• Fitness & Health
• Sport & Exercise Science
• Physical Education
• Strength & Conditioning
• Sports Medicine
• Sport Management
• Dance

Hunger, fullness, and the psychological side of eating

This is an excerpt from Practical Fueling for Endurance Athletes by Kylee Van Horn.

When fueling yourself properly as an endurance athlete, you must recognize there are many reasons for eating. Food can function as fuel, but it is also so much more than that. It can hold memories and emotions, and it is meant to be enjoyed. This is also why it is important to not treat your body as a machine and obsess about numbers and metrics. When you focus solely on numbers, you may lose sight of your actual body signals for hunger and fullness, not to mention that eating becomes more of a chore than it used to be.

Through a scientific lens, hunger is a signal from the body reminding us that we should consume fuel. Hunger is influenced by many factors, and everyone experiences different levels and types of hunger responses. Hunger and fullness are regulated by a complex system of hormonal and neural signals. Big players in this equation are leptin, ghrelin, and peptide YY. Leptin and peptide YY both signal to the body that it is satisfied and doesn’t need more nutrition, while ghrelin indicates to the body that it needs more fuel. Alterations or abnormalities in these hormones can cause the body to become dysregulated concerning hunger and fullness recognition and response.

Hunger recognition usually starts with being able to identify symptoms of hunger such as shakiness, low energy, a growling stomach, brain fog, and problems focusing. You may find it helpful to use a hunger and fullness scale. This rating system can help you gain more awareness of your own body’s signals and recognize and respond appropriately to hunger and fullness cues. The rating system was popularized in 1995 by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch when they introduced the scale in their book Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works and has since promoted a more mindful and body respectful approach to fueling (see figure 1.3).

Using this scale, you ideally want to fall between a five and a seven rating, which indicates satisfaction in the current moment. The better you get at recognizing and responding appropriately to hunger and fullness signals from your body, the less likely you are to under- or overfuel. The following are additional ways to best gauge whether you are hungry and recognize when you are full enough:

1. Take a moment to pause throughout your day and ask yourself if you are hungry.
2. Eat slowly and do a body scan to recognize how your body feels and to see if you are satisfied or full. This can be particularly difficult if you are distracted during meals and snacks.
3. Do body scans periodically to evaluate your mood and assess whether you are truly hungry or if you are feeling some other emotion.

While endurance athletes should be aware of their recognition and response patterns toward hunger and fullness, there are a few problems with simply paying attention to these signals as the core of fueling and nutrition. Endurance exercise can decrease appetite by increasing peptide YY and leptin levels but decreasing ghrelin levels (Douglas et al. 2015).

Hunger exists in many forms, and not all of them require you to eat to satisfy them.

• Biological hunger is the type of hunger mentioned previously that indicates its presence with physical symptoms.
• Emotional hunger is a response to emotions such as joy, sadness, anger, and stress. For some athletes, fueling is an automatic response to feeling emotions. In these situations, it is important to gain awareness of your emotions and have a toolbox of responses instead of automatically resorting to eating. In many cases of emotional eating, working with a licensed mental health professional can be beneficial to get past using food as a coping mechanism.
• Habitual hunger is a complex type of hunger that causes you to eat out of habit rather than actual hunger. In certain situations, this may be beneficial. For instance, if you get in the habit of eating breakfast between seven a.m. and nine a.m., that can be helpful if you tend to forget to eat because you are busy with work. However, fueling constantly with paired situations throughout the day can make it difficult to fuel intentionally and can cause you to lose sight of actual hunger and fullness cues.
• Practical hunger is important to mention for endurance athletes because the duration and intensity of endurance exercise, along with weather conditions (e.g., heat), can decrease appetite overall. This is why it is common for an endurance athlete to lose their appetite after a longer bout of training (more than 90 minutes). Practical hunger means you recognize that your training requires you to fuel yourself despite the loss of appetite. For instance, having an energy-dense smoothie after a workout could be an appropriate response to practical hunger.

More Excerpts From Practical Fueling for Endurance Athletes

---