Feeling Satisfied

When I was struggling with weight, I’m pretty sure I never knew what it meant to feel satisfied after eating.

On the physical side, I certainly wasn’t paying enough (or really any) attention to my body to know when I had eaten what I needed; even if I started eating out of hunger, why let a little thing like being full keep me from having more, if food was still available and tasted good? (The obvious answer, of course, is that it meant I gained more weight, but that wasn’t always easy to remember in the moment.)

Emotionally, too, I could never be satisfied. If I was in a dieting phase, I might not overeat, but I’d feel restricted by the meal and already be thinking ahead to when I was allowed to eat again. Or if I was in a rebellious or overeating phase, I might have too much and start feeling guilty about it, sometimes even before I was finished. Time between eating was mostly spent feeling virtuous or beating myself up or adding up calories to figure out what I could eat the rest of the day or something else related to food or weight.

The idea that I could have just enough, so I wasn’t hungry anymore and wasn’t even thinking about eating, wasn’t a concept that ever occurred to me. I knew my mom could do that, but to me it seemed as alien as anything in a sci-fi show.

Which is why, even now, that feeling can take me by surprise. Part of it is the sheer physical delight, because when I eat to the point of satisfaction, I am energized, focused, engaged, ready to go on to the next part of my day with enthusiasm. I don’t feel sluggish or tired, or disinclined to move because my waistband is too tight, nor am I trying to ignore the fact that I might still be hungry. It’s quite marvelous.

But even more wonderful is the emotional sense. If you’ve never been obsessed with food, you likely can’t understand how much it can consume your life. And if you have been obsessed with food, you may not realize the impact until you’re not in that place anymore.

It’s incredibly freeing, to eat a meal and then leave it, and focus on whatever else life might bring without counting calories or grams or points in the back of your head, or searching for excuses to eat, or finding ways not to eat, or wondering what other people think of you eating.

Instead, I’m simply left feeling happy, that all is right with my world, especially knowing that I can eat more when I need to and have that experience all over again. It fills me with joy but also gratitude that I know, now, what feeling satisfied is like.

Food Associations

Note: Am I Hungry? is a mindful eating program - to learn more, visit www.AmIHungry.com or my website.

In the Am I Hungry? program, one of the things we talk about is when we want to eat even if we’re not hungry, and why that is. Everyone has their own reasons, but one might be food associations. For instance, watching a movie might be associated with having popcorn or other snacks.

These associations can be very strong, as I was reminded when coming across a description from my own experience about five months into my weight loss.

It started with a five-course meal at The Sedgley Place in Greene, Maine. I went with my family and a friend as part of a Christmas present, and since I’d been doing well with my weight, I decided to treat myself by not worrying about all the food. This meant that I ate everything they gave me: bread and butter; creamy vegetable soup; garden salad with balsamic vinaigrette; chicken cordon bleu; and a very decadent brownie sundae. I will also add that the portions, while not huge, were also not tiny, so it amounted to a lot of food.

By the end I was stuffed, and my stomach wasn’t very happy, especially ending with something as rich as the brownie. It meant that I felt queasy as went to my brother’s to watch a movie. Despite how much we had all just eaten, he provided even more: Doritos; Tostitos and salsa; crackers with three types of cheese; grapes; and carrots.

I said, “I don’t know that we need more food.”

He replied, “It’s part of the experience. We’ve got to have snacks for a movie.”

Even though I questioned it, and even though I by no means needed more food, I found myself eating anyway. Partly it was because the food was there, but I was also hoping the salty chips and healthier carrots and grapes would settle my stomach. It worked, sort of, except it only added to my misery when I got home.

And I was miserable. I slept terribly and felt so awful the next day that I had to leave work early. Some way to treat myself.

The only good thing was that remembering this sometimes helped keep me from overeating other times when the food looked good even if I didn’t need it. Not all the time, but even sometimes was more than I had done before. And although it was a hard-learned lesson, it did make me more aware of some of the reasons why I ate. 

Is Eating a Nasty Habit?

I was recently re-watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (“True Q”) in which a young woman finds out that she has the powers of a Q, a race of omnipotent beings. As she’s learning about what she can do, one of the others tells her, “You don’t have to eat, you know. It’s a nasty human habit you could easily do without.”

It reminded me of how someone I was talking to said that he would prefer if food didn’t taste good, so that he could eat only for fuel. Perhaps he, and other people who already think of food only as necessary sustenance, might choose to forgo that “nasty human habit”. But not me.

Consider, for instance, what things might be like if we could do away with the many tastes of food. It might be as Sheri S. Tepper described in Beauty, where the heroine goes to a future in which all nutrients can be provided simply by eating a certain combination of mostly flavorless wafers. As Beauty noted, “It had sustenance in it but no pleasure. I could live on it, but if it were all there was to eat, I thought living might not much be worth it.” (p. 69)

It reminds me that while it’s true that food is fuel, it can also be one of life’s great pleasures. If we eat mindfully, it engages all our senses, providing joy in aroma, sight, taste, feel, and sound. And our satisfaction from food is more than just the nutrients it provides. It comes from everything involved – selection and preparation and sharing with loved ones – which is why we would lose so much if we regard eating simply as a necessary evil.

So while part of me can understand the impulse to do away with food so we’re not tempted to overeat, I am very glad I do not live in that future that Beauty saw, or a world as a Q where it’s a “nasty habit”. I much prefer the approach of eating for nourishment and pleasure, and doing so mindfully enough that I get the utmost satisfaction from taking in only what I need.

Food Waste

What do composting and weight have to do with each other? For some people, maybe nothing, but for me, composting helps with one of the constant challenges of eating only as much as I need: food waste.

It’s still difficult, sometimes, not to eat everything I’m served. Some of it is growing up in a household where we had enough but not a lot more. Some is from cultural attitudes about cleaning your plate. Some is simply that if I spend effort in buying or making food, I don’t want to just toss it, particularly if it will go into a landfill.

And even though I’ve gotten better at meal planning and restraining myself from buying all the yummy-looking produce I see, it doesn’t always work. Plans can change, and I may end up with food going bad. This is why I was so excited about being able to start composting this year, particularly with a curbside composting organization (Garbage to Garden) that accepts everything, including meat and dairy.

Suddenly I don’t feel so bad if I have food scraps, which means that if I do have things left, I’m not as likely to eat them just to finish it. Nor do I try quite as hard to cram in eating everything I’ve bought before it molds or rots – it all simply goes into my bucket, waiting to be recycled as compost, and therefore not truly wasted. And composting isn’t the only way to do this. I have a friend who keeps chickens who had a similar reaction when she realized that food scraps could go to the chickens, who will eat anything (sometimes to an unnerving degree).

The best approach, of course, is to avoid buying or preparing too much food to begin with. But since that’s not always feasible, it’s nice to have options that make me feel better about treating the extra as waste, instead of stuffing myself with food I don’t need and expanding my waist.