Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:00]:
Hello, fabulous Dr. Stephanie Fein here with Weight Loss for Fertility and 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, and that's 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, 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. It can be used now and even in pregnancy and beyond. I'll be referring to this series for years to come. Listen, practice and refine over the next weeks.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:08]:
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. There is so much to glean from this valuable tool. Find me on Instagram @StephanieFeinMD, DM me or contact me on my website, stephaniefeinmd.com and now the Hunger Scale Handbook Series. Week 2 Positive 2 Hello fabulous. It's Dr. Stephanie Fein here with Weight Loss for Fertility and I'm so happy to be talking with you. I am so glad you're here.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:51]:
This is the place where we lose weight for fertility. It benefits fertility, that's a beautiful thing. But losing weight in general feels so good when we can get a handle on it because it can feel like we're so out of control. So that's what we do here. And we do that in a way that's safe for getting pregnant, whether that's through IVF or naturally. We need to make sure we're doing healthy things for the body. That's always what we do here. Anything you do here, here you can do before getting pregnant, you can do while you're pregnant and you can do after pregnant safely.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:34]:
So important. I'm always looking out for your health and just you in general. I just have a lot of love for you. So I'm so glad you're here. And today we are going to talk about Hunger Scale Spotlight. We talk a lot about Hunger Scale. It's one of the foundational tools we use. It's such a fantastic tool.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:57]:
My goodness. And I've talked about it in a lot of different ways with different Focuses. The general introduction to hunger scale is episode two, if you want to go and check that out. I will of course be recapping a little bit of it here because we're going to spotlight, we're going to focus on the number +2. The scale goes from negative 5 to positive 5. So +2 is one of the numbers and we're going to focus in on that one. It's an important one. So I help you lose weight sustainably without old fashioned dieting.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:39]:
I know you know what I mean. The restriction, deprivation, punishing that one. Instead we learn to be naturally thin. I put naturally in air quotes. Cause we don't feel like we're naturally thin, but that's where we're headed. The people who are naturally thin eat when they're hungry. They stop when they're satisfied. It does not occur to them to eat food when they're anxious or bored or anything else.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:02]:
Because if their body's not hungry, they don't eat. And we can relearn to do that. Our body came that way also. I do happen to think they have a more tightly like hormone signaled system. It's easier for them, but we can learn the system. We can learn too. I don't know that I believed that when I was 50 pounds overweight, but I know that to be true now. We can relearn it and that is such good news.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:40]:
So we stop overeating by going back to the basics before our dieting guardians got a hold of us and before magazine articles and social media took hold of our hearts and minds. And we go back to the factory settings, we start believing our body signals. That means we eat when we're hungry. Now that's body hunger, not brain or mind hunger. There's a difference there. And we stop when we're satisfied, not full. Satisfied, not full. You're going to hear that a lot because that is the definition of plus two.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:24]:
Satisfied, not full. This is the foundation of sustainable weight loss. And the tool we use is the hunger scale. When we use the hunger scale, when we learn makes stopping overeating so much more straightforward. Really clear, very simple. So the recap of the hunger scale is that it goes from negative 5, which is completely empty, lightheaded, feeling very ill, to positive five, which is so uncomfortably full. You're like undoing your pants. You're physically bloated and uncomfortable.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:19]:
There is a episode spotlight on the extremes. Negative five and positive five. That's episode 47. We will link that up in the show notes. But Those are the two ends and then, of course, it goes from negative 5, minus 4, minus 3, minus 2, minus 1, 0, and then 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or plus 1 plus 2 plus 3 plus 4, plus 5. And in between, there are all the different levels of starting to get hungry, being hungry, getting over hungry, very hungry and too hungry or extremely hungry. And then on the other side is we're just starting to register food. We're satisfied, not full.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:10]:
We're full, we're very full. We're extraordinarily full. That's the scale. And the place we want to live most of our life is we want to feed ourselves at negative two, just hungry, and stop eating at plus two, which is satisfied, not full. So as you can tell, each number is a whole world unto itself. And I've done a couple other hunger scale spotlights. I told you about the extremes minus five and plus five. But also I did a minus one and positive three.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:51]:
So negative one was episode 21, and positive three is episode 34. Again, those will be in the show notes. But today is all about positive two, which is satisfied, not full. What's positive two? Satisfied, not full. And it's always so important. I can never say just satisfied. I have to say satisfied, not full, full. Because we so often think that satisfied is full.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:20]:
They're very different. And that's a big part of this, is learning the difference between satisfied and full, because the difference between satisfied and full is weight loss. So here's what's vital to know. There's three general areas we're going to talk about today. The first, positive two, which is satisfied, not full, is the stopping point. That's when we stop eating. That's when we know we've had enough food, our bodies had enough food. We when it's satisfied, not full.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:13]:
So full is where we start to feel discomfort. And of course, that's three is full, which is discomfort. And then four is very full. Five is extremely full. We get more and more uncomfortable as we go up on the scale. We want to learn to notice satisfied, positive two, and we want to be able to stop there. Now, I talk about this with my clients, of course, all the time. I teach them this.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:40]:
And I have one brilliant client. Actually, literally all of my clients are brilliant. I don't know how that works out, but it's true. And so one of my brilliant clients thought about it this way. It's just such a smart way of thinking about it. She said, oh, it's like being able to have sex after the meal. Yes, that's exactly it. She's so good at really understanding the concepts.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:09]:
She had so many of these super nuggets. And this one I just thought was so brilliant because I really understood what she meant. And maybe you can too, where if you go to dinner, you have a meal, you're like, ugh, don't touch me. Because you're so uncomfortable that we eat to that level. What we want to eat too is satisfied, not full. And satisfied means you. Your body can do anything you want it to do. After a meal, you could go for a walk.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:40]:
I mean, I don't know that you want to go for a very vigorous run. And I don't know how vigorous your sex is. This is not that kind of show. But I hope you get the point. The point is that you don't have to take a nap, you don't have to rest, you don't have to take tums. Like your body got what it needed and it didn't create another problem for you, a discomfort, something you have to recover from. Fueling your body is the ask. It's the thing your body's asking you to do.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:19]:
I need more fuel. When it gets hungry, we fuel it and then we go on. That's really food's rightful place. It fuels your life. It isn't the purpose of life. It's not the highlight of the day. Now, if it is the highlight of the day, we want to get your life more exciting. And that's a whole other episode and podcast.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:44]:
But for now, we're going to be talking about the fueling of the body. Now, that does not mean it has to be gruel or terrible or you hate it or it's yucky food. No, it could be delicious food, but it just. We don't want it to be too much at a time. The beauty is you can have more later when your body becomes hungry again. So we want to get to know this feeling of satisfied, not full, this feeling of, I'm energized, I'm fueled, I can go on and do whatever I want to do. When we are used to feeling full, and that would be positive 3 or anything above, we're uncomfortable. Usually that's how we get to know.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:12:37]:
We're like, oh, I'm uncomfortable now. I'm going to stop. We want to stop before then at satisfied, not full. But a lot of us thought that we stop at uncomfortable, and it's just an error, and it's just something that we want to correct. Discomfort in general, for our bodies, discomfort means something's gone wrong. Our body Generally, I mean, if we're very lucky, generally it's not uncomfortable. It functions. But if we eat too much and we're uncomfortable, then our body is telling us that's too much.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:19]:
So nausea, heartburn, fullness, bloating, heaviness. They all indicate something's wrong. Not, oh, good, you gave me the right amount of food. No, you gave me too much food. The body's saying, this is so foreign. I mean, it seems like it should be basic, but it's not. This is like a new concept. That's why we're talking about it here.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:58]:
We don't want discomfort. We want comfort. We want to be fueled and be able to go on with our day. But we get so used to thinking that full is the stopping point. And there's so many reasons we override the signal, the stopping signal, which is satisfied, not full. That's the actual stopping. We often learn to stop at full. And again, there's so many reasons why we do this.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:28]:
Parents, guardians, authorities like that. That whole group is, you know, when we're kids, we're told to clean our plate and we have certain meal times. Even if we're told to eat when we're not hungry or we're told that we can't stop when we're satisfied, we have to keep eating. And omg, parents and guardians and whoever do this for such good reason, they're worried about your health, they're worried about you. And they got mixed signals too. So. And so it's not for nefarious reasons. It's sort of a learned behavior and passed down and actually, so part of learning this for yourself will help that you can.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:10]:
Can teach it to your children too. Which, of course, ironically, we don't teach it to our children. They come that way. We teach it out of them, which is often what happened to us. So it can start in childhood that way. But also it's because we seek pleasure and. Or cope as a kid with food. We get pleasure from food.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:31]:
There's not that many places we get pleasure as a kid. Now, that's not true playing and stuff. But often we're told we can't play or we have to be in school. And the only way, if we're having trouble, is to eat something that tastes good. We learn very quickly. Oh, that's awesome. I am happier when I am in this miserable situation if I have a sweet something. So it's so innocent.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:58]:
And if we're anxious and we eat something, we have temporary pleasure. We learn that very quickly. And it's One of often as a kid, it's one of the only things we have access to. So again, if it tastes good, then we're going to want to eat it and override the signals of, I've had enough fuel. And then a third reason is the scarcity. This idea of I don't know when I'm going to have it again. So, like, I don't have a lot of control in my life. I have access now I'm going to load up because I don't know when I'll see it again.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:40]:
And that can happen as a kid, we don't have a lot of control. Right. So only when people put out the food for us and maybe that they weren't in sync with our timing. Our bodies were different, our schedules were different. These are just setups for how we turn off the signaling that our body gives us. We ignore it for good. I'm putting air quotes, good reasons, especially if we do it as a kid. And then as we get older, we have all these other reasons.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:17:10]:
People pleasing a date or people pleasing, again, our parents, but as older, wanting to fit in high school and magazines and what bodies should look like and all the rest of that stuff. There ends up being so many reasons why we override our body's signals. And we just learn this over decades. It's not even like a couple months, decades of this. So that's why stopping at satisfied is often this sort of a new concept here and one that has to be relearned. And you can do that. We have the tool hunger scale. And the way we use the hunger scale is checking in to our bodies to determine when it's active, actually hungry, and stopping when it's actually had enough, when it's satisfied, not full.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:17:59]:
So the hunger scale is the way we teach ourselves. We relearn the body signals. And of course. And there's so much here, and I've done a bunch of podcasts on trusting your body and that sort of thing. It's very hard to do. We've been told not to trust our bodies. And so trusting our bodies seems to not make a lot of sense, but I promise it does. The signals are still there.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:26]:
We think the signals aren't because it's our brain, not our body, that we're listening to. And that's the difference. Bodies have different signals than the brain. And that's the second thing I want to talk about, that satisfied can be a tricky word sometimes. I'll say the body's had enough. The important thing to mention here is that I'm referring to the body's definition of satisfied or enough, not the brain's definition. And a lot of us are not used to checking in with the body. We're very used to using our brains.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:19:06]:
We're excellent at it. It's gotten us very far and it works for so many things. Just not eating the body is the boss when it comes to eating. So for those of us so used to overeating our meals, satisfied and enough don't have body equivalents. They are brain ideas. If we're used to overeating, we're not used to listening to our body. So we just use different external cues to stop, not our body signals to stop. The plate is done, it's been two hours, the dessert came out.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:19:45]:
You know, it's five o'. Clock. You know, I mean there's external reasons we're not used to listening to our bodies. So if they're brain ideas, then there will never be enough or it's only however much is on the plate. There's no anchor in our bodies. There's no loop that we're closing. We're just sort of force feeding our bodies based on our brain's idea of what enough and satisfied is. And satisfied is really, who knows what that's going to be, right? I want the taste of ice cream over and over and over and over and over.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:20:24]:
If I'm not listening to my body, then my brain is basically never going to be satisfied. And then we get to, that's where we get to plus five, right? We're just putting the ice cream in over and over and over. And we do get to a point where we just cannot fit any more in. But we don't want to get there. We don't want that. Because the brain is designed to seek pleasure, avoid pain and conserve energy. That's how it keeps you alive. That's how you survive.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:20:57]:
Seeking pleasure, avoiding pain and conserving energy. So it's so happy to sit on the couch and eat carton after carton of ice cream. You're safe, you'll survive. But we don't want that for you. We want thriving. We want you doing what you're supposed to be doing in this world, what you want to be doing in this world. And so listening to the brain when it comes to food is not the best idea. We need to shift that to the body.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:21:28]:
So we want with positive 2 to mean that the body is satisfied, it's no longer hungry, it's fueled and ready to go. It's not bogged down. That is the feeling we're looking for from a plus two. It's a body feeling, not a brain feeling. Okay, amazing. And the third point I wanted to make is that getting to a positive 2, especially from a negative 2, which we'll talk about next time, but it doesn't take that much food. It's a little shocking. It's certainly not what restaurants give you.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:22:11]:
Right? Restaurants like to give you a lot of food. They charge a certain amount. You feel happy again because your brain is thinking, woohoo, I have a lot of pleasure here. And so restaurants are not a good indicator of how much food you should be eating in a meal. Your body is. I was thinking about a friend of mine who, she came from Ukraine and she came here in her 20s to the United States, and she went to one of those restaurants that just has the most enormous portions. And she was with a bunch of people and she ordered food and then they brought her her dish and they put it in front of her and she looked at it and her eyes were bugging out of her head. She's like, oh, no, no, no, this is for the whole table.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:22:59]:
And of course it wasn't. It was one of the places that has just the most enormous portions. She could not believe it. It was literally four or five times more than she normally would have eaten. And what's so interesting is she remembers that, but then she's been here many, many years and her brain is now very used to the enormous portions. Now she'll go to that same place and it looks normal to get that much food. It's so crazy what culture and environment can do. And in terms of food, we're famous for that, for people who come here from other cultures and then gain weight, because we're just a little nutty when it comes to all that.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:23:44]:
Which of course makes it hard. Which is why doing it this way means that you'll teach yourself how to be able to be in a restaurant and not clean the plate. And which of course means overeating now, not all the time. It depends what you order, where you are, you know, how hungry you are, what your body's saying. But in general, the restaurant is not the best decider of how much food you should be eating. So you came by all this. If positive 2 is new to you, you came by this honestly. Our family, environment, society, everything is telling us to eat.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:24:28]:
That's a piece of capitalism in terms of food. That makes it challenging because we'd like to go to restaurants that we feel like we're getting a deal. And the body has dealt with this all these years. But the way it's dealt with it is by storing the excess fat. It has to. That's all it can do with it. So imagine if you always felt well in your body, always energized, always ready to go. It's fueled but not weighed down.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:25:01]:
You are ready to do whatever you want to do with your day. That's how it can feel. It's possible by listening for your plus two. I just think that that's a wonderful thing besides weight loss. So here's some takeaways from today from Hunger scale Spotlight on positive 2 recalibrating your eating to match your body's needs is the best way to lose weight and keep it off. The keeping it off is so you can see how if you're learning this and doing this, you're keeping off the weight you lose. It's not coming back on. You're stopping.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:25:41]:
When your body's had enough, it becomes effortless and you feel and act as if you're naturally thin. That it truly Positive two is the key. Finding your own satisfied, not full is the foundation to stopping overeating. Period. And feeling fueled and ready to go after a meal has so many benefits. Not only weight loss, but feeling physically well, increased productivity. And by productivity I just mean doing the things in your day and your life that you want to do. Not being too sleepy or weighed down.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:26:29]:
You're available for your life. That's what food's supposed to do. Fuel us so that we can live our life. That's positive too, my friends. As always, please reach out if you have any questions. I'm @StephanieFeinMD on Instagram and stephaniefeinmd.com as my website. You can always reach out to me there. I'm happy to answer any questions on Positive two on anything you'd want a podcast on.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:27:01]:
And next week we tackle Negative two, which is just hungry. Until then, I am sending you so much love.
