[00:00:00] Welcome to the Hunger Scale Handbook series. Over the next seven weeks, you're getting a deep dive into the nitty gritty of the number one tool for sustainable weight loss, the hunger scale. In this compilation of past episodes, you'll be reminded of the how, why, and exactly what of this versatile tool that'll have you connecting to your body and hunger the way you did when you were a baby, when you had no food issues.
[00:00:28] Getting back to your factory settings before diet culture, well-meaning parents and social media, had you doubting yourself, starving yourself, and getting in the habit of overeating in direct response. The hunger scale is the best place to start to lose weight permanently and safely when you're trying to get pregnant.
[00:00:47] It can be used now and even in pregnancy and certainly beyond. I'll be referring people to this series for years to come. Listen, practice and refine over the next weeks. Feel free to ask me any questions that arise. I'm always looking for ways to communicate the nuances of the hunger scale better and better.
[00:01:05] There is so much to glean from this valuable tool. Find me on Instagram at Stephanie Fine md. DM me there, or contact me on my website, stephanie fine md.com. And now the Hunger Scale Handbook series. Week one, the hunger scale,
[00:01:29] So today, and right now we're gonna talk about the how. Okay? We're gonna start with my very favorite tool. It's the only one you'll ever really need. Honestly, if you, if you had to pick one tool, this would be it. And it's the Hunger Scale. So I'm gonna tell you exactly what it is and then why it's so fabulous.
[00:01:52] Okay? So. There are many different versions. The one that I like to use and I've been using for, oh my, it probably is a decade. That's gotta be longer anyway, long time is the scale goes from negative five to positive five. Okay, so negative five through zero all the way to positive five. So if you can imagine that on a line.
[00:02:13] Negative five is absolutely empty, lightheaded, feeling weak. No fuel in your system whatsoever. Okay, that's negative five, and then negative four is really very hungry. Negative three is very hungry. Negative two is hungry and negative one is starting to get hungry. Zero is neutral. Okay, so that's from, that's the hungry side.
[00:02:42] And then on the other side we go from zero, which is neutral to a positive one, which is just starting to register food positive two, which is satisfied, not full, but satisfied. Another way to say that is enough or no longer hungry. That's positive two. Positive three is full positive. Four is very full and positive.
[00:03:12] Five is an appropriate for what? We just had Thanksgiving full, like, you know, like unbuttoning your pants super uncomfortable. Like really? Yeah, not comfortable. So that's the scale from negative five to positive five. Now here's the thing. We never, if we can help, it wanna be at negative five or positive five, or even negative four or positive four.
[00:03:39] In fact, we don't even want to be negative three or positive three. I know that can sound shocking, but that's the truth. Okay, so the place that we want to live is negative two to positive two. Okay. So negative two is. Hungry. Just hungry. You're, you're registering hunger and positive to remember is satisfied enough, no longer hungry, but not full.
[00:04:07] And this living in this part is perfect. Usually what can happen is people will get to it's, that's about three hours in between. If you eat at negative two and you eat food until you're satisfied, you can get three. Anywhere from two and a half to four hours in there, depending on what you eat. That's a whole other episode.
[00:04:30] Spoiler alert, protein helps you stay satisfied longer. Okay. So that's, the thing. Now here's the interesting thing to me about this. There's so many interesting things, but if you waited, if you knew that you were hungry, so you were, this was negative two, but you waited, you just decided for whatever reason you weren't gonna eat, you.
[00:04:49] It does not take that long to get to negative three, probably 30 minutes, and then just a little while longer to get to negative four. And negative four remember, is really very hungry. The problem with getting to negative four, even negative three, is that you're so hungry that your brain sort of goes offline and anything.
[00:05:10] That presents itself to you. You will eat anything you perceive as fast. And this is where our brain makes terrible decisions about food, where we could have had really good intentions, but if we let ourselves get really hungry, we overeat. So we bounce from like negative four to positive four because we're so hungry and we usually make choices that are things that are much higher in calorie.
[00:05:35] So if we're eating at negative two, positive two, we have our wits about us a little more, and we can make. Better decisions. So there's so many reasons to stay within this, but that is a main one the reason we're looking at the scale is 'cause we don't wanna get too hungry and we don't wanna get too full.
[00:05:54] Now some people have, issues with getting over hungry. If you're used to ignoring things and letting things go too long and working and whatever, then you can get really hungry. And like I said, you do those big swings and you end up eating so much and then things sort of feel like they get outta control.
[00:06:12] But one of the trickier places for a lot of us is figuring out where. Full satisfied, not full. We often stop eating or we get in the habit of stopping eating when we're full or very full. We think that's the stopping point. It's not the stopping point is satisfied now. We live in a place where we have access to food.
[00:06:38] We're very lucky, and we have access to food whenever we want it. So this is why this can work, right? If evolutionarily, you know, if you didn't know you were eating, if you got to negative five, you wanted to eat to positive five because who knew when the next meal was coming? That is not our situation for the majority of us listening to this.
[00:06:57] So we. Don't have to worry about getting too hungry. We can have a snack with us. We can figure out our day so that we can do this negative two to positive two. Okay, so that is the hunger scale. That's generally how it works and what you do. I'll also tell you how to do this, is we start to check in with ourselves.
[00:07:19] Give yourselves a number. Whenever you think of how to do this, you could have it pop up on your phone. Also, when you know you're hungry, you can start to give it a number. I can't tell you your number. No one can. You are gonna have to figure out the numbers on the scale for yourself.
[00:07:32] And what I'll want you to do is to put Mark negative two as. Hungry. Just hungry. Hungry and positive. To a satisfied, not full. Okay. I just love the hunger skill, so, and I'm gonna tell you why it's so great. See? Love it. So, I just talked to you about checking in with your body. One of the reasons I really love this is because it requires you to check in with your body.
[00:07:59] Okay, so many of us, as we gain weight, we detach further and further and further away from our body. We don't like our body. We're upset that it keeps gaining weight. We don't like the way it looks. We don't like the way it feels. And so we try to get away from it as much as we can. Now, obviously we can't get away from our body, but we can.
[00:08:21] We sort of can. We can stop looking at it. We can stop taking care of it. We can stop listening to it, and that's what we do a lot of the times and it's totally understandable when, if it feels completely out of our control, then we're like. Forget it. And not only that, so that's just with weight and that can happen.
[00:08:38] It feels like our cravings. It feels like we can't, there's no, there's no way we're gonna be able to lose weight. And so then we're just, we just separate ourselves. We're in our heads. And we buy shoes instead of, you know, instead of buying other things, right? Clothing, clothes, shopping. So, so that's, that is one reason why we do this.
[00:09:00] So getting back into feeling what our body's wanting and needing is actually an important skill that we need. Now the other thing and why it's especially important in fertility is because when we're having fertility issues, we're especially disappointed in our bodies. So now we have two major reasons to be disappointed in our bodies.
[00:09:22] And the poor body just wants to be thrown to the, we wanna throw it to the curb, but of course we cannot. And it's a sweet body and we really, deep down we love it. We certainly need it and we can have a different relationship with it. But I can understand, of course, why we're upset. Yeah, it's totally understandable.
[00:09:44] But in order to be able to have a different relationship with our bodies and food, we have to engage. We have to reconnect. And so when we do that, we can start to do this hunger scale. So it's actually an elegant way of reconnecting, of asking it when it's hungry, part of the other reason why we also ignore our body's needs.
[00:10:13] We're upset with it. So we sort of deny it, but we also have tons of cultural things telling us to deny our bodies. Jobs can do that. Trainings can do that. Doctors, nurses shift workers, teachers. I mean, like, you're not allowed to go pee, you know, you have to stay with the kid.
[00:10:27] Like, there's plenty of reasons why we teach ourselves to deny our bodies also. So even if we think our bodies are the greatest things in the world, some other external cues or trainings or cultures have us denying parts of our body. So for all these reasons, we really want to reconnect when we're not connected to our hunger.
[00:10:51] External reasons, external issues, external cues. Tell us when we're done eating. If we're not asking our body when we're done eating, how do we know we finish the plate? The container of potato chips is gone. This is the only way we know, but, Lay's potato chip man does not know how much my body needs.
[00:11:17] Only I know how much my body needs, but only if I'm paying attention, right? So it makes total sense. If we're not connected to our body, if we're using external cues to tell us how much to eat, then very easily we can be putting on weight. So the other part of this that's really interesting is that our body actually knows.
[00:11:43] I know it doesn't seem like it 'cause often it feels like we've been misled by our bodies. Like it wants sugar all the time, or it won't stop eating this or that. So it does feel sort of like it's outta control, but the truth is it knows what we need if we can stay connected to it and retrain our thinking to really hear it.
[00:12:04] And one of the best examples of this is naturally thin people. So I think I've told you last time, I'm not naturally thin and I do actually have some naturally thin friends. I don't know if they exist in the planet. It's very hard to relate to them sometimes, but I've grown to understand them and here is why.
[00:12:25] This is what I know about naturally thin people. They can't imagine eating past full. It just wouldn't occur to them. Like they feel full and they're like, why would I take another bite? I'm full now. It's not because they are superior in any way. They're more brilliant. They have better willpower.
[00:12:43] It's not that their hunger hormone system is better controlled. It's more tightly controlled than the rest of us. So their system just works better. It's like eyesight, right? Some people have 2020 vision. Some people do not. It says nothing about who they are as a person. It just says that their eyeballs are shaped in the right way and have the pieces that work and they can see without glasses.
[00:13:12] And you can imagine our bodies are so unbelievably complicated and there's so much going on that of course some people are gonna have tighter hormone systems here and you know, they're gonna be taller or they're gonna have, thicker hair or, you know what I'm saying? Like different things happen with people and one of the things that can happen is they have a tighter hunger hormonal system and they stop eating when they've had enough food, when their body's had enough food.
[00:13:42] And it's sooner than our naturally stopping place. 'Cause what I know is even those of us, when we feel like we can overeat, you know, we can eat a lot of pizza. I mean, our body tells us that it's full, but we just don't listen to it, and we just keep going. Now, there is still a point at which we stop eating.
[00:14:03] Now, it could be that the whole pizza's gone, but you could continue to eat more if you wanted to, if you continue to go past the signals in your body, but there's a place at which you naturally stop and that place is your hormonal system right now. And what we do is work to make that signal louder and louder so that you're naturally eating less and less, and not because you're forcing yourself, not because you're willing yourself, but because you listen to your body and heard that it's full.
[00:14:37] You're like, oh, I'm fueled up for now. Thank you very much. That's what can actually happen. And. I know some of you're listening to this and thinking, yeah, but that, that can happen for me. But you're wrong. You're wrong. I literally spoke to two people today. I spoke to more than two people today, but the two who had the epiphany today about this week, they could not believe that they took two bites of cake and they were done.
[00:15:10] Never have done that before. Two bites of cake. Normally they'd have the whole cake and it was not, they didn't force themselves. They weren't trying to cut out sugar, they weren't doing any of that. It was just that they listened to themselves. They knew their hunger scale, you know, they reached the two and they were done and they naturally put the fork down.
[00:15:30] That was one of 'em. The other person was noticing how different it was because her husband kept eating and he's like, oh, are you, are you done? Like, normally they would be continued to eat together, but she just was, she noticed that she was at positive and it just didn't make sense anymore at that point.
[00:15:48] Both of them were so surprised, and I really, really get it because it seems like we have to force, we have to willpower, we have to restrict, we don't practicing this tool, I promise you, really works. So hunger scale is magic. Now what you have to do is practice. So practicing is what you're gonna do, and all that means is that you check in every once in a while, how am I feeling?
[00:16:15] What number am I right now? And then you start to get your own, scale in order. And then you can ask yourself when you're about to eat what you are. Then you continue to ask yourself during the meal you check in. Where am I? Where am I? Where am I? And see what happens. It's so exciting.
[00:16:35] The other really amazing thing about this reconnecting with your body and asking your body what it needs and, and honoring it, is you're building trust with yourself, which is so important when we've done. If we've been on lots of diets, we've done things that aren't kind to ourselves, and so building trust around food is actually really important.
[00:16:57] The other thing is that it's a precursor to feelings work and feelings work is something we for sure will be talking about, and that has to do with emotional eating. So already your, your laying the groundwork to understand any emotional eating that you may have by doing this hunger scale work.
[00:17:15] So it's such good and important work. The other thing that's phenomenal about this is that you can, it's totally safe, right? You can do this during pregnancy. You can do it during lactation. There is no problem with it. What I'm asking you to do is eat when you're hungry at, at negative two. Always.
[00:17:36] Whenever you're at negative two, you eat. So when you're pregnant, it might be. That you're hungry a little more often. I'll tell you, you're not nearly, you're not hungry as much as you think you would be, but you may be. And then you eat. So every time now, and as you're getting pregnant and when you're pregnant, you eat at negative two, and then you stop at positive two, and you can do that for every phase of your life, right?
[00:18:03] It's safe to do for your body. So this is the hunger scale. Can you see why it's one of my favorite things? Not only are you listening to your body reconnecting, but you're learning how you can feel good in your body and how you can easily, honestly, it feels easy once it, you're in it about how you're eating less food.
[00:18:28] And I wanna say naturally, but it kind of is hunger scale, practice it.
