How Full Do You Feel?
When prioritizing your metabolic health, it becomes important to understand and heed your body's signals and cues, especially when it comes to satiety. While it can be beneficial to schedule your meals strategically, it's equally important to refine your ability to recognize when you're genuinely satisfied. Achieving that perfect equilibrium of fullness requires honing your skills in listening to your body's internal cues.
What is satiety?
It’s the feeling or state of being sated, or full. You feel satisfied and ready to stop eating, but not bursting at the seams. For many, eating is simply a function of the time of day rather than a response to feelings of hunger. And in turn, a common practice is eating until the plate is empty rather than in response to feelings of fullness.
- Rating your hunger using a scale before eating can help you become more in tune with your body as you pause to ask yourself, “Am I really hungry?”.
- An ideal time to reach for a meal or a snack is when you reach level 3 on the scale—you’re hungry but not yet ravenous or “hangry”, which could lead to overeating.
- An ideal time to stop eating is when you reach level 7 on the scale—you’re pleasantly full, but not bursting at the seams.
As you experiment with using this scale as a tool, you may notice that some foods lead to comfortable levels of satiety more easily than others. Meals or snacks that contain both protein and fat such as salmon or whole nuts are more likely to give you that level 7 satisfaction for a longer period, whereas carbohydrate-heavy foods such as soda and doughnuts often lead to dips soon after they’re eaten.
The key is checking in with yourself.
You might keep your own Hunger-Fullness Scale near your desk or on the refrigerator so that you can take a moment to tune into the hunger or fullness sensations in your body. See if you can attach the level of satiety you feel with a specific number on the scale to help guide you about when to eat, and also how much.