How 'Hunger Meter' Can Be Your One Stop Solution to Stress Eating

Have you seen a bowl full of Doritos disappear in a flash of a few minutes on some nights? Have you ever noticed how that one bucket of ice cream sounds tempting to be eaten as a whole when you are all alone? Could it be that you do not like sharing the food? 

You could be the next Joey Tribbiani! Or could you be stress eating?

Looking at the current scenario, in these unprecedented times, where we want to be close to our near and dear ones, but at the same time, we can not be for their good, a new kind of situation has come up. 

A world full of social media connections is disconnected, nonetheless, and in these times, people have been reportedly under more stress. So, give yourself a break as you see your waistline rise, and lets work through this together.

What is Hunger Meter?

There is a hunger scale ranging from 1 to 10, where 1 means "Starving" and 10 means "you can rethink this decision". It is as follows:

1 = Starving, greedy, discombobulated, grumpy, can not think unmistakably, low glucose

2 = Extremely ravenous, thundering stomach

3 = Sensible yearning; a glad spot where you need to show up at supper time;
quiet and careful about eating

4 = You could eat; however, you are not unreasonably ravenous; snacky

5 = You have presumably quite recently eaten, and are not eager

6 = The fantastic halting spot; your stomach feels cheerful and settled, its not excessively stuffed

7 = Your taste buds lose intrigue much past this point

8 = You are on the way toward full and feel moored by your food

9 = Thanksgiving day stuffed

10 = So full that you feel wiped out

The approach is that, the next time you make your journey from your sofa to your fridge or the kitchen cabinet, you should ask yourself the question as to where you lie on the hunger scale.

If you are on 1, then you should go for eating right there and then. The 2 and 3 can mean you can think about it. On the other side of the scale, if you end up anywhere between a scale of 7-10, that means that you should not go for the craving that you have.

The better question would be to ask yourself why you are eating when you are anywhere between 7-10. Yes, that cookie sounds nice right now, but could there be an underlying reason?

Experts say that we often crave sweet desserts when we are experiencing stressful conditions. We prefer eating chocolates, cookies, biscuits, etc. So, maybe that ice-cream makes sense right now.

Another surprising fact would be for spicy food. Have you ever noticed that while often we connect being sad and gloomy to eating sweet desserts, what usually is overlooked is when you start overeating spicy food.

It could be true too that you are just a fan of spicy food, but if you observe yourself eating more than usual, then it could be a sign that you are doing not so well.

When experiencing pain, i.e., the burning sensation you feel after eating spicy food is followed by your body, releasing endorphins to soothe the pain. This is why some people crave spicy food too.

What Should You Do?

You should ask yourself where you lie on the hunger meter and, based on that, either go for or not go for food. It does not have to be necessarily just that. Sometimes, it is okay to give yourself a break.

In this time of the pandemic, we have noticed problems that we have not seen before. There is even a surprising increase in the number of plastic surgeries after the lockdown period. People have attributed it to looking at themselves too much in video calls and thus finding blemishes.

What needs to be done is to go easy on yourself. 

The workload is high, the working hours uncertain, jobs are not entirely secure, the line between personal and professional life vanishing, your loved ones feel a little further away, and maybe things are a little challenging at times; there are many problems.

So, use the hunger meter as a way of gauging your behavior. It is not a means of punishing yourself. It is to make that cookie go back to being a cookie, instead of being a reward or a punishment for yourself.

Written by - Srishti Purohit

Edited by - Sandhya R