The ability to truly listen to your body is an extremely advanced concept. It is not something that a lot of us can actually do.
The signals that we supposedly receive from the body are often conditioned by habits, beliefs, social upbringing, lifestyle, and even sickness.
Let me give you an example. Let’s look at food cravings during your menstrual cycle.
During your second (luteal) phase, you might be craving more food.
This is normal as the rise of endogenous progesterone increases your metabolism and your body is craving food as it is building your endometrial lining. So yes, this is the time to listen to your body and have more food, especially protein.
However, even if you track your cycle, you still might be getting a variety of hunger cues that have nothing to do with what your body is trying to tell you:
1. Lifestyle – if you are someone who lives off sweets and often fuels with sugary snacks instead of eating proper meals, you might be in a constant blood sugar roller-coaster. Having food that is highly processed, full of refined carbohydrates and with high GI will fill you up but then once your blood glucose level drops, it will leave you feeling low in energy or mood and craving more sugary snacks. This will have nothing to do with the rise of progesterone or the need to fuel, and in fact it might be the cue not to be listened to.
2. Gut microbiome – the bacteria that you have in your gut flora is the one that you (yes YOU) cultivate; or, another way to put it, the one that YOU FEED. So, if you eat a lot of sugary snacks, you grow the bacteria that feeds on sugar. And guess what, this bacterium is hungry. And if you’ve heard of the brain-gut axis, you know it will influence your appetite, again, overriding your natural food cravings.
Tip: if you are trying to eat less sugary snacks, it might take a while as what you need to do is to starve the sweet-fuelling bacteria for those healthy / desirable food-craving microbiome.
Listen to your gut by Brittany Anne
3. Habit – one of the best ways to eat is to eat according to the circadian rhythm. If you look at your cat or dog, when they wake up, they’re hungry. This hunger cue is correct as in the morning the cortisol levels are at its highest and one of the functions of cortisol is to make you hungry. However, I know of a lot of women who do not eat in the morning claiming that they are not hungry. There could be a couple of reasons for it: their cortisol fluctuations are all over the place and / or they eat too late and/or too big a dinner.
I am acutely aware that a lot of women eat very little (if anything) at breakfast, trying to stay off food till as late as possible, only to finally binge on a big dinner. If this is in order to lose weight, the opposite might actually happen (long-term). I already talk at length about this subject in this blog post but if you need a reminder, if you are trying to lose weight, the best way is to stick to your circadian rhythm and ‘Eat breakfast like a Queen, lunch like a Princess, dinner like a pauper’.
And thus, if your body is not giving you hunger cues in the morning, maybe it’s time to stop ‘listening to your body’ and simply retrain your metabolism and hunger, and change your fuelling patterns.
4. Disordered eating & eating disorders – let’s not shy away from this topic. While an eating disorder is a clinical diagnosis, disordered eating refers to abnormal eating patterns. With 57% of women in the UK being on a diet (2023), the slimming obsession and the cult of youth, there is no space for ‘listening to the body’. Instead, we: ‘conquer the body’, ‘triumph over the body’ or ‘remake the body’. We follow so many external rules that say when to eat, how much to eat and what to eat. We go against our body in so many ways that our hunger cues get completely messed up. [1] We feel hungry but never satisfied. When the body’s metabolism reduces considerably, we feel full or bloated even on very little food.
So, again, here, the lack of hunger is not a sign of “I’m just eating intuitively and trusting my body” but it’s a sign of undernourishment.
5. Numbing discomfort, boredom or pain – and finally, but mind you, this list is not exhausted, is the layer of life itself. When we are stressed, bored, unhappy, or just need some distraction, food often comes to the rescue. Life these days has become a constant stream of entertainment. Our attention span is now thought to be less than that of a goldfish (eight seconds)[2] turning us into dopamine junkies jumping faster and faster from one form of amusement to another. This brings me to the point I made at the very beginning: when was the last time you sat doing nothing for more than 30-minutes? Sadness, boredom, anxiety, restlessness, exhaustion etc., sets us up for craving foods, especially the ones that are high in carbs, fat and sugar. They are the brain's reward system, which believe it or not, are the same brain’s rewards centres that are activated by drug or alcohol consumption.[3] In fact, sugar and sweet rewards can not only substitute for addictive drugs, like cocaine, but can even be more gratifying. [4]
Okay, enough, I think you get the picture. But does that mean that we can never trust the body? I think that in the world where Everyone is Shouting and No One is Talking, as Ashley Charles brilliantly put it in her book by the same title - it’s hard. We have a lot of work to do.
So, where do we start?
1. Discern between the monkey mind and the body.
Most of the time when we think that we are listening to the body, we are listening to our thinking head. We are stuck up in our heads, completely disconnected from the physical body. Understanding who is talking is key here. Discerning between the needs of the body and the external self-imposed shoulds, musts and don’ts.
2. If you don’t meditate yet, just sit quietly.
Meditation is often regarded as some unbelievably difficult or boring or unachievable practice. The thing is, you don’t have to sit in a lotus pose on the beach in Bali to meditate. The simple practice of mindfulness can be just sitting in your favourite armchair for 10 min. Treat it as bliss, a moment that you finally have just for yourself, a gift to yourself. And while at it, just notice, observe, feel. If the mind is full of thoughts, let it be. Keep catching yourself thinking and then let the thoughts go. Keep coming back to the present moment. Keep anchoring yourself on the sensations of feeling the armchair underneath your skin, the subtle rise and fall of your chest as you breathe, the sun shining through the windows.
3. Practice yoga or mindful somatic movement.
Your objective here is to pay close attention to our bodily sensations, how you move and position yourself in space as well as sensing, feeling, and noticing the deep yet subtle feedback from within such as your heart rate and breath rate.[5]
In a yoga class, for example, keep enquiring: ‘where can I feel it?’. Observe how it is to just be.
4. Accept discomfort.
We are conditioned by habits and beliefs. So, before we can listen correctly to our body and accept what we are feeling - we must get rid of our habits, learn how to accept our discomfort of being uncomfortable, bored, or restless. Only then can we truly start listening.
But most importantly, please do not throw the baby out with bathwater. Please do not discredit science. In fact, invest time to learn your unique female physiology and allocate time to track your cycle. And then, use the combination of knowledge, data, and the understanding of yourself, to make the most of your infradian rhythm.
Blog post inspired & written under the guidance of my teacher & friend: Laurent Roure.
[1] How To Restore Normal Hunger And Fullness Cues // Eating Disorder Recovery [2] Why are we so bored? [3] What is Comfort Food and Why Is It So Comforting [4] Sugar addiction: pushing the drug-sugar analogy to the limit
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