How to Get Back in Touch With Your Body Signals — Registered Dietitian Columbia SC

Intuitive eating is an approach to eating that’s based on listening to your body signals. But what if you don’t feel hunger, fullness and other body cues? This post shares three exercises to build interoceptive awareness, or a connection to your body cues.

Intuitive eating is an approach that teaches you to listen to your body signals, like hunger, fullness, and how food makes you feel, to help guide eating. Because our body is a complex system designed to keep you alive, we can trust that by listening to our body signals, it will guide us towards feeding our body in an appropriate way.

But what if you’re not in touch with your body signals? The idea of eating according to them probably feels pretty overwhelming and confusing! If that’s you, please know you’re not alone. In my experience, most of my clients with a history of chronic dieting or an eating disorder feel pretty disconnected from their body. Feeling disconnected from body signals is also common among those with a history of trauma, anxiety/depression, gastrointestinal conditions, or sensory processing disorder, and people who are autistic.

The good news is that you can get back in touch with your body signals, or at the very least, build a stronger connection with them. In this post, I’ll explain interoceptive awareness, the sensory awareness of your body signals, and share a few tools for strengthening it. By no means am I an expert, and if this is something you struggle with, I highly encourage working with a therapist who is trained in somatic work if that’s accessible to you. But I do hope this post is a helpful starting guide, and gives you some simple resources for fostering a stronger connection with your body signals.

What is Interoceptive Awareness?

Interoceptive awareness, or interoception, is the sense of what’s going on inside your body. Consider that compared to exteroceptive awareness (what’s going on outside your body - think sight and sound), and proprioception, which is where your body is in space (i.e. it’s positioning).

Hunger and fullness is the aspect of interoceptive awareness you hear most about in intuitive eating, but interoception also encompasses things like your heart rate, muscle tension, pain, thirst, body temperature, and the somatic experience of emotions, like anxiety, anger or joy.

A strong interoceptive awareness, or connection to your body signals is helpful, not just for understanding what is happening in your body, but also for knowing how to take action and meet your needs. For example, if you notice your mouth is dry, you could drink a glass of water. Or, if you noticed your feet were cold, you might put on some socks. And of course, if you felt your stomach was empty and grumbling, you would eat something. Think of your body’s signals as its way of communicating needs!

How to get back in touch with body signals

One way you can lose touch with your body’s signals is when you continuously push your body to where it’s not getting its needs met, for example not getting adequate sleep, going too long without eating or undereating, or when you’re chronically stressed. Basically, if you’re not responding to your body’s signals, eventually, you'll lose touch with them. To get back in touch with your body’s signals, you first need to have your basic needs met with relative safety, adequate sleep, food and water.

Since being a dietitian and all, hunger and fullness is the body signal I work with the most, I want to share an analogy I like to use with my clients. Think of getting back in touch with hunger and fullness as rebuilding a trusting relationship with a friend that you’ve fallen out of touch with. As you can imagine, if you had a friend who kept calling you, and you never picked up the phone, they’d eventually stop calling. That’s basically what happens when you don’t honor your hunger! To get back in touch with your cues, you have to be the one to pick up the phone. In this analogy, that means regularly feeding your body with adequate (and hopefully pleasurable!) meals and snacks. You cannot get back in touch with hunger and fullness cues if you are not eating enough food.

I share this analogy because so often, clients feel frustrated when they don’t feel their hunger and fullness cues. They feel like they can’t trust their body. But really, their body can’t trust them because they’re still engaging in restrictive behaviors, like not eating enough or skipping meals. The same thing happens when one is engaging in overexercise or is under high levels of stress.

(I do want to note though, if you struggle with feeling/understanding body signals due to trauma, sensory processing disorder, GI conditions, etc, this analogy may be a bit too simplified. Obviously, eating enough is still super important, as you are a human being who obtains energy from food, not photosynthesis, but just want to note the complexity there!)

How to Get Back in Touch With Your Body Signals for Intuitive Eating

Once your basic needs are met, it will create a safe environment and a level of body truth to where you can get back in touch with your body signals. Here’s a few exercises that may be helpful:

Body Scan

One of my favorite exercises to foster interoceptive awareness is a body scan. To do a body scan, either lay down or sit in a comfortable position, and take a few deep breaths. Imagine your body is in a scanner, almost like a CT machine or the full body scanner at airports. Imagine it starting at your feet, and moving its way up your body, scanning and giving a readout of what your body feels like. I just did a quick body scan, and here’s some of the things I noticed:

The toes on my right foot are fuzzy and feel like they were falling asleep, probably because I was sitting on my foot before doing the scan.
My calves feel tight
My legs feel warm and cozy in my PJ pants
My stomach feels satisfied and warm inside from the hot chocolate I was just sipping
My chest feels slightly tight, residual anxiety from a day that was feeling kind of stressful
My eyes feel dry, like my contact lens are glued to my eyeball!

Feel free to do body scans whenever you have a free moment. It just takes a minute or two, and it’s a helpful way to check in with your needs!

Feel Your Pulse

Feel your pulse by putting two fingers over the radial artery at your wrist. Notice the pulsing feeling against your fingers, and the flow of your blood pumping. Remove your fingers, and see if you can feel your pulse in different areas of your body. You can probably notice your heart beating in your chest, but can you feel your pulse in your legs? What about in your fingers or stomach or toes? It’s OK if you don’t! Keep practicing!

Filling Up at a Meal

One exercise I like to have clients do when they are getting back in touch with hunger and fullness is to notice the change in how they feel as they eat a meal. You can use the hunger and fullness scale, a scale of 1-10 that I go in depth with in this post, or just notice the physical sensations without putting a number to it.

First, before eating a meal, check in with how your body feels. Pay special attention to your stomach, but also do a quick body scan to check in with other parts of your body. As you eat your meal, check in with each quarter, as you eat 25%, 50%, 75% and eventually 100% of your plate. What did you feel like in the beginning? How did that compare to how you felt at the end? What was it like when you stopped halfway compared to before the meal and 25%? Resist the urge to label any way you are feeling as wrong. Think of it as an experiment - a chance to simply get curious about your body’s signals.

Feel free to experiment with these exercises and see what connects with you! Do remember that to get back in touch with your body signals, you need to regularly check in with your body in a way that feels comfortable and safe for you, and get curious about what it feels like. Take a second in whatever task you’re doing, whether it’s walking the dog, taking a shower, going to the bathroom, exercising, reading in bed, and get curious about what your body feels like!

If you enjoyed this post on getting back in touch with your body signals, follow my intuitive eating Pinterest board for more inspiration and support.

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