Food as a Consent Practice
The piece below is excerpted from my book WANT: 8 Steps to Recovering Desire, Passion, and Pleasure After Sexual Assault
Hunger and Fullness as Consent Signals
Hunger is a form of physical desire. It is something that we feel in our bodies and, when we’re healthy, it’s unambiguous. We can feel it right there in our stomachs. Fullness is a physically felt aversion, an internally felt “no” or “stop” signal. Feeling and following our hunger and fullness signals is a powerful way to practice consent within our own bodies, to teach our nervous systems that our desires and our limits matter. If you’ve been assaulted, though, these signals can get a little scrambled. For me there is only a subtle difference between nausea and hunger; I feel them in exactly the same place. Sensations in the stomach might be hunger or, if there’s stress, it could be nervous butterflies caused by the blood and energy leaving the digestive system in preparation for fight or flight. In a way, hunger is a kind of anxiety. It’s a low level signal that we need to put food in our bodies or we’ll die. Hunger has a relationship with survival. When we associate stomach sensations with fear, we get mixed up about hunger. My strategy is to avoid food in order to control the nausea/anxiety. Others eat and eat to keep the nauseous/anxious demons at bay. Both strategies are unconscious attempts to avoid discomfort at a physical and existential level. Food restriction and binge eating are opposite sides of the same coin.
For someone with anorexic tendencies, the work is to identify and feed genuine hunger. For someone with binging tendencies, the work is to identify and honor fullness signals. Food restricters need to work on their “yes.” Bingers need to work on their “no.” Most of us need a little of both. Honoring these internal signals is vitally important because sexual violation generally teaches us that our “yes” and “no” don’t matter. Regardless of what we think about it consciously, our nervous systems don’t forget. They don’t believe our brains when we try to tell them we’re safe and that it matters what we want and don’t want. Honoring hunger and fullness signals is the most visceral way—literally, at the level of our viscera— to teach our nervous systems that our “yes” and “no” do matter. Eating can be a way to practice consent with ourselves.
Image by Andi McLeish
Hunger, our internal “yes” to food, is controlled by the hormone ghrelin. Ghrelin gives you that empty feeling in your stomach, indicating that you need to fuel up. This hormone also prepares your body for digestion, so if you eat when you’re hungry, the food tends to be better absorbed than if you eat when you’re not. Leptin, the fullness hormone, lets us know that we’ve had enough and it’s time to stop eating. It slows down the digestive processes, so any food we eat when we’re already full won’t be as easily digested. Sounds easy enough, right? Eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full. No problemo—at least for those of us that have a clean, easy, anxiety-free relationship with food. Anyone here have that? Hello? Anyone?
In an ideal world, we’d all have access to plenty of healthy food and eat according to our internal signals. We’d all probably be at a healthy weight for our bodies (barring other medical issues), though our sizes would undoubtedly be quite varied—healthy weight can mean a lot of different things, and it’s natural for there to be fluctuations at different times in our lives. In that same ideal world, we wouldn’t push a particular body shape onto everyone and make them feel bad for deviating from that one shape. We’d eat just enough of our plentiful healthy food and dance around with glee in the diversity of our nourished, energetic, happy bodies.
Of course, that’s not the world we live in. There are a lot of reasons our hunger and fullness signals can get mixed up. Overweight people tend to have a bit more leptin, the fullness hormone, in their systems as a natural way to try to rebalance. But leptin can be inhibited by lack of exercise or—you guessed it—stress. Underweight people tend to have more ghrelin in their systems, the hunger hormone, signaling that they need more calories. The body believes there is a shortage (which there might be) so it insists that we stay on the hunt until we find food. Unless, of course, we override the hunger signal with cigarettes, booze, anxiety, or sheer denial.
Unfortunately for dieters, losing weight too quickly tends to instigate the hunger hormone because the body likes the status quo. Certain types of diets can backfire because they cause an overload of hunger signals, which exacerbates stress and the panic to find food, overriding fullness signals. Starving is stressful. I have a friend who was going through some extreme dieting practices for a while for health reasons, including short-term fasting where she could only eat within a short window during the day. “My body doesn’t trust me anymore,” she told me. “It doesn’t believe I’ll feed it enough so it never tells me to stop eating.” She’d end up binging on forbidden grapes, one of the few “treats” her medical diet allowed, at 8pm, long after her eating window had closed. The fullness signal would never come no matter how many grapes she put in her mouth, because when you’re starving and the only thing on the menu is grapes, then it will be as many grapes as your desperate maw can hold. Our bodies do not like to be denied when we are hungry. Resisting hunger, especially when we do actually have access to nutritious food, means resisting one of our basest survival instincts. It’s not just that diets don’t work, it’s that when they insist on keeping us hungry, they become a mechanism of cruelty against our own instincts. Willpower doesn’t stand a chance against the drive to survive.
Plenty of us have a long history of ignoring our hunger and fullness signals. When we ignore them long enough, they start ignoring us back—and fair enough. It’s a bad sign when we stop feeling hungry altogether. It means we’ve taught our bodies that there’s no point talking to us. It’s pretty hard to feel safe when our own bodies can’t trust us to feed them. The best and worst thing about our relationship with our own body, of course, is that we can never leave it, no matter how hard we try. This is one of those relationships we’re going to have to work on, for better or for worse. The good news is that when we start implementing consistent, loving, consensual, nonjudgmental practices for encouraging the body to trust us and talk to us again, these signals can come back.
A Practice for Reconnecting the Signals
There are plenty of ways to work on your relationship with yourself and your hunger/fullness cues. I have three food rules (plus a secret fourth) that have helped me on this journey. They are:
Sit down. If you are eating, you are sitting.
Chew. Chew enough to taste the food you are eating, to notice what it feels like as you are eating.
Relax your belly. This might mean sitting back in your chair between bites.
Forgive yourself when you cannot follow these rules. Life happens, and it’s not always possible to do this. That’s okay—just do it when you can.
Essentially, these rules all just mean slow down. Slow down and enjoy the food you’re eating. If you try it, let me know how it goes!