I came across this article today and I really liked what it had to say. I am one of those who is struggling with hunger after weight loss surgery and I actually found this article kind of comforting. So I thought I would share it with all of you. Maybe it will shed a light on others who are struggling.
How to Feed Your Hunger Without Gaining Weight
By: Melissa McCreery PhD
It’s true. Some people have bariatric surgery and just don’t feel very hungry anymore. Others have to be very mindful of eating regularly and enough early on after their weight loss surgery (WLS), but it’s not uncommon to find the hungry feelings and the urges to eat creeping back in. Still other WLS patients claim they never feel a loss of hunger—“ I woke up from surgery hungry,” said one frustrated gastric bypass patient. It’s also not uncommon to feel confused about whether you are eating enough or too much. Many people who have struggled with their weight for years aren’t really too sure how much they can trust their bodies.
I work with my clients to help them learn about their hunger and their appetites and perfect their ability to feed themselves, and feed themselves well. People are amazed to learn that losing weight doesn’t have to mean going hungry.
In fact, learning to feed your hunger is one of the most powerful things you can do to create enduring weight loss after bariatric surgery.
I’ve heard all sorts of advice for people struggling with overeating or emotional eating or “head hunger.” “Ignore it.” “Be strong.” “Don’t give in to it.” “Don’t legitimize it.” “Know that it’s not real and distract yourself from it.”
I respectfully submit that this might help many of us in the short term, but in the long run, this advice dooms us to failure— simply because the hunger is real. Ignoring hunger just keeps us unfed and growing hungrier. The real, effective solution is learning to identify what we are hungry for and learning to feed ourselves appropriately.
There is more to hunger than food
Seriously. Very few people in our culture use food strictly as fuel. We eat for taste. We eat for entertainment. We eat because we are bored, tired, excited or heartbroken. We eat as part of a social experience. We eat because advertisers spend millions and millions of dollars enticing us in a variety of ways and equating foods with happiness, sex, excitement and other wonderful things. We use food to soothe and satisfy a wide range of appetites and needs and we hunger and crave lots of things that are not food.
Let me say that again because it is important. We experience hunger in many areas of our life. We hunger in relationships, we can hunger to have our emotional needs met. We can hunger for physical energy or for sensory pleasure.
Hunger is pervasive in our life and it is not always about food
A craving or hunger for food is not always a physical need for nourishment
Hunger is an incredibly rich phenomenon that can be experienced in many different ways and requires very different types of feeding depending on what kind of hunger it is. If I’m hungry for love, I’m not really going to feel better if I feed myself chocolate chip ice cream—well, not for long anyway. If I’m not clear that what I’m really hungry for is love—if I’m mistranslating it as a hunger for food—than I’m going to keep eating ice cream, never really feel satisfied, and, never get adequately fed.
The Hunger is Real
The non-food hungers that I’m talking about are very real and very powerful. In fact, if we could hook ourselves up to some kind of monitor and measure all of our various hungers, we’d probably find that for most overweight people, physical hunger isn’t the dominant hunger experienced.
We’re hungry, in lots of different ways and for lots of different things. That’s a part of the human condition—it’s perfectly normal. Some people, for a variety of reasons, get out of touch with their emotional or sensory hungers—hungers for things like affection, comfort, excitement or relief from anger or anxiety. Maybe the hunger or appetites feel too overwhelming or feel impossible to feed. Maybe the hunger has been there for so long that it seemed like the best response was to try to “stop thinking about it.” Maybe it feels like the hunger or desire is so big that if we really let ourselves feel it, it will just swallow us up or it will be unbearably big and painful and it will never go away.
Sometimes we haven’t been taught how to pay attention to our hungers. We might experience them as just a vague sense that something is wrong. We might not really know what the hunger is or what to do about it. We may have been taught to try to push our hungers aside or ignore them. Or, we may have been taught indirect or ineffective ways of responding to what we truly hunger for, like overeating.
Know What You’re Really Craving
Many people misidentify emotional and sensual hungers as a hunger for food. The underlying real hunger might not even be consciously experienced. A vague (or intense) feeling of discomfort is interpreted as physical hunger and the need to eat. Emotional eating can become almost as automatic as breathing— an impulse followed by an automatic response. The problem, of course, is that the original, real hunger or need never gets addressed. That hunger never gets fed. We might feel better for the moment, but the hunger is still there.
Learning to be mindful about hunger can be incredibly powerful. By slowing down, we can train ourselves to not respond automatically with food, but to stop and examine what we are really hungry for. I use a 28-day program called The Emotional Eating Toolbox™ to help my clients learn to identify and feed their true hungers. Here’s a one-day exercise that you can begin to use right now.
Try this. For a day, pause for ten minutes each time before eating. Use that time to examine the reasons you are thinking about eating. Write down everything you know about how you are feeling, your level of hunger, how you are identifying your hunger (i.e. my stomach feels empty, the clock says “noon,” my energy has dipped). Then, write everything you know about what you are really hungry for. Allow yourself to think beyond food. You might be craving a meatball sandwich, a good long vacation or a nap. You might want a bubble bath, or a date, or a good argument. Now, let yourself think about the highest quality way that you could feed yourself at this time. You might not be able to take off for the Greek Isles, but could you leave your desk and walk around the block? Call a friend or take a nap? Is the café mocha really going to fill that hungry spot?
Don’t be surprised if you identify that you aren’t really physically hungry, but you also aren’t sure what you are really hungry for or how to respond to it. Give it time. This is new stuff and change rarely happens overnight. That’s okay. By asking the questions about your hunger, you are doing something very powerful, even if you don’t yet have the answers.
The “hunger always = need to eat” paradigm keeps people focused on food and physiological hunger. Moving beyond it, and thinking more broadly about what you crave and hunger for allows you to see the bigger picture. You can see the forest instead of focusing on just one tree. With that perspective, you can be much more effective in your life.
It’s true, that to lose weight, we need to eat less. However, we do not need to feed ourselves less, and we do not need to go hungry. A major focus of the work that I do is helping people become an expert on their hungers and learn to skillfully match their various hungry feelings to the best way of feeding them. As my clients do this, they are amazed to discover what a smaller place food naturally starts to take in their life. As they become aware of what they are truly hungry for, their cravings for food diminish.
That’s because it’s not about the food. It’s about realizing that you truly are hungry, but you’ve been feeding yourself in unsatisfying ways. When you know what you are really, truly craving, it gets much easier to feed yourself in a way that will not only satisfy you, it will not contribute to your pant size.
Melissa McCreery, Ph.D. is a Psychologist and Life Coach who specializes in helping clients take control of emotional overeating and succeed with their health and wellness goals. She is the creator of the Emotional Eating Toolbox.™ For more information, or to subscribe to her free e-newsletter, go to
Enduring Change Coaching: Helping people create healthy lives, businesses and bodies.
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How to Feed Your Hunger Without Gaining Weight
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