Intuitive Eating Principle #5: Feel Your Fullness

This blog post will discuss everything you need to know about the fifth principle of Intuitive Eating: Feeling Your Fullness. 

If you’re brand new to Intuitive Eating, you’ll want to start with this blog post, which breaks down what Intuitive Eating is and how it might be beneficial for you. 

If you need a refresher, I’ve also gone over the previous four principles in separate blog posts, which are Rejecting the Diet Mentality, Honoring Your Hunger, Making Peace With Food, and Challenging The Food Police. 

Intuitive Eating Principle #5: Feeling Your Fullness

With our busy lives, the reality is that we are not as tuned in to our meals as we should be. Think about it: when was the last time you sat down for a meal without interruptions? 

Now, some of these interruptions may be outside of our control. For example, your kids may need something, or your boss pulls you into a last minute meeting. 

But, some of these interruptions that are preventing you from connecting with your body may be self-inflicted. Maybe instead of just eating, you’ve gotten used to eating with distractions. 

Honoring your hunger (principle two) and feeling your fullness (principle five) very much go hand in hand with each other. Practicing both principles requires you to have an intimate connection with your body. 

Eating What You Want In The Amount You Want It

Along with giving yourself permission to eat whatever you want comes permission to eat those foods in whatever quantities you desire without judgment.  

If you are still struggling with eating certain foods, I strongly encourage you to take more time with principle three of Intuitive Eating, which is Making Peace With Food. 

We Were Born Knowing How To Eat

This is a point that I mentioned in previous blog posts, but it needs to be repeated often. We are ALL born knowing how to eat. 

What I mean when I say this is that no one needed to tell us when to eat, or how much we needed to eat. This was an innate ability we all had since birth. 

If you have children, you can definitely see this in action through your baby’s hunger and fullness cues. And sure, you can try to put your baby on a feeding schedule, but there will sometimes be days your baby is going to want to eat outside their designated eating times.

Suppressed Hunger and Fullness Cues

If you’ve been dieting for a while, chances are you’ve been suppressing both your hunger and fullness cues. You might not know what either truly feels like, and will subsequently have a hard time identifying what they might feel like in your body. 

You may also think that feeling full is something to be ashamed of, almost like it’s a taboo thing. But it really isn’t! In fact, it is your body’s natural way of telling you that you have properly nourished yourself, and that you can stop eating. 

What Does Fullness Feel Like?

Just like how hunger feels different to everyone, fullness will also feel different to everyone. 

Some physical signs of fullness may be slight pressure in your stomach or tiredness from your mouth from chewing. 

You may also notice that the first bite of food tasted amazing, but as you keep going you realize it no longer tastes as good as when you started. 

Mentally, your thoughts surrounding food may have stopped. You may already be thinking about the next task you have to complete for the day. 

Practice Identifying Your Fullness

At your next meal, check in yourself periodically. As you’re eating, approach your fullness levels with gentle and nonjudgmental curiosity. 

Ask yourself: What signals is my body sending to me right now? How is the food tasting? Do I want to keep eating?

It’s okay if this is a hard concept to grasp at the beginning. There is no “right way” to feel your fullness, so don’t put too much pressure on yourself. 

You can’t expect that you’ll be able to identify your fullness right away. This is especially true if you have been chronically underfeeding yourself for an extended period of time. 

What is a Mid-Meal Check?

A mid-meal check is a really great tool that you can use when you’re learning how to tune into your body’s signals and respect your fullness.   

Sometimes, your mind and body are not always connected during a meal. You may be multitasking, where you’re eating and working simultaneously. Or, you may be watching a show on your laptop or television. 

If this sounds like you, a mid-meal check would be a good way to reconnect with your body. 

Practicing the Mid-Meal Check

At your next meal when you’ve reached about halfway into your meal, stop eating and take five minutes to assess where you are. 

Notice how much food is left on your plate. Think about if the food in front of you still looks appetizing. Does the food still taste good to you? Do you feel any of your fullness signals approaching?

If you notice that you’re getting full, you can decide what to do with the remaining food on your plate. Will you enjoy the rest at a later time, or did you have enough where you feel okay discarding the leftovers?

If you’re still hungry, feel free to continue eating after the mid-meal check. 

Remember, this tool isn’t meant for you to judge yourself and your food choices, but rather to approach your fullness with gentle curiosity. 

When Should You Do A Mid-Meal Check?

I would recommend only using a mid-meal check during meals where you are curiously hungry. This will not be a useful tool for you if you are painfully hungry, as you will probably eat more food at a quicker pace and not be as engaged with your meal. 

This will also not be useful to you if you are already feeling full from a previous meal and are just eating to satisfy your practical hunger. 

Ideal Fullness on The Hunger Fullness Scale

In my blog post “Intuitive Eating Principle Two: Honoring Your Hunger”, I went over the hunger fullness scale, which is a great tool to assess both your hunger before a meal and your fullness after your meal. 

The scale ranges from 1-10, where a 1 indicates primal hunger and a 10 indicates painful fullness to the point of being nauseous. 

The fullness portion of the hunger fullness scale is as follows:

5-neutral, neither hungry nor full

6-lightly full, will need to eat again within 1-3 hours

7-comfortably full and satiated

8-slightly stuffed, maybe overdid it a bit

9-stuffed and past the point of comfort, stomach may hurt

10-uncomfortably full and feel sick/ nauseous

Generally, you want to shoot for that 6-7 range where you are comfortably full, but there inevitably be days that you go over this. It’s important not to make Intuitive Eating another diet, and fullness another diet rule to follow. 

For example, my normal/baseline fullness that I like to be at is a 7. However, if I go out to all you can eat sushi (one of my hubby and I’s favorite lunches), I will probably be walking out of the restaurant closer to an 8. 

Funny side note, one time my hubby ate 15 rolls by himself and it came back up in the parking lot. Safe to say his fullness was at a 10. 

What Is The “Clean Plate Club”?

The “Clean Plate Club” is anyone that overrides their fullness levels and continues to eat until everything they have on their plate is gone. 

This usually stems from childhood, where you couldn’t leave the table until everything on your plate was gone. 

Or, it may come from a previous place of scarcity where food might have been harder to come by. This is actually a very tricky situation to unpack, as it can be hard to shake that deprivation mindset. 

Members of the clean plate club may be really good at honoring their hunger, but have a very difficult time stopping when they’ve had enough. 

Instead of relying on your internal fullness cues, you rely on external signals (a clean plate) to tell you that you’re full. But by the time you’ve finished everything on your plate, you may actually be too full. 

This is actually something I still struggle with sometimes. No matter how full I am feeling physically, there are still times I override my body.

Conclusion

Intuitive Eating Principle Five is Feeling Your Fullness, and it is all about eliminating the external signals that have told you when to eat and how much to eat. 

These external signals could be calorie limits, points, an eating window, and a certain time on the clock. 

You might be very familiar with how the feeling of eating “enough” feels like.  

Or, you might be familiar with how uncomfortable fullness feels like from the binges you went on after eating “enough”. 

But, in order to really master this principle, you will have to look inward and tune into your body at each meal. 

Further Research

Evelyn Tribole, one of the cofounders of Intuitive Eating (Elyse Resch is the other founder) wrote a great post detailing Intuitive Eating Principle #5: Feeling Your Fullness. If you want to learn more about Intuitive Eating Principle #5, I definitely recommend reading that article, linked here.

NOW I WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!

Sometimes, it may be easier to identify your hunger than to identify your fullness. Does this sound like you? Or, do you have a hard time identifying both hunger and fullness?

What are some ways that your body lets you know when you’ve been properly nourished? How often do you listen to your body’s signals?

Let me know in the comments below!