Which Bucket Are You Filling – The Emotional Hunger or the Biological Hunger One?

Throughout my own personal adventure of mindful and intuitive eating, I became aware of the different types of hunger. The two most popular types of hunger are emotional and biological hunger.

 

What’s the Difference Between Emotional Hunger and Biological Hunger?

Glad you asked! Following is a graphic showing eight differences between emotional hunger and biological hunger.

How I Got Confused…

As I was untangling my own challenges with eating, I started to realise that I was confusing these two types of hunger and how I was filling that hunger. I was confusing biological hunger with emotional hunger and emotional hunger with biological hunger (and also other types of hunger).

Filling My Buckets…

What I realised over time, is that I needed to firstly recognise the internal signals my body was giving me (and yes that took lots of practise), then start to identify the difference between biological and emotional hunger and then fill the correct bucket. I needed to fill biological hunger with food and my emotional hunger with other things that filled my emotional hunger bucket.

“If you want to eat when you’re not hungry, you’re hungry for something else.” ~ Geneen Roth

Over to You…

I hope this has given you insight in to the biological and emotional hunger buckets. This practise took me quite a long time to learn and today (after beginning again many times), I make more conscious choices than I have previously.

Are there any other comments you  would add? If so, feel free to share them below in the comments! Remember – there are other types of hunger (i.e. spiritual hunger), however emotional and biological hunger are the most popular.

If you would like more information on how to change your relationship with food and your body, so you can truly nourish your health and wellbeing, please have a look at our nutritional coaching programs or contact us 🙂 Also – you are invited to download the free 10-minute mindful eating exercise here or join our untangling emotional literacy course here.

 

Reference:

Virtue D. (1995). Constant Craving: What Your Food Cravings Mean and How to Overcome Them. New York, USA: Hay House.

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