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food for thought

American Fitness, March, 2000 by Tal Leead

How to know when you're hungry and when to stop eating.

there is no doubt that food intake is an innate, primitive and essential drive for human beings. However, it is a drive that many of us misuse. Eating and nurturing our bodies is such an important function we all have stopped to think about at some point in time. We usually assume the hunger we experience is essential to the fulfillment of this important function (i.e., eating). However, many of us have eaten at times without really being hungry. We find ourselves standing in front of the refrigerator door when, on some conscious or unconscious level, we know that we are standing in front of a cold door which probably will not fulfill our needs. We are aware of certain emotions, but we don't necessarily know what they are. Nevertheless, we find ourselves needing to eat.

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Since the phenomenon of emotional eating affects many different segments of the population, there has been much written about it. People are labeled as emotional eaters because they are believed to be substituting food for emotional needs (i.e., satisfying an insatiable desire for unobtainable love or intimacy). Other symbolic meanings of food are also discussed in the literature, such as substituting parental affection or a hostile rejection thereof. Food can also represent the longing for a reliable friend or it can comfort when people feel hurt, angry or frustrated.

This symbolic significance of food intake may carry an enormous variety of different, and even contradictory, connotations. Therefore, as fascinating as it is to unravel the unconscious symbolic reasons of why one would misuse food, we still have not figured out how one becomes an emotional eater. It seems we need to discover how it became possible for an innate primitive drive such as food intake to become such a dysfunctional process that's no longer being used to satisfy nutritional needs.

* Is hunger really innate or learned?

One way to approach this question is by recognizing that the experience of hunger is not innate per se, but rather a learned behavior. For many people who are preoccupied with weight and eating, it seems as though something has gone wrong in the learning process regarding the satisfaction of nutritional and other bodily needs. It may be that incorrect or confusing early experiences have interfered with their ability to recognize hunger and satiation, resulting in their inability to differentiate hunger from other tensional states.

To answer the question of whether hunger perception is innate or learned, we need to reevaluate one commonly held assumption about the human organism. On a primitive level of homeostatic regulation, an unsatisfied need would lead to corrective behaviors. This assumption would imply that every child "knows" his bodily sensations. Moreover, every child should recognize his/her "drives" and, therefore, every child should correctly satisfy them.

However, the aforementioned assumption is not a shared experience for every child. In actuality, only if things go well will a child successfully learn to identify his/her bodily needs correctly and satisfy them in ways which are biologically appropriate as well as "proper" in his/her familial, social and cultural setting. More commonly than not, the innate needs of a child (which would include his/her hunger expressions) and the parental or environmental responses to such needs are poorly attuned to each other. Consequently, a perplexing confusion in the child's conceptual hunger awareness might result. This perplexing confusion can explain the developmental course of hunger misperception.

* How might you wrongly perceive hunger?

Indeed, some individuals grow up without the proper ability to recognize whether they are hungry or satiated, nor do they differentiate between the need for food and other uncomfortable sensations and feelings. They may need outside signals to know when and how much to eat since their own inner awareness has not been correctly programmed.

From my experience as a clinical psychologist, there is a strong correlation between childhood experiences and the ability to perceive hunger. It is believed that all children are born as expressive creatures who can communicate their needs in even the pre-verbal stage of their lives. For example, they communicate by crying, calling, greeting, spitting out their food, acting restless in their cribs, clinging or smiling. It is an important and very difficult task for the child's caretaker to correctly perceive which need the child is trying to signal.

For instance, if the child is restless in the crib, does this mean the child is bored? Is the child cold? Is the child hungry? If the response to the child's needs is somehow inappropriate or superimpo ed (according to what the caretaker felt the child needed), the child can grow up to mistakenly identify and satisfy his/her own needs. If most of the child's discomfort results in the child being offered food, then the child slowly loses the ability to distinguish other bodily sensations from those of hunger. The child has now learned that most bodily needs and sensations should result in food consumption.

food for thought

American Fitness, March, 2000 by Tal Leead

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