Is Mental Hunger is Sabotaging Your Relationship with Food?

Despite what diet culture and wellness influencers may lead you to believe, it’s actually very normal to eat for reasons besides physical hunger. We eat to celebrate and to grieve. We eat to keep ourselves alive and to find pleasure and joy. Our appetite changes based on our emotional state. Some people lose their appetite when they’re very anxious (a major part of many eating disorders in fact), and some people eat compulsively, constantly, or until physical discomfort because it can distract or numb difficult feelings. Once in a while, these things would be very normal in anyone’s life. But if mental hunger and emotional eating are everyday occurrences for you, it’s reasonable to find a solution. I believe you can and I hope this posts helps. 

The Three Types of Hunger

Back in my college days, when my relationship with food was at its worst, I found myself thinking about food constantly. It didn’t really seem to make sense to me at the time, but even after I had splurged on a big fast food lunch, a couple hours later I was thinking about what I was or was not going to allow myself to eat in the cafeteria later.

It’s likely that if you’ve been dieting and restricting yourself from eating freely for a large portion of your life, you also feel like you’re constantly thinking about food, eating when you’re not hungry, and for a slew of reasons – few of them actual physical hunger. Trust me, you’re not alone, nor are you crazy or “addicted to food”. When we go to war with our bodies, food can become pretty dang complicated. 

We end up eating for many reasons in addition to physical hunger – mental hunger and emotional hunger being the main two that I’m going to explain in this post. So if you feel addicted to food or confused about why you can’t seem to stop thinking about food when you don’t think you should be, I hope you find this helpful. 

Physical Hunger

Physical hunger is your body’s way of keeping you alive. It’s a normal, neutral biological cue signaling you to DO SOMETHING, just like having to pee or being tired. But it’s possible you’ve gotten kinda bad at listening to it as a result of diet culture. Physical signs of hunger include: 

• Mild gurgling or gnawing in the stomach
• Difficulty concentrating or mind starting to wander
• Lightheadedness
• Thoughts about food (yep!)
• Feeling irritable or anxious 
• Stomach pain 
• Nausea
• Headache
• Stomach growling 

It’s common for folks stuck in the dieting cycle to either ignore signs of hunger until they’re extreme and then a binge happens, or to avoid hunger feelings and so be eating before you can really feel these signals. Physical hunger is pretty clear for someone with an in-tact relationship with food, but can be pretty confusing if you have an eating disorder or disordered eating. 

What to do: Pay close attention to your body’s hunger cues. You’ll feel them growing in intensity, instead of coming on all of a sudden. Eat when you have a hunch you probably should, instead of putting that off another couple hours. This will get easier as you practice. 

Having a HAES dietitian (like me!) to guide you through this and keep you accountable to your body and your hunger can fast track your progress toward a happy relationship with your body and mental hunger. 

Emotional Hunger

I consider emotional hunger to be the phenomenon of eating instead of feeling an emotion fully. Or it could be eating instead of filling yourself up with other pleasures, needs, and desires.

From my experience with clients, the most distressing emotional hunger is the type that happens in response to uncomfortable emotions like loneliness, sadness, body image distress, and even boredom and stress. 

This type of emotional eating happens when you are feeling something you’re uncomfortable with, and you either are not willing or not able to experience your feelings without eating. You could be eating to soothe, comfort, distract, or numb yourself from your emotions. This is true emotional eating. 

If you find yourself eating and you are pretty sure you’re not hungry, tune into what you’re feeling. Whatever that emotion is, it needs to be felt. In our society, so many of us are taught to squash down, ignore, or blame ourselves for having emotions instead of simply letting ourselves feel them. Overcoming this may take time and could be supported by the help of a good therapist who you feel comfortable and open with. 

mental Hunger

Lastly, we have mental hunger, (mind hunger or head hunger also work). Even though I don’t agree with all of Geneen Roth’s thoughts or theories, I think she does a great job of exploring the outcome of dieting and restriction. I got the concept of mind hunger from her, but I see it a little differently. And I like to call it mental hunger instead.

Mental hunger feels chaotic and doesn’t make a lot of sense to your emotional self. You sense it as erratic, constant, and quite possibly, agonizing. Emotional hunger and mental hunger definitely overlap and can also easily be confused.  

Mental hunger is thinking about food and desiring food as a result of the rules, constraints, restriction – and rebellion – that your brain perceives. 

You may blame yourself for eating, feel worse, and eat more. This is also often where binge eating comes into play.

How Restriction – Or Perceived Restriction – Create Mental Hunger

A rebound period often follows a diet. This is when the mind and body, deprived of enough nourishment and/or particular foods or food groups, drive you to eat more than usual, and usually the same foods that were restricted. You might experience intense cravings, a sense of being out of control around food, or find yourself eating a lot, or eating more because you’re going to “start again tomorrow”. 

Diet culture misleadingly suggests you can simply “ease off” a diet (side note this is what the essential Maintenance Phase podcast was coined after), but the reality is that the psychological and physiological effects of restriction don’t go away for most people, not automatically. 

But of course, you don’t give yourself a break for this. 

You may blame yourself, believing you lack willpower or are broken. To soothe this shame, you eat, providing “proof” that you have a problem. This mind f*ck is compounded when these feelings are kept hidden and not processed openly. It’s an extremely vulnerable place, especially if you grew up believing your worth depends on being thin. This is why working on your relationship with food must include working on your relationship with your body. 

What feels like emotional eating, lack of willpower, or obsessive thoughts about food is often better understood as restriction backlash. Even seemingly normal behaviors like eating only “good carbs” or thinking you should say no to cupcakes and pizza can create a deprivation effect. Real or perceived restriction creates a desire and need to eat, triggering mental hunger.

Mental Hunger Example

To illustrate this, imagine telling yourself you can’t have bread because it’s “bad” or “unhealthy.” Your brain might become preoccupied with thoughts of bread – the chewy, crumbiness of freshly baked loaves, the satisfaction of a crunchy slice dipped in oil. Passing a bakery might be overwhelming for you. You might find yourself thinking about bread more often, noticing it everywhere, and feeling guilty for wanting it. This is mental hunger, caused by the restriction you’ve imposed on yourself. It’s not about physical hunger, but rather a mental preoccupation created by the act of restriction itself.

When You’re Physically, Mentally, and Emotionally Hungry at the Same Time

The constant calculating, over-thinking, should or shouldn’t-ing, planning for one thing and hoping for another can all cause stress and anxiety. And if that anxiety is happening at a time when you are physically hungry because you’re trying to eat 1200 calories and you’re upset because you’re unhappy with your body and blaming yourself because you can’t stick to a diet, all three types of hunger crash into each other.  

The perfect storm for more blame, shame, and eating. 

Next Steps: Healing Your Relationship with Food

Understanding the different types of hunger is the first step. Next, you want to bring awareness to what type of hunger you are dealing with throughout the day. Here are some steps to take to help you along in healing your relationship with food and calming down the mental and emotional hunger.

(remember there’s nothing wrong with physical hunger and you want to actually listen to this one!)

Take note of how well you’re listening to physical hunger

This step has to come first, because if you’re hungry, you’re never going to be able to stop mental or emotional hunger. You need to be eating every few hours so you can make sure that you’re adequately nourished. Also note that right after you end a restrictive diet, you might be more hungry than usual for a while and that would be VERY normal. 

Hunger cues, when ignored for long enough, start to become quiet until you can hardly feel them. This isn’t great because ignoring hunger just causes extreme hunger, which is a major cause of binge eating and overeating. The more sensitive you can get to your hunger cues, responding to them appropriately, the less likely you’ll overeat. It may seem counterintuitive, but I promise it works and will ultimately be one of the keys to unlocking a breakthrough with your relationship with food.

Practice mindfulness

Pay attention to your body’s needs, including it’s need for rest, pleasure, food, and movement. Eat slowly and without too many distractions when possible. When you want to eat, ask yourself why. Are you hungry? Ok then. Eat. Are you not hungry? What could be going on? 

Make sure not to judge yourself, just get curious so you can learn if you’re reacting to restriction and that’s where the mental hunger is coming from. 

Challenge food rules 

Gradually allow yourself to eat foods you’ve restricted. Remember, no food is inherently “bad” or inherently “good”. Food is just food. You can still choose to eat foods that make your body feel good but try to do so without restricting yourself from things you love. 

It’s normal for this to feel hard and possibly confusing. Reach out for help if having someone guide you through it feels supportive. 

Develop emotional coping strategies

Obviously this is easier said than done, and is often a life-long process. It’s normal to feel avoidance of difficult emotions, but that doesn’t mean that actually avoiding them is the right move. Some discomfort is normal and important at times. 

If you realize that you’re just bored or don’t have enough stimulation or excitement in your life, consider meeting new people, joining some sort of group, or trying out a new hobby. Moving your body in ways that feel good can also be a great emotional relief. 

If your emotional wounds are deep and traumatic, make sure you’re getting the therapeutic help you need. 

Work on accepting your body as it is

Working toward body acceptance and potentially through body grief is an essential part of healing your relationship with food. This is true no matter what your body size. 

It’s such important work to tease apart your inherent worth as a human from the size na shape of your body. Work on dismantling your internalized fatphobia. Remember that your worth isn’t tied to your size or shape. Practice self-compassion and positive self-talk.

Seek support 

Consider working with a HAES-aligned dietitian or therapist who specializes in disordered eating. Remember, healing your relationship with food is a journey. Be patient with yourself and celebrate small victories along the way.

Such an important part of healing your relationship with food is about retraining your brain to think of progress and success differently. This is a little talked about, but wildly important part of Intuitive Eating, body image work, and anti-diet nutrition in general. My Intuitive Eating support & coaching program, The Love Food Again Program, will help you rewire your brain, teach you to eat again from this new place, and then strategically reshape your relationship with food. I’d love to invite you to join us!

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