Stop Eating When Satisfied

Ever since I learned ThinWithin eating guidelines, I have struggled with the last 'key to conscious eating', 'stop eating when your body is satisfied'. During the years I struggled with undiagnosed food allergies and other gut ailments, I regularly went from painfully hungry to painfully full. I ate from pain to pain, rather than moderate hunger to 'comfortably' full. I had no idea what comfortable eating was. I hurt after every meal. During the past 4 years as I learned to abstain from food allergens, treated several gastrointestinal problems and added betaine hydrochloride to assist digestion, I began to occasionally feel BETTER after eating, rather than worse. Most of the time I felt too full, because I never learned to acknowledge and stop eating when I felt 'satisfied', rather than full.

After my recent experience with nausea, vomiting and reflux, I cautiously ate only as much as I needed to stop the hunger. So I got a sense of 'enough' and actually experienced 'satisfaction' when I ate really satisfying food. Now I'm doing better with digestion, but getting more lax with food choices. I don't always eat the most satisfying food on my plate first. I fill up with less satisfying foods. So I often feel 'cheated' when I finally get to the really satisfying food which I initially craved, enjoy only a few bites and then begin to feel full. I need to pay more attention to the whole notion of 'satisfaction', if I want to stop eating when I'm satisfied, rather than uncomfortably full.

Fortunately I found the following post by moderator Karen Koenig (author of 'Rules of Normal Eating') on the 'Food & Feelings' board. She explained what 'satisfied' feels like so well that I wanted to quote her description here:

"Satisfaction is a felt sense of having had enough pleasure, a marker that your attention is ready to be pulled in another direction, a signal that eating is as good as it's going to get for the moment. After that it's pretty much all down hill in terms of enjoyment. Satisfaction has to do with taste and texture, the reaction your appetite has to quality, whereas fullness is your response to quantity.

Most of the information your body has on satisfaction derives from taste and that comes from chewing food slowly and allowing it to sit on your tongue so your taste buds can give "enough now" signals to your brain. That's the problem with unconscious or fast eating--your tongue doesn't get to do its job. Oh, and you have to be looking for satisfaction to find it, at least until the behavior becomes automatic."

So satisfaction is more than a level of physiological 'fullness'. Satisfaction involves a food's taste and texture, as well as timing. I really like Karen's idea that satisfaction means "eating is as good as it's going to get for the moment. After that it's pretty much all down hill in terms of enjoyment."

I can't count how many times I have continued to eat after hunger disappears, because I want to keep enjoying a delicious taste. I ignore the fact that my taste sensations are sharpest when I'm hungry. After my hunger is satisfied, the food doesn't taste as good. Sometimes I keep taking bites, hoping to find one more tasty morsel, as I forget that food won't taste as good after satisfaction. At other times I stop eating when the food stops tasting good, but I get up and go for a few bites of a really sweet tasting dessert. However, those few bites can take me from comfortable to uncomfortably full.

Somewhere I got the idea that I don't want to stop eating until I hit that peak of satisfaction. Yet when I hit the peak before I feel full, I try to see how much more I can eat before I feel uncomfortable, rather than appreciate how little I need of a really satisfying food to feel 'satisfied'. Rather than ask myself how little do I need, rather than how much can I get away with, I still have a notion of 'entitlement' when it comes to eating. I mean I don't snack between meals. I wait for physiological hunger before eating. So I believe I DESERVE to eat what I serve myself, especially if it's really tasty, no matter how full I feel. Obviously that belief encourages me to eat 'satisfied' to the point of 'uncomfortably full' which I suffer for several hours afterwards.

Nevertheless, I know I more often feel satisfied AND ready to stop eating, when I eat without distractions. When I don't read, watch tv, talk on the phone or have emotionally charged conversations at a meal I feel READY to stop eating when I stop feeling hungry. When I have been fully present, totally aware of the whole eating process and every taste and texture of food, I don't feel cheated when my body says 'enough'. If I eat first the food I most enjoy, I can also easily let go (throw away or wrap up for later) whatever food remains on my plate when I feel satisfied. So for me, sensing and stopping at satisfaction requires: (1) satisfying food (duuuhhh!); (2) total focus on eating; and (3) slow enough eating pace to allow my body to tell my mind that it no longer needs food.