ongoing, she might have to come in early, or stay late depending on the case. That meant that meals fitted in around work, and she’d find herself arriving home feeling ravenous and would head for the fridge.
In her exhausted state, she’d grab what was there, and kept going back for more as she had lost any sense of ‘enough’.
Anouk was keen to do something to change this pattern.
Old memories were being activated
When I asked her about her past experiences around food and eating, Anouk told me an interesting story going right back to childhood. She was the youngest of 6 children. Her 5 older brothers got fed first, and she often felt hungry after eating what was left.
She was intrigued by the idea that such old memories could be having an effect decades later. She said it was something that she hadn’t considered before, but as we talked about those years, she had a gut feeling that being hungry now might be reminding her of when there truly wasn’t enough for her to eat.
Finding her off-switch
My aim in helping Anouk was to discover what approach to stopping eating would work for her in the long term. There was nothing to be gained by offering her yet another short-term fix.
We did two things in parallel –
- I introduced Anouk to the Appetite PendulumR
- She came up with an intelligent way to deal with the homecoming-hunger issue
The Appetite PendulumR
I designed the Appetite Pendulum to reflect changing levels of feelings of hunger and fullness. Other people have created scales to rate hunger and fullness which go from 0 to 10, where zero is extremely hungry and 10 is extremely full.
This doesn’t work at all for me, for the simple reason that to me, zero denotes nothing – an absence rather than a presence. But feeling extremely hungry is an intense experience for me – it nags at me until I do something, so it is anything but nothing.
When I was working out how to retrain my own appetite after decades of riding rough-shod over whether I was hungry or full, I needed zero to be the neutral point between hunger and fullness, so that it would resonate with what I was experiencing in my body.
The idea of a pendulum was a real light-bulb moment for me and I knew that it was the image I needed in order to get back in tune with my gut.
I settled on the pendulum having 11 points – this isn’t a magic number and any odd number would have worked – but having 5 levels of hunger and 5 levels of fullness seemed the most practically usable, so I went with that. Using the wording for each of the 11 points on the Appetite Pendulum, you can tune in at any time when you think of eating and check what number you’re at.
It may take practice for you to get in to the swing (excuse the pun!) of using the Appetite Pendulum, especially if you’ve ignored what your gut is saying for years.
Tuning into how full you are – the positive numbers on the Appetite Pendulum
The Appetite Pendulum is designed to help you stop eating any meal at the point when you’ve had just enough and you’re just full (+3).
You need to bring the Appetite Pendulum to mind when you are eating, so that you can tell when to stop eating. Here’s a blog where I explain more about the two types of fullness signals we have, and which one to tune in to…
Does it really take 20 minutes for your brain to know you’re full?
A smart solution to arriving home starving
I talked with Anouk about the crunch point of arriving home hungry. I told her that I’d worked with other people who’d had a similar issue, and how some found that taking a snack to work, and eating that before heading home really reduced what they ate when they came in.
But Anouk said this wouldn’t work for her as she couldn’t bear to spend a minute longer in work than necessary and was desperate to get home. She came up with a really clever variation on this idea – she made up a packed lunch, and took it with her to work, then brought it home with her and when she walked in the door, instead of going to the kitchen, went into the lounge, and was able to sit down and enjoy it.
She said, “Having the packed lunch with me reassures me I can get food. It calms the fear I might go hungry. Eating it when I get in instead of going to the kitchen means things don’t get out of hand”.
Anouk’s experience of using the Appetite Pendulum
Using the Appetite Pendulum, “a lightbulb went off”.
Anouk started asking herself, “Do I need this?” and reminding herself, “I don’t need a bigger portion” when she was tempted to keep on eating beyond just full.
She chose to focus on a new habit of slightly under-eating if in doubt as to whether she was just full, and then having more if needed.
What had changed after six months
It was a real pleasure to hear her reflect on the changes she had made.
“I am now in control of the off-switch. Learning to trust myself was massive! I used not to trust myself around food”
In addition, Anouk lost 12 pounds over the six months it took to establish the new pattern of stopping eating meals at +3 (just full).
In a major change after 30 years of battling with food she told me, “I don’t feel like I’m dieting!” And it was interesting that she told me that stopping eating at the point of fullness was now like flossing her teeth each day – she couldn’t not do it! That’s the sign that a habit has become automated – you don’t need to think much about it as it has become part of daily life.
And as usual, if you have any questions, I’m happy for you to email me info@theappetitedoctor.co.uk
Photo by Jason Leung for Unsplash