Relearning Hunger Cues: What Athletes Discover in Eating Disorder Therapy in NJ About Listening to Their Bodies
Many athletes feel a disconnect at times to their internal hunger cues due to performance pressures, GI distress or diet culture. This can make it very difficult to fuel properly. Eating disorder therapy in NJ helps athletes rebuild trust with their bodies, especially when hunger has felt like the enemy or been silenced altogether. Athletes in NJ are impacted by the cultural and competitive pressures of high-performance sports and therapy can support a return to body-awareness and recovery.
Why Athletes Often Lose Touch with Hunger Cues
Training is often seen as the ultimate guide to getting faster and stronger. Years of listening to messages about rigid schedules, pushing your body through discomfort, and listening to what others tell you about your body signals can dull hunger awareness. High-performance myths around hunger, such as not needing to fuel during workouts or ignoring hunger in the morning to fast during morning workouts, leads to disordered patterns.
Athletes may end up restricting, binging, or ignoring hunger altogether in service of performance. Hunger becomes a moral battleground with internal messages like, “I was strong enough to skip lunch” that incorrectly validates how strong an athlete is.
What Hunger Actually Feels Like
Hunger can feel like so many things. Many people think of hunger as just being an empty feeling in their stomach, but it can show up as physical or emotional cues. Here are just a few ways that people may experience hunger.
Physical Cues:
Growling stomach, lightheadedness, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, empty feeling in stomach, stomach pain.
Emotional/Behavioral Cues:
Irritability, anxiety, preoccupation with food, perfectionistic thoughts ramping up, anger outburst.
Many of these cues are actually far past the point of when our body actually needs fuel. Working with an eating disorder therapist in NJ can help you learn the earlier, softer cues so that you do not get to the point of being in pain or uncomfortable. Looking at hunger from a scale of 1 through 10 can help you see how hungry you are and if you need to eat. Typically, you want to keep your hunger between 4 and 7. Not allowing yourself to get below a 4 can help you feel more in control with food. Here is an example of a hunger scale.
How Eating Disorder Therapy in NJ Helps Rebuild Hunger Awareness
As shown above, the hunger/fullness scale can help folks track patterns without judgment around their ability to listen to their body. You want to approach your body with curiosity instead of control. For example, if you notice feelings of discomfort in your stomach after eating or feeling physically ill, try asking yourself, “What is my body trying to tell me right now and what does it need?” Changing language from “should” to “What is my body telling me” helps take away the judgement.
Introducing Mindful Eating
Mindful eating exercises can be used in and outside of session to slow down and notice sensations, tastes, textures and even enjoyment while eating. An example of a mindful eating exercise may be going through each of the five senses while engaging with a good. I recommend starting with a snack and working your way up to a meal, slowly.
Nutrition education around hunger and fullness can help clarify how not all hunger is stomach-driven. For example, muscle fatigue or mental exhaustion can be ways that an athlete can identify hunger, but may be unaware if they think they are eating enough. You may be surprised to learn that needing food doesn’t always feel like stomach growling, it can look like zoning out halfway through practice!
The Role of Structure in Recovery Without Ignoring Cues
Structure is an important part of an athlete's life and can help them feel in control. An eating disorder is often talked about as a form of control. The thing is, when an eating disorder takes over, usually the core self is lost. This means the eating disorder becomes the driver of the ship. As you work towards recovery with Serendipity Counseling Services in NJ, it can be helpful to find structure where the eating disorder is not in control. This may look like having a meal plan as a way to help train the body to trust that it will get fed regularly again. This structure matters early in recovery, especially when hunger cues are unreliable.
How to Start Intuitive Eating
The next step is usually a slow transition to intuitive eating. Intuitive eating is the ability to trust your body to tell you when and how to eat, based on what choices feel best for you. This includes hunger, fullness, and eating to satisfaction. When cues become clearer and trust increases, intuitive eating becomes easier. For athletes specifically, listening to your body becomes extra tricky because you may need to eat before you are hungry in order to fuel properly for your sport. Balancing athletic schedules and listening to your body can bring up fears around hunger not “fitting” into the workout schedule, but finding out mid workout that your energy is depleted is not a fun way to realize you need to fuel beforehand. Working with an eating disorder team can help you find confidence to practice this tricky balance.
What Athletes Begin to Discover
The biggest thing that athletes focus on is performance and you want anything that will lead to better or improved performance. Well good news, honoring your hunger does give you better performance. You will have less injuries, stronger workouts and improved focus! Hunger is not a weakness. It’s data, not a character flaw. Oftentimes emotional hunger is seen as a weakness. Whether it is, wanting to eat as a coping skill or craving a certain food, emotional hunger plays an important role. Sometimes food is about comfort, and therapy helps you sort that out without shame. In eating disorder therapy in NJ, you will reconnect with satiety and learn that it doesn’t equal failure if you are full. In fact, it is an important part of being a healthy, fueled, and happy athlete!
How to Start Reconnecting with Your Body
Relearning hunger cues is both a physical and emotional process. Eating disorder therapy and seeing a registered dietitian helps athletes do both. In NJ, therapists familiar with sports culture and eating disorders are there to support athletes in this deep reconnection with your body. Consider working with an eating disorder therapist if you are ready to stop fighting your body and start fueling it from a place of trust.
Find Support with Reconnecting to Your Body Through Eating Disorder Therapy in NJ
Reconnecting with your hunger and fullness cues does not need to be done alone. At Serendipity Counseling Services, we specialize in helping guide athletes to building trust with their body and bring the enjoyment back to food.
Here is how to get started working with an eating disorder therapist in NJ:
Schedule a free consultation to see if we are a good fit!
Book your first eating disorder therapy session where we can start exploring your relationship to hunger and fullness.
Start trusting your body again and learning to love food!
Other Services
Beyond eating disorder therapy in NJ, Serendipity Counseling Services brings knowledge and experience to podcasts and public speaking events in order to spread the word and get people talking about the difficulties of eating disorders. I am here to help you an an individual or your team!
Meet the Author: An Intuitive Eating Disorder Therapist in Cherry Hill, NJ
Kate Ringwood is an eating disorder therapist that specializes in working with athletes. She helps athletes get back in touch with their body and mind in ways that connect them with their hunger and satiety. Her balance in evidence-based therapies such as, CBT, RODBT, and ACT, mixed with lived experience as an athlete going through recovery, Kate brings a loving and compassionate approach to the therapy room.
