There are three types of hunger. Here’s how to recognise them

Human instinct is a wonderfully clever thing. You instinctively know when you’re tired or your bladder tells you when you need the bathroom. When it comes to our hunger and how our body signals how much to eat, it’s down to another instinctual mechanism: our appetite. And if you can tune into it, it helps to regulate our health and weight without even thinking.

Key to this working is trust. This is where intuitive eating comes in, which is an approach that makes you the expert of your body to make food choices that feel good, without judgment.

If you have lost track of your appetite, rating your hunger using a hunger scale can help you get back in touch with it.Credit:Anna Kucera

Does it mean you’ll just reach for junk food? Not exactly. In fact the opposite tends to happen. While dieting leads to increased desire for the very foods you’re trying to avoid, eating intuitively can help make previously forbidden foods feel less “interesting” so you may want less of them over time.

Of course, part of the fun of being human means our appetite can be a little complex. There are three different types of hunger, with each manifesting in unique ways. As an accredited practising dietitian, here are my tips for recognising them and how best to respond so you can eat intuitively.

Physical hunger

Let’s start with the obvious one. Physical hunger is characterised by that growling stomach feeling or you might notice you become “hangry” when you let it go a bit far. This hunger comes on slowly and builds gradually. But if you decide to ignore your physical hunger, you might find it causes you to become obsessed with food – like it did for participants in the landmark Minnesota Starvation Experiment.

While each of us is different, it may take about one hour to 90 minutes to go from peckish to hungry. If you’ve been on restrictive diets, you may have been taught to ignore physical hunger and simply eat by the clock or a meal plan. But rating your hunger using a hunger scale can help you get back in touch with reading your appetite. By tuning into your hunger, you learn to fuel your body without needing to count macros, points or weigh your food. On the hunger scale, 0 is beyond hungry and 10 is stuffed full. Ideally, you should never let your hunger get to the extreme, aiming to sit between 3-7.

Emotional hunger

Unlike physical hunger, emotional hunger can come on quite quickly – and it may be all consuming. While physical hunger is satiated when you eat something (almost anything with energy), emotional hunger has quite specific needs.

It can explain why you aren’t satisfied with a savoury meal until it’s been finished off with a bite of something sweet. Interestingly, chronic dieters often deny their emotional hunger leading to a feeling of restriction. They might say “I shouldn’t be eating this” or “I’ll have to be good tomorrow”. While they might be physically satisfied by a meal, these judgments around food can lead to perpetual, underlying and hard-to-pinpoint emotional hunger.

The thing is, emotional eating is normal. Everyone does it, it’s a standard reaction to stress. It only becomes problematic when it happens frequently and there’s a sense of feeling out-of-control. It’s worsened when you add on a side serving of guilt and shame (which we all know never works out well). Or you can accept it, pause, and simply ask yourself: “What’s going on? Am I hungry? Am I anxious? Am I sad? How can I help myself?” Leap to curiosity over judgment if you can and get to the root cause of a binge.

Hormonal hunger

Many of us underestimate how lack of shut-eye can significantly impact hunger hormones and lead to a surge in appetite. Combine poor quality sleep with high stress levels, and it might explain why your cravings for high-energy food feel so intense. If you aren’t refuelling your body with sleep it may seek out energy in chocolate form when reserves get low after a gruelling day. If you’re looking to get healthier, prioritising good quality sleep is important.

For women, it’s common to feel pre-period cravings. The menstrual cycle has a big impact on hunger hormones, along with a bunch of other things like energy, confidence, sleep, body image and sex drive. This all plays into your relationship with food. Research suggests you’re more likely to get cravings, eat more than you’d like, feel depressed and it’s all thanks to those surging hormones. Why? Women experience changing levels of four different hormones throughout the month. They tend to crave higher energy food before their period and they might notice hunger reducing again from day one of their cycle. Knowing that your hunger will naturally change during the month helps you eat more in tune with your body’s needs. Some weeks you will be ravenous, others you might find you forget to eat. Learning to be OK with the changes can help you feel more calm around food so you can finally stop dieting or stressing about your weight for good.

Lyndi Cohen is an accredited practising dietitian, best-selling author of The Nude Nutritionist. You can follow her on Instagram here, or get her Back to Basics app which has relaunched to include a hunger check-in feature.

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