Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:00]:
Hello, fabulous Dr. Stephanie fine here with.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:03]:
Weight Loss for Fertility and welcome to.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:07]:
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. Feel free to ask me any questions that arise.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:11]:
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 5: +3
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:47]:
Hello, fabulous. I want to talk about full and so we're having a hunger scale spotlight today on weight loss for fertility podcast. We had one of these on episode 21. The spotlight was for negative one, which is just starting to get hungry. But today's spotlight is positive three. So episode number two is all about the hunger scale. So definitely give that one a listen if you Hunger scale is new to you, but I will go over it here. Of course, the hunger scale that I like to use is from negative five, which is absolutely empty, like fainting, exhausted, very empty, all the way to positive five, which is very full.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:33]:
Like Thanksgiving undoing your pants, so uncomfortable. So that's the whole scale and we want to eat at negative two, which is just hungry. And then we want to stop at positive two, which is satisfied, not full. Positive three is full. So that's what we're going to talk about today. I love the hunger scale. If you couldn't tell, I think it's the most useful tool for weight loss, for easy weight loss, for intuitive weight loss, for. For weight loss that helps us learn and be able to have the weight we want in any situation because it's a tool we take with Us all over the place.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:20]:
It's in us. It is us. It is our body's needs, talking to us, communicating with us. And I absolutely think that we get completely out of whack with it. Most people don't know when they're hungry, when they're full. They may know that, but they don't listen to it. They don't honor it. And honoring it is such an important thing to do in terms of fueling your body for what it needs and not giving it more than it needs.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:51]:
And when we don't give our body more than it needs, it naturally goes to the weight it's meant to be at, a comfortable weight. The hunger scale is so useful. There's so many things I could tell you about the hunger scale, which is why we have these spotlights. So today I'm going to try to focus on the positive 3 version of it. But the issue of the hunger scale is that it's very personal, so I can't tell you exactly how it will feel in your body. I have my clients all over the place. Some people feel tired when they're hungry. Some people feel tummy growling.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:29]:
Some people just have a sense. It's even hard to describe. Some people get unfocused, Some people get irritable. There's so many people are completely different. Whenever I think about that, I just think about the body and how amazing it is that all these connections, all these nerves, all these. Our bodies are all different. And so, of course, we have different signals for ourselves. So it's up to us to figure it out.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:04:56]:
And once we know about the scale, then we can start to assign the numbers to the way we feel. And certainly with hormonal shifts and changes, if we're on medication, if we're not, if we're sick, if we're not, the hunger signals are going to be different. And the more we learn about ourselves, the more we'll be able to handle all those different situations. Some of the places that people run into trouble with the hunger scale are getting over hungry. It's when they ignore those cues. And that is what I think happens most with us, is that we may have communication from our body, but we don't listen to it. And often that will happen in a workday where we just are ignoring the fact that we're hungry. And then we get over hungry.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:45]:
So that's on the hunger side. But the deciphering between full and satisfied satisfied is plus 2 and full is plus 3. Then we have very full as well, plus 4 and variable as plus 5. That is a place that we can end up spending a lot of time because the difference between overeating and not is the difference between the plus three and plus two. That's where the weight loss is. So let's talk a little bit more about this. The definition of full. So I looked up the definition of full.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:19]:
I think we know it and of course, like I just said, you have to learn it for your body. But I thought it was useful to look at this. It's containing all that can be held filled to utmost capacity and then here unable to consume more food or drink. Yes, that's the point. And those are important definitions, right? So when we say full, it's these definitions are pointing to that it's too much. It's the most. It's that can be handled in the stomach. We don't want to get there.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:54]:
We're often taught that's where we should go. Or we were told to clean our plates and we associated finishing with being overfull. So it makes sense why we would think that. But that's not where we want to go. We do want to be able to define it. We want to know what full feels like and then we want to stop eating before that. So full is too much for our bodies. The definition of satisfied in the dictionary was content or pleased, which of course is a little different.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:31]:
That's a little more in the mental realm. And we're going to talk about the difference here between being physically full and being mentally full. So I then looked up the definition of enough. Because sometimes when I talk about enough or no longer hungry. So enough sounded more like what I wanted to talk about. Enough definition is adequate for the want or need. Sufficient for the purpose. Yes.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:03]:
The purpose of when we're hungry is to fuel our bodies. That's the purpose. Purpose isn't finishing our plate. The purpose isn't having the delicious taste in our mouth over and over and over in one sitting. The purpose isn't to make us happy when we're sad. The purpose of hunger is body signaling that we need fuel. So we want to go to enough. We want to eat to enough.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:34]:
This is radical for some of us. The concept is not intuitive for many of us because we've always eaten to full or we've always eaten to some other external endpoint. The plate, the taste, the desire, those are not the limits. Those are not the reasons to stop or those aren't the reasons to eat. Right, they are. We use them that way. But the real reason to eat is to Fuel our bodies. It doesn't have to be gruel or something that we dread.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:11]:
It can definitely be pleasurable. But we don't eat to have pleasure. We eat to fuel our bodies and it's pleasurable. That difference is really important, especially when we're talking about enough here. So a lot of us have to examine our relationship to enough. Because a lot of us, especially in America, the culture is more, more, more. If you could have more, you always want more. Have more, take more, do more.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:45]:
More is just a very big part of our culture, but it does not have to be. When it serves us, it's great. I want to be more kind, more understanding, more curious. Those all can work. Although I'll tell you that pushing anything to its limit of more can turn out really bad. Always more curiosity can turn intrusive, more compassion can be like people pleasing things can be contorted more and more really isn't always better. You'll have to figure that out for yourself. But definitely with food, we've gone off the rails on this one.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:25]:
More is not better. We have to define for ourselves or discover for ourselves what enough is physically and mentally. So concretely, when we're hungry at negative two, we want to eat to positive two. Satisfied, meaning we've had enough. We are no longer hungry, but we're not full. Remember, plus three is full. Discovering that difference between plus two and plus three is weight loss, and three is physically uncomfortable. Full is physically uncomfortable.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:01]:
You can physically feel that your stomach is stretched. Now, maybe not to its maximum, that's plus five, but it is stretched to uncomfortable. And that's how we know we're full. It's actually physically sometimes a little easier to notice full, right? Because we're like, oh, pain. Got it. That's a quirk of human beings, is that we sometimes have to be in some sort of pain to stop and notice. And that's just the way our brains work a lot of the times. So we're going to go with that.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:36]:
We're going to use that to help us. So when there's some discomfort of having too much food, we know we're at positive three. And what we'll do is we work backwards to positive two. If we don't know what positive two is for us, then we start at positive three and we work backwards. So we're like, okay, I had about this much food and that got me to three. So next time I'm going to take less on my plate or I'm going to stop eating sooner or I'm Going to split this or I'm going to order differently. You try something until the next time you try it and you're like, oh, I can tell I'm no longer hungry from the looks of it. I've had enough food in terms of my experience with myself and how I feel, and I'm not full yet.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:12:23]:
Bingo. You got it. That's a plus two. And then what happens is you start to notice what that feels like physically. So you knew what positive three was. That was full, it was a little uncomfortable, and then you backed off so that you didn't feel that, but you also were not hungry anymore. That's a way to discover plus two satisfied. And that three can really help us with that.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:12:54]:
Once we are able to get comfortable with the physical part of it. So positive three, remember, is uncomfortable. So we're looking for positive two, which is not physically uncomfortable, then we can start to play with the mental part of it, the mental piece of enough. Sometimes that can be harder than the physical piece because there's still food on the plate, it still tastes good. That part is mental because now we've understood that physically we are no longer hungry and we don't want to get to positive three because we know that's full. So physically we know where we are. But mentally, that can be a challenge because we just want to keep eating. And that is the mental game that is so important to get in touch with.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:49]:
That's what I do with my clients, and I talk here about that. So listen to the podcast for more. But that mental relationship with enough is really important. And a lot of that comes from. Sometimes we'll have a feeling of we're not going to get it again. We better eat it all right now. Something around that, mentally, physically, we know we're satisfied. We don't need more food, but our brain wants it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:22]:
That is different work. And we can do that work. Once we've determined the physical plus two versus plus three. So plus three is our teacher. It teaches us physically where to stop and then shows us what the issue is about how we were eating more food than we needed, then it becomes less a mystery. And not only that, less. Less of a mystery. But then we actually have the reasons it's important to know.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:53]:
I just want to keep eating this food. Okay, good. We have a solution for that. Or I just want to finish the plate. Okay, that's slightly different information and solution. Amazing. There's also a whole idea of what kind of foods to eat and what makes us satisfied and full. And if we Notice eating a whole bunch of sugar versus eating protein.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:18]:
It feels completely different in our body. So Plus 3 can teach us so much. We'll know when we feel better eating certain foods versus other foods. It's just. It's so useful. The other thing I love about backing into plus two from plus three, this idea that we have to experiment, that we can't know it going forward if we haven't known it before. And something we're learning, we have to learn by first doing it. I'm putting air quotes wrong.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:56]:
I love this lesson because we do need to learn how to experiment and not beat ourselves up. We do need to learn how to try things and them not go the way we want. And the next time we. We'll do it differently because next time's coming with food. We always have meals to practice with, but it's so hard for so many of us to do it wrong. Again, air quotes. That we beat ourselves up and sometimes we don't want to try. We literally give up because it feels so uncomfortable to have eaten too much, but we're doing that anyway.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:26]:
So now if we do it with purpose, now we eat to plus three. I'm like, oh, more information for next time. Yes. Because if we keep getting more information and we keep trying and we keep tweaking, we will get there and we will learn so much in the process. And all we need to do is learn. Because the way we're doing it now, if we're overweight and not losing weight, if we want to lose weight and we're not losing weight, then we're not doing the things that are needed to be done. So we have to learn and try something different. And this is such a beautiful way to do that and to learn.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:17:06]:
Really, the main way to learn is to try. And if it doesn't work out, we change and pivot and try again. And that's naturally built into the whole 32 thing, learning how to do that. There are just so many reasons why I love the hunger scale. And when we have the physical understanding right. So we've identified our plus three, we've learned and tried and experimented, and now we know what our plus two feels like. Amazing. It's huge.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:17:41]:
But once we've gotten there and we still have some discomfort, mentally, not physically, then remember, it's showing us what the issues are. Beautiful. Because now we know we didn't know before, and now we have concrete evidence. We know when our body's satisfied now because we've figured that out. And so what else is holding me back what else makes it challenging. And then we work on that. So because of the hunger scale, because we're using our physical sensations to inform us about our body's needs, we can then work on the mental stuff. Thank you, body.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:23]:
It's amazing. Thank you, hunger scale. When we can do that, when we can learn our physical cues, learn how to get to positive 2, and then notice all the mental thoughts that are in the way, you will get a handle on permanent weight loss. Permanent. Because as you learn this, you will forever know it. And then you will be able to easily eat in a way that lets you have the body you feel comfortable with. It's inevitable. When you learn this stuff and you can.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:59]:
You absolutely can learn it. I can help you. So listen to these podcasts. We're at six months. I'm so excited. Six months of podcasts. You can go back and binge them all. But also, I can help you if you want to work with me.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:19:15]:
So lose weight with me. Come to my website, click the lose weight with me button, and I would love to connect with you there. So hunger scale positive three is our teacher to help us get to positive two, and we'll be on our way to permanent weight loss. I'm sending you so much love. Until next week.
