(00:01):

Hi, I'm Corinne. After a lifetime of obesity being bullied for being the fattest kid in the class and losing and gaining weight like it was my job, I finally got my shit together and I lost 100 pounds each week. I'll teach you no bullshit weight loss advice you can use to overcome your battle with weight. I keep it simple. You'll learn how to quit eating and thinking like an asshole. You stop that and weight loss becomes easy. My goal is to help you lose weight the way you want to live your life. If you are ready to figure out weight loss, then let's go. So we're going to talk about getting our hunger cues back online today. We're going to talk a little bit about, I just don't feel hungry. I miss my hunger cues. I don't know what it is. Something goes on there around my hunger cues, but I honestly just can't tell. 

(00:53):

This is for you. First of all, one of the ways that you can get your hunger cues back online, because what happens is over time when we are overeating because we're tired, overeating because we're stressed, overeating because it tastes so good, and that's the only time that we ever get to feel an ounce of is when we're eating something that tastes good. If you are overeating because you don't like not cleaning your plate, whatever that is, eventually your body will say, oh, we must not need hunger cues, so I'm going to turn son of a bitches down. We're not going to keep what we don't need, and that is the way the body is designed. The body is designed to love you so much that it will morph and change itself to meet your lifestyle. This is why lifestyle is so important because your body, whatever lifestyle you're leading, it tries to accommodate that. 

(02:05):

Just like if you spend your life watching TV at night like this hunched over and then you work at a desk hunched over, eventually your spine changes its shape to accommodate a rounded back. If you don't exercise, if you don't stretch, if you don't do some posture work, if you don't do those things, eventually you'll see your back gets rounder and rounder. That is your spine saying, I will contort myself to match your lifestyle. Hunger is kind of the same way, so this is the nice thing about your body. They never just go away. It's not like they evaporate into the air, it's down there right now. It's just blunted. Your brain hasn't had a reason to turn them back on. That's big message. So don't be scared that they won't come back, but probably what you're really saying is, I'm scared that I'll gain weight until they come back, which is what a lot of people think. 

(03:13):

And here's the thing, getting your hunger cues or your enough cues back online. For some of us, when we have spent a long time overeating or we have spent a long time, I'm either overeating, so I'm not listening to my hunger cues. I'm eating when I'm bored, I'm eating when I'm tired, I'm eating. When I'm stressed, I'm eating when everybody else is. I'm just eating, eating Irregardless of what my body wants. Eventually your body's like, alright, you don't need that, so I'm just going to turn that off. But it's not like we cut it off from the city water. We just turned the faucet off in the house, but the main is still running. Okay, you're still hooked up. You just don't have your faucet on. So now we got to work on turning on the faucet, and for some of us, if it's been years and years and years of doing this, it's a little rusty, so it ain't going to just be like, we're just going to go like, oh, it's like a brand new house. 

(04:07):

It's going to be like, no. It's like going into 120 year old house and we're going to have to bust through some rust to get there. All right, so the other thing that happens is you've been on diets a long time, and if you've been on low calorie diets, calorie counting, diets, fasting type things, your body has also had its hunger cues and ignored, and so it's like, I just don't need these. Why would I send you this stuff? You never listen anyway, so I just won't bother, and that is the way our body is designed. It is designed to accommodate whatever it is that we repeatedly do, whether it's good for us or not. Your body doesn't really know what's good for you. It just knows to accommodate things, and if it doesn't think it's good for you, it sends up warning signals like weight gain. 

(05:04):

It's sending up smoke. Something's wrong here. If you're eating when you're not hungry and you're like, Ugh, I'm so bloated, or heartburn or whatever, it's like that's your body saying, Hey, we really weren't hungry. I'm just letting you know I didn't eat that, but most of us just suffer through that stuff to eat, so that could be the reasons why it's off. Now the first thing you can do is do time to eating. If you really are just like, I do not know when I'm hungry, I really don't. Then what I would do is I would start with some timed eating. I would just set intervals and I personally, I'm not a nutritionist. There is no doctor's degree here. This is literally just this doctor, Google, doctor, books, doctor podcasts and collection of wisdom that I've learned over the years. So nobody brought in being like, oh my gosh, can you make me a menu? 

(06:02):

It's like, no, Corrine is not a nutritionist, but what I do suggest is that I would eat breakfast and I would, and especially if you're over the age of about 40, I would eat breakfast at about an hour. Once you wake up, you do not need a big old country boy breakfast from the Cracker Barrel, but just a little something to reteach your body if you've been used to, especially for those of you who tend to be like, I don't know, I don't really feel hungry. I don't really eat. I get busy in the morning, my first meal's not till one o'clock, and then I barely get time to eat, and then at night I'm losing control. If that's you, then what I would do is then I would do some time eating and I would have something small for breakfast just to kind get the body back to being like, okay, we are going to get food in regular intervals, and this is new to me. 

(07:08):

Then your body has to start kind of trying to turn on its cues, especially because it'll be a pattern interrupt. So a lot of you're saying, that's me at night. If you're not eating a lot during the day, try eating more during the day. A lot of times nighttime eating comes down to two different things, and sometimes it can be a combination. One nighttime feeling like you just can't get enough food at night. If you are one who eats very light during the day, it's like your body is saying, we are going to be going through the ringer tomorrow for the first 12 hours, so we need to eat a lot to gear up for that. So you could be setting yourself up and then the second, well, one other thing that happens with that is then you start getting into the habit of eating all that, and then it could also be combined or on its own. 

(08:08):

Nighttime eating often is a signal that during the day you don't have breaks. You're hard on yourself, you never have time for you at all. You're go, go, people pleasing, doing all the things, and for a lot of people, nighttime eating, especially for people who eat in secret or once everyone goes to bed and you do your relaxed eating, it can be a signal that is the only time you get for you, and so you've associated the eating as a way of truly comforting yourself and caring for yourself. So if you make sure that you're going to do time to eating, it will help you lose weight. This is the thing at the end of the day, if you're doing time to eating, we're still eating to enough. We're not eating to enough. We're just starting to eat at times. We think we might should be hungry. 

(09:14):

So if you've just like, I have no clues, none whatsoever, I want you to try time eating for a month, give yourself an entire month of saying, I will eat at 8:00 AM and then I'm going to eat at 12, and then I'm going to eat at maybe have a little something at three, and then I'm going to eat my dinner, and then I'm just going to be done for the day. I'm just going to have these strategic times where I'm eating, and then after a month, what you can do is you can not eat by time. You can just say like, okay, I'm going to see if I get hungry in the mornings, so I'm going to wait, and then I'm going to look for little clues, and here's the other thing about hunger. Most hunger signals are I want you looking for slight ones, and I think sometimes what happens is people will say, I don't have hunger cues because you're used to hunger cues being severe, starving extreme. 

(10:21):

We're not looking for that level of hunger. We're looking for minute hunger. We're looking for yawning, lack of focus, a little flatness in the belly. For some people there will be a growl, but for a lot of people it's not For me, I start getting tired, so I do it. All of a sudden I'll be rocking and rolling, and then all of a sudden I'm just yawning. That is my signal that it's like, oh, it's harder for me to stay focused. I'm yawning. I'm starting to get tired. My energy levels are now dipping. For me, that's slight hunger, so everyone's a little different. The next thing you can try, we call this the level two, is if you do have some cues, but you're not a hundred percent sure, am I hungry or am I not hungry? Then you can use the on the clock method, which is super simple. 

(11:16):

If you think you're hungry, this is especially good for people who have a hard time drinking water. If you think you're hungry, then drink eight to 16 ounces of water. Wait 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Just set a little timer on your phone and then reevaluate. Do I have the same physical sensations? Do I still feel hungry? Because it could be that you're just thirsty, but you may be hungry. So if you go on the clock and after 10 or 15 minutes you're hungry, you eat, we know that you're hungry. If you're still thinking you're hungry, just go with being hungry. If after 10 or 15 minutes you're not, then you wait until the next time you think you're hungry and then the next time you just go ahead and eat. I wouldn't keep going back on the clock every single time because for some people that can backfire. It's like all of a sudden we're just glorifying being able to put off hunger. Our goal here is not to glorify hunger. Our goal here is not to put off hunger and to see how far we can push it. The goal is to just know when you're hungry so that you can start giving your body some food. 

(12:36):

Then the next thing is, I know I'm not hungry. I'm just not waiting for hunger. So these are people who are like, my cues are not messed up. I know I'm hungry, or I know that I'm not hungry. I just don't want to wait. One reason that could be is because you're bored. If it's just straight boredom, come up with a list of some shit that you can do and don't make it hard. Play games on your phone. Scroll social for a few minutes, go for a little walk. When you're eating because you're bored, then you can either just get used to being bored and just being like, you know what? I'm bored. I don't eat over that anymore. I just sit here and don't like it. Or you can find something that you can do to move through the boredom, but the other thing is it could be something more deeply rooted. 

(13:37):

So if you're just not wanting to eat, then what I would do is I would try journaling about why you're afraid you're sad or you're mad about waiting for hunger. So if you're afraid, usually it's not true. Most of us have a fear of getting hungry. We think like, oh my God, I'm going to overeat later. There's zero. It could set you up for that, but here's what I don't want you doing overeating. To prevent overeating, what I'd rather you do is tell yourself, it's when I used to get extremely hungry was the problem. I'm not doing that anymore. I'm waiting for slight hunger. Some people get mad that they have to wait for hunger, and it's probably because you're thinking other people don't have to do this. Other people don't have to wait till they're hungry. Most thin normal eaters wait until they're hungry. 

(14:32):

In fact, most normal thin people will skip a meal if they are enjoying themselves. Just like my son. If my son is enjoying something, he is not going to stop to eat. Not fun, but that's why we have to watch what we are doing because sometimes we associate like, well, if I'm not going to eat, then I can't have fun. It's like, really? We have to think about that. How could I be having fun in the same situations where food doesn't have to be part of it? And then the last thing is making, and the sad part, a lot of us, if we're feeling sad because we're going to have to wait for hunger, it's because now we are thinking it's not so much you're sad about the food and not being able to eat. You're sad about what the food represents. So if eating represents comfort, you're not sad that you're losing the food, you're sad that you're losing your only way to comfort yourself. 

(15:37):

The only way you know how to de-stress the only way you know how to unwind. If that's the case, we want to figure out better coping mechanisms, so it's good to know, oh, it's not the food that I'm missing when I let go of this food. I have not replaced what the food represents, so I've got to replace what the food represents, so I don't feel so sad about giving it up. Okay, that's it. Y'all have a good one. Talk to you later. Bye y'all. Thank you so much for listening today. Make sure you head on over to no bs recourse.com and sign up for my free weight loss training on what you need to know to start losing your weight right now. You'll also find lots of notes and resources from our past podcasts help you lose your weight without all the bullshit diet advice. I'll see you next week.