We often talk about mindful and intuitive eating, but food noise can make listening to your body difficult. Food noise is defined as persistent, intrusive thoughts about food, eating, and meals. It can be distressing, frustrating, and genuinely interrupt your life.
Consistently honoring your hunger and properly fueling your body can limit food noise, and understanding the type of hunger you are experiencing can help with that. Hunger can show up in a myriad of ways, so we are going to dive into the six types of hunger today, to help you reconnect with your inner cues.
Please remember: all types of hunger are a valid reason to eat.
So, what are the six types of hunger?
Physical Hunger
This is the traditional ‘hungry feeling’. You can feel your body asking for food, and you have an openness to eating different options, instead of one or two specific items. You are ready to eat, but could wait another 30 – 45 minutes if necessary. Physical hunger develops gradually and can fluctuate from day-to-day.
Extreme Hunger
This is an extremely uncomfortable sensation, in which your body needs food immediately. You may feel like you cannot focus on anything besides food, and you truly cannot wait. Symptoms include shakiness, nausea, light-headedness, irritability, and difficulty concentrating. You are truly desperate for food.
Extreme hunger typically occurs when you have gone too long without food or did not properly fuel yourself throughout the day. Listening to your physical hunger (and other types of hunger that we will discuss here) can help prevent reaching this level.
Emotional Hunger
This type of hunger is associated with mental symptoms, rather than physical. Emotional hunger can manifest as a reaction to many feelings, including stress, boredom, sadness, loneliness, or even excitement. It may appear as a craving for 1 – 2 specific comfort foods.
Listening to your emotions and eating whatever you’re craving is normal. Guilt is not welcome in the conversation about emotional (or any type of) hunger. Understanding how you’re feeling, and identifying what will most nourish you in the moment is a radical act of self-care that can deepen your connection to yourself.
Practical Hunger
Practical hunger may not even feel like ‘hunger’ at all! You may feel slightly hungry, or neutral about food, but you also understand that you will not have another chance to eat before becoming genuinely hungry. Honoring this type of hunger feels more like planning, and allows you to avoid extreme hunger later.
For example, you may have three straight hours of back-to-back meetings, so you choose to eat your entire lunch beforehand, even if you aren’t quite hungry enough for it yet. Trusting yourself to make decisions like this is another great way to deepen your connection to yourself.
Mental Hunger
Like emotional hunger, this type of hunger does not necessarily show up physically. Mental hunger is associated with an extreme preoccupation of when and where you will next eat, and is often only satisfied by the specific food items on your mind.
Mental hunger sometimes strengthens when specific foods are deemed ‘off-limits’ or ‘immoral’. Allowing yourself to eat what you are craving, and understanding that all foods can fit in a balanced diet, can limit unwanted mental hunger thoughts. Mental hunger is not necessarily a sign of depriving yourself, but constant mental hunger may be.
Taste Hunger
Similar to both emotional and mental hunger, this type of hunger is not classified by traditional bodily signs of hunger. Instead, taste hunger is experienced when you want to taste a specific food. You may be full from a meal, and still have room for a treat or a snack that you’d like to try.
For example, your friend made a chocolate chip cookie recipe that you love. Even if you aren’t hungry, you want a cookie, because you know that they taste amazing. This type of hunger is a great example of how food is an opportunity for connection, joy, and tradition, and not just nourishment.
Like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, identifying what type of hunger you are experiencing is an amazing way to provide your body with the fuel it is asking for, and, ultimately, quiet food noise. If you would like to dive deeper into hunger awareness and cues, schedule your complimentary discovery call with us today!
Hannah Fliess
Hannah is the Practice Operations & Marketing Manager at Mindful Eating Dietitian. She holds a Master of Health Administration from the University of Florida. Hannah is incredibly passionate about intuitive eating through gentle nutrition. She loves distance running, matcha lattes, and dark chocolate!