What Is the Hunger Scale In Intuitive Eating (+ examples)
With a few exceptions, nearly all of us are born Intuitive Eaters. As babies, we cry when we’re hungry; we turn away from food and stop eating when we’re full; and as we begin eating solid foods, we naturally prefer certain foods and flavors. In essence, we self-regulate our eating, following our bodies’ internal cues.
As we get older, though, a lot of external guidance about food and eating begins to creep in. We learn that some foods are considered “good” or “healthy,” while others are presented as “bad” or “junk.” We may be taught to clean our plates or encouraged to eat when we’re not hungry. We may learn to use food to cope with certain emotions.
Fast forward a bit more, and we begin absorbing diet culture messaging that demonizes weight gain and certain types of food, promotes an impossibly thin ideal, and very much connects calories with weight gain. Instead of being a source of pleasure, food may become a source of stress, guilt, or frustration.
Dieting draws your focus away from your body’s cues
If we end up dieting—as so many people do—we typically become even further disconnected from those innate eating signals. Instead of listening to hunger and fullness cues, we can get stuck in our heads, counting calories (or points or macros), weighing or portioning our food choices, and following external guidelines about which foods to eat or avoid. The more diets we try, the more disconnected we’re likely to become from that internal ability to self-regulate our eating.
On top of that, most diets recommend a caloric intake that’s more in line with the needs of a 4- to 9-year-old child and far too low for most adults. This leaves well-meaning dieters trying to ignore or hack their hunger rather than listen to and respond to it. And unfortunately, when we get overly hungry (as you’ll learn in just a moment), it’s much harder to respect our fullness cues too!
The bottom line is that it’s very common to lose touch with your hunger and fullness cues, and there are a variety of reasons why this happens. Luckily, you can learn to reconnect with and eventually trust these cues once more—and the Intuitive Eating hunger scale can help!
So, what is the hunger scale?
The hunger scale is an Intuitive Eating tool that can help you honor your body's eating needs and better understand when and how much to eat.
This is one of my favorite tools to teach both my private and group coaching clients because when you use the hunger scale correctly, you learn how to:
Connect with your innate eating cues so you can get away from counting, tracking, or measuring your food choices (or feeling as though you should be!)
Identify what varying levels of hunger and fullness feel like in YOUR body so you can land on a more comfortable amount of food
Navigate the messy middle of Intuitive Eating, where you may feel untethered without dieting “rules” but haven’t yet reestablished full trust with your body’s eating signals
Here’s how to use the Intuitive Eating hunger scale
Ok… so how can you use this awesome tool?
First, as the name implies, it’s a scale meant to help you identify what varying levels of hunger and fullness feel like in your body. It also helps you practice finding your sweet spot for both eating and ending a meal. The scale goes from 1 to 10 as you see below.
Hunger and fullness feel a bit differently for everyone. Some common signs of hunger include:
Increasing thoughts about food (for example, you start wondering what you’re going to have for lunch or what sounds good for dinner)
Heightened food awareness (noticing what other people are eating or tuning more deeply into food aromas)
A hollow feeling in the belly
A gnawing feeling in the throat
Lowered energy or mental focus
A rumbling stomach
Getting “hangry” (ie, becoming irritable)
Stomach pains
Feeling faint, weak, or dizzy, getting a headache
Hunger exists on a spectrum, so you can think of some of these as pleasant signs and others as unpleasant signs of hunger. In general, we want to avoid getting to unpleasant levels of hunger. Not only does it not feel good or optimally support our body’s nourishment needs, but hunger and fullness cues go together.
When you get overly hungry (we call this primal hunger in Intuitive Eating), you’re far more likely to grab the first thing you see and eat it very quickly because your body has an urgent need for energy.. Since it takes time for the stretch receptors in your stomach to signal to your brain that you’re filling up, you’re also FAR more likely to miss your fullness cues and end up overeating.
One key step in finding your comfortable fullness point, then, is to make sure you’re not missing your hunger cues or waiting until you experience urgent hunger. Of course, this is the exact opposite of dieting approaches, which encourage people to delay, hack, or distract themselves from eating for as long as possible.
Generally, on the hunger-fullness scale, a level of 3 to 4 is considered “pleasant” hunger and a good time to consider grabbing something to eat, while a 1 or a 2 corresponds to “unpleasant” hunger and likely means you’ve waited too long to eat mindfully and intentionally. As you use the tool, see if you can begin to associate the sensations you’re feeling in your body with varying levels on the scale.
You can also use the Intuitive Eating hunger scale to find your comfortable fullness point
Just like with hunger, there are many different signs of fullness, and they differ from person to person. Some common fullness cues are:
A sensation of the belly filling up or slight pressure in the stomach
A fullness or tightness in the throat
Greater mental calm or clarity
Stabilizing moods
Cravings subsided and/or you feel mentally satisfied
Food may not taste as good as it did at the start of your meal
Increased energy
Sleepiness
Discomfort, tightness, pressure, or pain in the stomach
Uncomfortable bloating
Feeling sick or nauseous
Again, some feel pleasant, and others do not. Naturally, you likely want to avoid uncomfortable fullness as it doesn’t feel good and probably means you’ve eaten more than your body needed. If you were to think of your belly as a gas tank, if you fill it all the way to “full,” that likely corresponds with unpleasant fullness on the Intuitive Eating hunger scale. Thus, we want to aim to stop at about a 7 or 8 on the fullness end of the spectrum.
Just as with hunger, see if you can begin to identify what varying levels of fullness feel like in your body and with corresponding gradations along the hunger-fullness scale.
As you practice using this tool, your goal is to check in before, during, and after your meal to see where you fall on the scale.
Try asking yourself a few questions:
Was this pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral hunger and fullness?
Was this an eating experience I’d wish to repeat? Why or why not?
What, if anything, would I want to do differently next time?
Three notes of caution before you begin using the Intuitive Eating hunger scale
First, please know that it takes patience and practice to tune in and reconnect with your body’s hunger and fullness cues. I always caution my coaching clients that there is NO FAILURE when it comes to respecting your hunger and fullness signals (or frankly, with eating in general). There’s only FEEDBACK.
Through trial and error and lots and lots of practice, you can learn what does and doesn’t work well for you when it comes to honoring your hunger and finding your comfortable “last bite” threshold.
Second, and most important, please know that Intuitive Eating is NOT the hunger-fullness diet. There will absolutely be times when you get overly hungry, miss a fullness cue, or eat when you’re not physically hungry. This is all part of “normal” eating and the nuance of Intuitive Eating. Do not beat yourself up when these things happen! Rather, see what you can learn about yourself, your body, your relationship with food, or your eating behaviors.
Lastly, please know that honoring your hunger and feeling your fullness are just two out of the 10 principles of Intuitive Eating—and they work synergistically. If you’re struggling to honor your hunger and fullness cues, you may find it really helpful to get support learning how to apply and incorporate all 10 principles of Intuitive eating into your life so you can break up with dieting and diet culture and make peace with food and your body once and for all.