why you’re always feeling hungry even after eating and what to do about it
If you’re reading this it’s likely that you’ve been on one diet or another for a good part of your life and you’re still unhappy with your weight, how you feel about your body and how you feel around food.
And that’s because diets don’t teach us any real skills…they just give us arbitrary rules to follow and send us on our way.
Skills are what allow us to make choices in any situation. To check in, to pay attention. To decide what works and what doesn’t without sacrificing what we enjoy.
And one of the most practical and useful skills you can use to help deal with cravings, emotional eating, mindless overeating and to work on binge eating recovery is to use a timer.
Why? Because a timer creates a structured pause so you can make an intentional choice about what, why and how you’re eating instead of just operating on autopilot like you always do, wondering why you’re always feeling hungry even after eating.
You know the drill. You’ve just finished dinner with your family and you’re cleaning up. As you walk through the kitchen you get an urge to just see what’s in the pantry. So you open it up and there’s leftover candy from a birthday party your kid went to this weekend, a bag of chocolate chip cookies and BBQ chips.
Suddenly you find yourself standing there eating cookies out of the bag, telling yourself you shouldn’t be eating them because they’re not even good. Now you feel guilty and start telling yourself you can’t keep cookies in the house and tomorrow you need to be “really good.”
This is a perfect situation to use a timer. Because a timer will help you pause—create space between the urge and the action. And in that space is where change happens. Where you can figure out what’s actually going on to create the urge to eat.
Where else can you use it?
When you finish what’s on your plate and feel full but want to go back for seconds
When you’re out to dinner with friends and there are 6 different appetizers sitting on the table in front of you that you don’t even like but are eating anyway
When you’ve had a really shitty day and want to eat all of the leftover cake in your fridge
You get the idea.
Set a timer for 5-10 minutes. Use your watch, your phone, your Alexa 🤷♀️
5-10 minutes gives you literal space and time to figure out whether you’re actually hungry or eating for another reason like boredom, stress, or circumstances (like someone else around you is eating).
A timer will also help you figure out why you feel like you’re always feeling hungry even after eating…because maybe you’re not actually hungry.
Maybe you’re stressed. Or tired. Or annoyed that nobody is helping you clean up the kitchen (to keep going with the example from above). There are SO many reasons we get the urge to eat aside from hunger…but we just don’t realize that’s what’s happening because we never give ourselves the space to pay attention.
This is why using a timer gives you a chance to figure out what you truly need so that you can start to make choices that are lined up with how you want to feel and what your goals are instead of what feels easy and gives you relief right in that moment.
Very often you will find that 10 minutes is enough time for the urge to subside.
And if it doesn’t, that’s ok. You can set the timer again. Or you can eat.
This isn’t a rule about whether you can or can’t eat….its about creating structure so that you can make intentional choices rather than operating on autopilot.
There are 3 huge benefits to this:
You learn how to stop relying on food to cope with emotions and build the self trust and confidence that you can decide what you eat rather than feeling controlled by a craving
You slowly reduce your intake overtime which can lead to fat loss….without dieting.
You prove to yourself that you can survive not having the cake/cookie/chips/pizza the exact instant that you feel like you want it AND realize that maybe you don’t even need it at all
This is a skill. Simple, always available and very effective. And the best part is the more you practice it, the easier it will become. So that pausing becomes your new autopilot instead of automatically eating the cookies.
I have an entire blog post with more skills similar to this that will help you feel at ease around food and lose weight without dieting. Click here to read it!
Episode 116 of The Diet Diaries: What, why and how to eat so you can stop dieting and find your best weight for life is another great resource to learn more about how eating skills are the key to permanent change in your relationship with food.