Health, Nutrition
Better Eating Habits: Reducing Snacking Through Interoception
Get Lean By Mastering Your Hunger
In a previous article “Learn Interoception,” I provided general background on what interoception is, how to learn interoception, and how to use it to modify your reactions.
Learning to use interoceptive awareness has been a powerful tool for me in reducing my snacking habit and as a result, decreasing my waistline. I have long struggled with continuously snacking most of the day. The most difficult time for me is the time between lunch and dinner. In the past, no matter how much I committed to NO SNACKING between 1pm and 5pm, I would consistently find myself breaking my promise to myself and eating… and then going back for one more… and one more. It was adding hundreds of calories a day to my diet and keeping me above a healthy weight.
Through practicing techniques like mindful eating and hunger awareness, over time I increased my understanding and awareness of my internal state. My interoceptive awareness of what hunger felt like and didn’t feel like improved substantially. At first, I was uncertain what hunger felt like — I snacked all the time and was never really hungry! I thought I was a lost cause. But with consistent practice, I’ve come to master what hunger feels like in…
