After Dinner, I Wanted More Food. I Wasn't Hungry.

Has this ever happened to you?

Immediately after finishing dinner the other night, I started rummaging through my cupboards looking for something else to eat.

I wasn’t hungry. I was unsatisfied.

I didn’t completely dislike what I ate for dinner. It just didn’t hit the spot. 

My ho-hum meal left me wanting more. It left me wanting pleasure.

Feeling pleasure-deprived, I kept trying different foods until I found something that truly satisfied me. Once I did, my eating experience felt complete and I was able to move on with my evening.

Wired for Pleasure
As humans, we’re wired for pleasure. When our meals lack pleasure, it’s a natural human response to seek out food that meets our fundamental need for it.

There are many reasons why a meal may be pleasure deficient.

It could be because the recipe you made didn’t turn out quite right, or you’re stuck in a food rut, or bored with your leftovers. 

Maybe the entrée you ordered at the restaurant didn’t live up to your expectations or wasn’t what you really wanted because you were trying to make the “right” choice. Or perhaps the takeout food you had delivered arrived irreparably tough or soggy.

Or maybe you were dieting, which is rarely pleasurable.

If you’ve ever followed a plan that restricted what you were allowed to eat, that didn’t let you have what you really wanted, that didn’t satisfy your hunger or taste buds, you may have frequently found yourself after finishing a lackluster meal digging through your fridge or cabinets looking for something more to eat.

You may even have found yourself feeling a bit binge-y after your meal.

Despite what diet culture wants you to believe, this is not due to a lack of control, willpower or self-discipline. It’s due to being human. 

You’re simply trying to take care of your unmet need for pleasure.

Satisfaction-Based Eating
If you have a history of dieting, most of your eating decisions have likely been driven by questions such as “What am I allowed to have?” or “What have I earned the right to eat?” or “What should I eat?”

When working with my clients on shifting from restrictive, rules-based eating to unconditional, attuned eating, their food decisions start to be guided by satisfaction- and pleasure-based questions, such as:

  • What sounds satisfying? What will hit the spot?

  • How can I make my meal pleasurable?

  • What will taste and feel the most satisfying?

  • What will satisfy my hunger level, my appetite, my desires?

It may be hard to answer these questions in the beginning as dieting can cause you to lose touch with what you actually like to eat.

Radically Change Your Relationship
Approaching eating decisions through the lens of pleasure and satisfaction versus rules and restriction can radically change your relationship with food, and frankly, your overall quality of life.

Of course, not every meal is going to be a five-star experience. For most of us, life doesn’t work that way. 

Sometimes food is just fuel to get you through your day. Sometimes whatever you have on hand is good enough. 

Sometimes you may have barriers that prevent you from having what you really want, like budget, time, energy or access limitations.

However, if your eating experiences are often unsatisfying due to all the diet and wellness culture rules you’re following, I encourage you to experiment with making choices based on what you’re desiring instead of what you’re denying yourself.

Understandably, doing so might feel pretty scary, especially as diet culture conditions us to mistrust our bodies, our instincts and our desires. 

Most of us worry we’ll lose control if we allow ourselves to eat what we actually want. We’re afraid we’ll never stop eating and completely go to pot. 

The opposite tends to be true, however. My clients are often surprised to discover their eating feels much more balanced, nourishing and fulfilling when they make choices based on pleasure and satisfaction instead of restriction and deprivation.

As the journey toward a more pleasurable, satisfying relationship with food is often full of many challenging twists and turns, it can be quite helpful to get support from an Intuitive Eating community, therapist, counselor or coach. I’m here for you if you need me. 

I Was Fed Up With Hating My Body. How I Ended My War.

Many years ago, while getting dressed to go on a hike, I caught my reflection in the mirror and, once again, was unhappy with what I saw.

Immediately, my inner critic swung into full gear. My mind was overtaken by negative body talk as I filled my backpack and drove off to one of my favorite trails.

My plan to enjoy a lovely day of hiking along the coast was spoiled by the relentless voice in my head telling me that my body was a problem that needed to be fixed.

Completely Fed Up
While I had struggled with negative thoughts about my body for decades, this time I had finally hit a tipping point.

I couldn’t go on any longer.

I was completely fed up with hating my body. 

I was done wasting so much of my life at war with my body and decided, once and for all, to do something about it. 

And for the first time ever, doing something didn’t mean changing my body. It meant changing my relationship with it.

No More Body Bashing
One of the first steps I took was changing my internal body talk.

When I stepped out of the shower, instead of dodging my reflection in the bathroom mirror and running for cover under a towel to avoid a distressing body-bashing session, I opened the shower curtain and faced my reflection head-on. 

I practiced gazing at my body without ruthlessly picking it apart, without zooming in on my perceived flaws, without judging and agonizing over what I had been conditioned to believe was wrong.

Instead of thinking “My stomach is disgusting” or “I hate my thighs,” I simply thought “This is my body.”

I didn’t try to make the leap from body loathing to body love, from body negativity to body positivity. Nor did I force myself to say positive affirmations. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things; they just felt very inaccessible and insincere for where I was at. 

Instead, I focused on what felt attainable. I aimed for a neutral place to land.

“This is my body” felt about as neutral as I could get.

I still often didn’t like what I saw in the mirror, but unconditional body acceptance wasn’t my initial goal. Ending my negative body talk—and the downward shame spiral it triggered—was.

By swapping negativity with neutrality, I no longer got swept away by my critical thoughts. I was able to stop focusing and fixating on my body and just move on with my day. 

One of Many Steps
Of course, changing my body talk didn’t come quickly or easily. And it was just one of many challenging and necessary steps I needed to take to make peace with my constantly changing body. 

Certainly, divesting from diet culture and uprooting my anti-fat bias were absolutely essential, major steps. 

And while I refer to all these actions as steps, they are really ongoing practices that enable me to be as resilient as possible in a world that’s constantly lying to us about what our bodies are supposed to look like to be considered acceptable, healthy, worthy, valuable and lovable.

Neutralizing my internal body talk was a starting place for me. Perhaps it can be for you, too.

Once on Your Lips... When Food Became Complicated.

Recently, I was talking with some family members about our favorite meal when we were kids.

Mine was spaghetti.

Specifically, spaghetti with only butter and Parmesan cheese.

I vividly recall eating this combo at one of our family’s favorite restaurants, Spaghetti Works, where it was called “Hot Naked.”

When ordering, I was too embarrassed to say “naked” so I would shyly point to it on the menu as my cheeks burned bright red. My mortification, however, did not stop me from requesting my beloved dish.

In addition to those buttery noodles, I loved many different foods, from pepperoni pizza and sloppy joes to banana pancakes and peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches. And, of course, I relished anything sweet.

Food was easy back then.

I ate it and moved on.

After all, I had far more exciting things to focus on, like riding bikes and playing hide-and-seek with my neighborhood friends.

When Food Became Complicated
I sometimes reflect on when food started to become complicated for me.

While I can’t pinpoint an exact moment, I do recall starting to view food differently when I was around 11 or 12 years old and feeling terribly awkward in my rapidly changing pubescent body.

One memory is of my best friend and me making these giant chef salads loaded with iceberg lettuce, diced turkey, shredded cheddar, herb-seasoned croutons and low-cal ranch dressing. As we dug in, we’d pat ourselves on the back for making something healthy and hopefully slenderizing.

I remember another moment around this time when, as I reached for a chocolate-fudge brownie at a family reunion, an older boy shouted across the crowded kitchen, “Once on your lips, forever on your hips!”

With my shoulders slumped, head down and cheeks burning with shame and humiliation, I turned away without saying a word and headed to a quiet corner to eat my brownie alone because who would want to be seen doing something seemingly bad?

As I entered high school, I started getting more deeply entrenched in diet culture, from drinking diet soda and replacing meals with SlimFast shakes to burning calories in aerobics classes. 

For a short while, I doubled down on these efforts believing that if I lost a lot of weight my ex-boyfriend would regret dumping me and beg me to take him back.

Even More Complicated
In my later teens, my dad was diagnosed with heart disease and our kitchen became fat-free practically overnight. At that time, even almonds and avocados were off-limits.

From Snackwell’s chocolate-chip cookies and non-fat lemon yogurt to blueberry bagels with fat-free cream cheese, I continued to eat fat-free throughout college because I was taught doing so was the ticket to good health and a thin body.

Shortly after moving from Omaha to San Francisco a few years after graduating, I started restricting my eating further.

My list of food rules grew longer and more complicated. Being hyper-vigilant with my eating gave me the illusion of control in an environment where I felt like a complete fish out of water.

Hitting Rock Bottom
My struggle with food and my weight went on for years until I finally hit rock bottom.

I didn’t like the person I had become (frankly, neither did the people closest to me). And I no longer wanted to waste my life trying to have a body I was never meant to have.

With the help of some very wise guides, I came to understand that I can trust my body to tell me what it needs and to weigh what it’s meant to weigh—just as I used to do long ago before diet culture eroded this trust.

I returned to making food decisions based on my internal cues and personal preferences, including how foods tasted and felt in my body. No longer were my choices driven by food rules, good and bad lists, and how something might impact my weight.

I started regularly eating all my favorite foods again instead of restricting then bingeing on them as I did during my dieting days.

And I felt a sense of freedom with food that I hadn’t felt since I was a young girl.

What About You?
We come into this world knowing how to eat intuitively.

Sadly, for many reasons, we start to disconnect from our instincts and internal cues and instead start following external rules that, for many, result in a disordered relationship with food and their body.

When did food start becoming complicated for you?

Can you remember a time when food was not an issue? If so, how did it feel?

If you were to decide tomorrow that you’re finally done with struggling with food and your body, what steps would you take next?

It’s completely understandable if you feel some ambivalence about stopping dieting and being so tightly regimented with food and your body. Loosening the reins can feel both exciting and scary.

Perhaps a first step might just be imagining what would be possible for you and your life if food was no longer complicated.