Day One Hundred and Forty Four!!

Hunger
What are the ways in which you can identify if you are really hungry? Well, there are ways in which to be able to identify what type of hunger you are experiencing and there are different types of hunger. Lets look at the different types of hunger.

1.  Real hunger.
Real hunger is when you are actually really physically hungry. Symptoms include a feeling of hunger pangs that come on telling you that you will 'keel over if you don't eat something'. It is really important to be able to think about when you ate last. This will tell you if the feeling is actually because you have not eaten in a fair while. If you haven't eaten in a fair while, then your system is telling you that your brain and body needs energy to keep going.

2.  Emotional hunger.
Emotional hunger is when there is a sudden response of hunger pangs based upon emotional food queues. This could be due to the feeling that you are 'empty' and as such you just have the feeling that you need to eat. You can be experiencing signs of hunger such as stomach noises, salivation, thinking about food, but the truth is that this is an emotional feeling state that has been triggered by your emotional imagination. You could have just ate, yet the feeling of emptiness, says that the answer is to eat.

3.  Environmental hunger.
Environmental hunger occurs when the feeling that you need to eat, is due to food queues which are triggered due to your environment. This is to do with the sight, smell, or conversations occurring around you that is about food. This gets the 'juices' flowing in regards to your imagination. Signs of the fact that you have been triggered by emotional queues include; stomach noises, salivation, and thinking non stop about about trigger foods. These triggered emotional queues of specific foods can be caused by external queues that say to your brain 'I need to eat because food is plentiful here' but these signs are not to be trusted.

At my workplace there is a restaurant in the entryway of the building. Every time I enter, there are these fabulous smells of carbs in the air. I feel those external queues pulling at me and I can hold them at bay by bringing into my mind the fact that these enticing smells are to do with sugar. I look at the bowl of free cut up brownies and cookie pieces and I say to myself 'not an option, just carbs'. The next thing I know, once I start to concentrate on my work, is that the restaurant is closed and those food choices are now over. Now the temptation is gone and I no longer have to deal with it. 
Whether you are experiencing physical, emotional or environmental hunger, you don't have to actually react to these feelings by eating. It is important to be able to identify which hunger it is and then decide what you would like to do about these feelings. You can chose to respond, or not. That means that you have control over these feelings and therefore can decide for yourself the appropriate response. Just because the feeling might be based in physical hunger, it doesn't mean that you have to respond. You can identify the feeling and then just role with it until it subsides. And it will. Then you can chose what and when to eat because you are in control.