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“Why Can’t I Stop Eating!?”: The Truth About Extreme Hunger
I‘m crazy. Completely insane. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I just eat normally? This is what went through my head constantly in the early days of recovery. Extreme hunger had taken over.
I thought I could just magically go from restricting to being a normal eater. That was not the case. I would try so hard to serve myself and eat normal portions of food like I saw the people around me eat. Although these portions were far more than I would have ever allowed myself prior to recovery, I was never satisfied. I just couldn’t stop at a “normal” portion.
It was the oddest feeling. My stomach might feel full, but I feel an innate calling to keep eating. And eating. And eating. I’d consume huge amounts of foods at once and still scrounge for more. I felt like some sort of poor child who’d been locked away for years without enough food. In a sense, I kind of had been.
It’s not why you think!
This happened over and over again, day after day. I would wake up and tell myself that I was going to be “normal”. “I’m not going to restrict, but I won’t keep shoving insane amounts of food into my mouth for half the day. I’m not going to spend 95% of my day eating again. Nope. Not today”
But I just couldn’t uphold that. My body was screaming for more food. And even though giving in to it’s demands to eat large amounts of nutrient-dense food was scary and uncomfortable, I couldn’t fight it anymore. I felt defeated; like a failure. What was wrong with me? Why did I just go from one extreme to another? Then one day, I stumbled upon the logical reason for my self-diagnosis of “crazy” – extreme hunger.
Extreme hunger
Essentially, extreme hunger is your body trying to heal itself.
Extreme hunger is characterized by eating large quantities of food in a relatively short amount of time. You might be thinking, “so, it’s bingeing“, but it’s not! That’s what my first thoughts were too.
Extreme hunger is not something everyone recovering from a restrictive eating disorder will experience. However, most will. When you’ll experience it and for how long differs, but it is usually a (scary) part of the recovery process.
Why is this happening?
Let’s just think of this hypothetically. Your body needs a certain amount of calories every day to live, allow your body to function properly, and give you energy. Say you’ve only been giving your body 1/3 the amount of calories it truly needs for two years. When you finally start fueling it properly, it’s going to try to make up for lost time. Your body has been in starvation mode for so long.
Even if your brain knows there is plenty of food available, your body might not.
This Girl Audra also has a great video explaining her take on extreme hunger, which can help you understand some of the causes of extreme hunger.
It’s scary and uncomfortable, but your hunger is something you need to honor. When your body is hungry, give it more.
Will extreme hunger ever stop?
Yes, it will. However, it may take quite awhile for your hunger levels to go back to “normal”. There’s no way of knowing how long extreme hunger will last. For some people, they may only experience it for a few weeks. Other people may find themselves in a state of extreme hunger for months on end. Or, you may never experience extreme hunger.
I don’t know how long you’ll feel extreme hunger for, but I can tell you that it will come to an end. That said, you must honor it for however long it sticks around for.
Holding onto restriction will never help you heal.
It will only prolong the process and send you backwards.
So, do your best to honor those hunger signals, however crazy, wrong, or scary it seems. Your body has a lot of healing to do, and food it fuel.
Extreme Hunger and Bingeing in Recovery
You will most likely experience extreme hunger in eating disorder recovery. You eat, eat, eat and never seem to get full. You may be physically full but still feel you want to eat more! You feel like a crazy Foodzilla who is about to make an end to the world’s food supply.
The normal amount of food seems to not satisfy you (even the 2500-3000 calorie recovery recommendations) and you think you just have a binge eating disorder! You feel hungry, but not hungry. You feel “empty”, but you know that you are physically full. You feel like a bottomless bit. Ready to inhale all food at once! BAM! – it’s gone! Next!
If you start recovery from any kind of eating disorder or just past of dieting and restriction, having extreme hunger is normal and it will pass! It is your body’s response to the previous restriction. Sometimes, when we have gone through extreme restriction like eating disorders and dieting we might temporarily need to go to the other extreme and eat in large amounts to actually restore balance!
Think about it this way: when you dive underwater and hold your breath you will slowly get deprived of oxygen. When you finally come up to the surface you might start gulping for air and be hyperventilating for a while. Now imagine if something extreme happened. You got 3 big ocean waves coming over your head in a row and you got into some serious trouble. You get to the surface for a brief second but the next wave is coming smashing over your head again. Your body desperately needs air to come out of this alive. When you finally get out of this scary situation and are pulled to the shore you might even need emergency CPR. If oxygen levels are not restored quickly you may suffer from brain damage or even die. That is what oxygen deprivation does to your body, it is very dangerous. It might take quite a while to come out of the initial shock and be able to breathe normally again.
This is similar to eating disorder recovery. Extreme hunger is like hyperventilating after oxygen deprivation. You need to follow this hunger signal to restore health and balance. It is there for a reason. It is not your body working against you. It is doing all it can to save you from further damage.
Extreme hunger is like hyperventilating after oxygen deprivation. You need to follow this hunger signal to restore health and balance. It is there for a reason.
Extreme hunger will pass as long as you will keep eating an adequate amount of food and skip any form of calorie compensation (purging, dieting, skipping meals, exercising, using diuretics or laxatives etc).
Note: read my post about Refeeding Syndrome before you start eating more just to be safe.
How long will extreme hunger last?
This varies for people. It can last a few weeks to several months. It can be present during a certain time period and then end completely or it can come and go in recovery and then come back again for a while. Some people do not experience extreme hunger at all. It can also vary in the intensity and be different to how many calories people consume in their extreme hunger periods.
Should I follow extreme hunger when I am not underweight?
Extreme hunger may cause panic for pretty much everyone in the restrictive eating disorder and they lock down on the incorrect thoughts that they will “just keep going” and are “bingeing”.
People who are underweight (anorexia) need to follow their extreme hunger in order to gain weight and come out of the starvation mode. But what about people who are not underweight, maybe they are even overweight? Do they also need to eat that much?
This is especially a concern for people who have had bulimia because “bingeing” was the hardest part to overcome in their eating disorder so they do not see how following extreme hunger or this “bingeing” in recovery is necessary?
You have to understand that during your bulimia you were also purging or did some form of restriction in between those binges. That’s why you are bingeing in the first place – you were restricting beforehand. “Binge” is our body’s response to compensate the restriction. Not only calorie restriction but also food restriction (like we see in orthorexia).
If you stop restricting and start to eat normal amounts of foods bingeing won’t stop overnight because your body does not trust you and your brain is also strongly wired to your eating disorder habits. Plus, your body actually needs a lot of calories to restore all physical damage eating disorder has done to your body.
In order to break these habits, it’s firstly important to let go of restriction and then follow your hunger. If some days your hunger leads you to 4000+ calories (extreme hunger) then so be it. But if you start to resist this hunger, your body just gets assured that famine is not over.
In order to break these habits, it’s firstly important to let go of restriction and then follow your hunger.
Eventually, extreme hunger will come less and less as you eat enough and regularly. Slowly but surely it will fade away, just like the hyperventilating will go away when our body’s oxygen balance is restored.
In all recovery stories, I have never read about recovery without any initial bingeing episodes (extreme hunger). Every single one of them still “binged” in the beginning of recovery. No matter if they did MinnieMaud or not (most of them did not!). But as time passed they binged less and less and they also stopped all compensation after those “binges” and in time their body accepted that there was no restriction coming, hence, no binge signal needed, famine was over.
So my point is that I do not want you to see this extreme hunger as a threat, as something abnormal or something you want to suppress anxiously. But rather see it as your body’s way to come out of the restriction – just the same way as it is normal to gasp for air after oxygen deprivation.
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Extreme Hunger 1: What Is It?
Extreme hunger is a common experience for almost everyone undergoing recovery from any kind of eating disorder. Next to the presence of edema (water retention), extreme hunger is one of the most anxiety-provoking elements of recovery.
Mr. Frivolous: Flickr.com
It can happen at any time in the recovery process and varies for everyone as to how long it lasts. Many of you will have already seen this information, but it is worth repeating:
And if I have missed any variation in the above 7 items I can assure you that it is still perfectly normal.
During this time you will want (and very much need) far more than the Homeodynamic Recovery Method intake guidelines and may find yourself consuming anywhere from 6000-10000 calories in a single day. That causes panic for pretty much everyone in recovery and they lock down on the incorrect thoughts that they are eating for the wrong reasons.
The enemy is restriction. When extreme hunger hits then you commit to never eating less than the recommended guidelines on any given day no matter what you ate the day before. It is restriction that will pull you to relapse, not responding to the extreme hunger itself.
A few patients (very, very few) do not experience extreme hunger and just go through the process steadily at a few hundred calories above the minimum. The vast majority hit extreme hunger.
It is a unique experience because often the digestive system struggles to keep up with demand. Many describe it as “I’m not hungry, but I’m hungry”, or (because the emotions are so difficult to put into words) they will define it as though they are just eating out of boredom. I will delve into the science of hyperphagia (extreme eating) in recovery in Part 2 of this series.
Usually, when there is no eating disorder present, people are energy balanced and the complex signals that arrive from both the digestive system and all other areas of the body are in agreement. The physical fullness of the digestive system coincides with the much more arcane and complex satiation experienced throughout the body’s cells.
The signals that the brain receives as to whether the digestive tract is physically capable of handling more food or not is best described as the sensation of “fullness”.
The signals the brain receives as to whether there is sufficient energy present throughout the body is the experience of satiation and it involves an emotional response as well that reinforces the neural pattern demanding action.
For those in recovery, often the digestive system is somewhat atrophied in several ways: the stomach may be practicing gastroparesis (drastic slowing of the emptying of the contents into the small intestine to try to extract maximum energy from the too-little food coming in); the enzyme-producing enzymes are running at half-speed (again to conserve energy); and the bacterial colonies in the large intestine (the good ones) have been decimated due to insufficient energy as well.
As you begin eating to the recommended minimal guidelines, the digestive system has quite a bit of catch-up. And if that coincides with the cells throughout the body demanding a massive infusion of energy to repair damage, then you end up experiencing fullness and hunger at the same time, which is disturbing of course.
The digestive system is frantically sending messages to the brain “I’m going as fast as I can here” and the cells throughout the body are screaming at the brain “More energy now!” Again, the science behind this will be revealed in Part 2.
Respond to the hunger always and never allow any restriction to creep in. To deal with a digestive system still getting up to speed, eat very calorie-dense foods (lots of ultra-processed, fast food options are great for this phase), snack on nuts and seeds constantly and eat tons of small meals to help the digestive system cope as it gets back to normal.
To summarize, you may find extreme hunger triggers relapse and you need to be prepared and remind yourself of the following facts when it happens:
Sewing Your Body Back Together
A daily dose of wear and tear is naturally repaired each day in the human body.
Now imagine a fully stitched hem on a skirt, but there are always five stitches of the hem that come undone by the end of the day and have to be sewn up that night.
After only a few months’ worth of restrictive eating behaviors of any kind and the hem is now frayed throughout. There are stitches missing everywhere, long loose threads that can catch and unravel even more of the hem, and so on.
Now, the owner of this skirt finally decides she’s going to get out the thread and fix the whole mess. But she still wears the skirt everyday and those five stitches still have to be dealt with at the end of the day.
If she only pulls out enough thread to support fixing the usual five stitches, well that hem will never get fully repaired and will continue to deteriorate—think of that as analogous to providing around 2000 calories a day to your body to ‘recover’ from an eating disorder.
If she pulls out more thread, she’s able to attend to some of the other stitches and that’s an analogy for eating the recommended guidelines every day to recover from an eating disorder.
If she pulls out even more thread to attend to some of the areas where loose threads may unravel the whole hem, then that’s extreme hunger.
Because the woman sewing is essentially the body and we cannot see the hem it needs to fix, we just go with the demand for more thread when it comes up.
Nature Abhors a Vacuum—Aristotle
Extreme hunger happens because your body is not just addressing the need to restore weight to the optimal set point, it also has to repair a lot of physical damage that occurs when you create energy deficits within the ecosystem that is your body.
When you restrict energy intake and/or create energy deficits with exercise and exertion, then the body does two things in response to that vacuum you are creating: stops whatever biological functions it can to save energy and takes energy from fat tissue, bones, muscles, organs and nerves to fill the void.
You essentially damage the power plant and steal raw materials as well. If you just replenish the raw materials, then that’s not good enough because you also need to bring in additional materials and crews to repair the damage to the power plant otherwise the raw materials still can’t effectively be transformed into energy.
And in the middle of this entire restoration project, the power plant still has to be up and running to some extent. That is why extreme hunger hits.
Think of extreme hunger as hiring a crew of 25 guys to fix damaged equipment in the plant while the plant still provides the town with basic electricity needs.
Think of denying extreme hunger as insisting that one guy can work on the damaged equipment while the plant still provides the town with the same basic electricity needs.
That one guy bitterly complains each day that all he can manage to get done is fix the one faulty bolt on the equipment because while you continue to provide the town with electricity that bolt keeps breaking and he can’t get to all the other problems.
Obviously providing the town with electricity is non-negotiable. We cannot take the town off-line anymore than we could you “off-line”.
I think I’ve come up with as many different analogies as I can at this point to try to relay the reason why extreme hunger occurs in the recovery process for almost everyone and why it is critical to respond to those demands for energy.
How to Tackle Extreme Hunger
Do you ever experience such extreme hunger that you feel completely out of control with food? As if you’re never full even when you’re eating regularly? When this happens, you may be quick to blame yourself – you might say you have no willpower, no sense of control, and feel you’re not able to stop eating. Extreme hunger like this is incredibly common if you’ve been dieting or restricting your food intake. This is not your fault!
What is Extreme Hunger?
Extreme hunger is an intense feeling of hunger – as if you don’t feel full no matter what you eat or you feel hungry again shortly after a meal. Your stomach may growl, feel empty, or you may feel dizzy or fatigued. When this happens, it can be hard to think about anything else until you eat something again.
Extreme hunger is often the human body’s response to being deprived of food. Even if you feel as though you ate enough that day, and are questioning why you might be hungry, it could be past deprivation that is fueling the massive hunger you’re feeling that day. It is basically your body trying to communicate with you, reminding you to nourish it and satisfy that hunger – without guilt. These feelings of extreme hunger can be challenging, but can be overcome.
What Causes Extreme Hunger?
Extreme hunger occurs because the hunger hormone ghrelin increases to signal you to eat more. If you have been restricting certain foods for a long time or limiting your overall food intake, your body will try to counteract that by sending you signals. If you ignore these signals, they will only get more intense until you eat. It’s important to know that this extreme hunger can occur even if you ate enough that particular day. This feeling is more of a result of long-term dieting, and not necessarily a reflection of your current eating habits.
After a long period of restricting your diet, your hunger hormones can become out of sync. This can often be difficult to ignore, and for good reason. Your body will always try to protect you, encouraging you to nourish yourself.
But, if the desire to lose weight or to follow a diet is very strong, you may have tried to ignore these signals. However, if you do continue to ignore them, your ghrelin levels eventually go down and stop giving you those warning signals. This is not what you want.
Low ghrelin can lead to a temporary cycle of appetite suppression – where your body “adjusts” to the restriction and you no longer receive signals to eat. Long-term, this can decrease your hunger cues to the extent that you aren’t sure when you are actually hungry. This can make things particularly challenging when you’re trying to break away from dieting and e resume normal eating again.
In the beginning stages of diet recovery, your hunger hormones, like ghrelin, will ramp back up and you may begin to feel this extreme hunger and diet backlash. You may have difficulty differentiating between actual hunger which is a physical need to eat and appetite, which is the desire to eat. While this may feel frustrating, there are several ways to tackle this and overcome it.
How to Handle Extreme Hunger
Here are a few tips for how to best honor your hunger to prevent binge eating or feeling out of control with food:
Honor Your Hunger
Extreme hunger often resurfaces in the recovery process once you allow yourself to eat more again. As you start to eat more, your body then remembers that you need that food, especially after all that dieting!
Listen to your body and honor that hunger, without any guilt! I know this may seem scary, but I promise it gets e asier. Honoring your hunger means eating when you feel hungry and not waiting, and paying attention to how that food makes you feel. Give yourself unconditional permission to eat whatever it is you are craving when you feel hungry. When you give yourself unconditional permission to eat it will be easier to work on strategies that will also allow you to not respond to emotions with food.
When your body is in a semi-starvation state like in the case of chronic dieting, you actually become more obsessed with food. This has been shown in a classic study called the Minnesota Semi-Starvation study. After being in this semi-starvation state, participants came out of the study feeling more obsessed with food, more anxiety, fatigue, depression, and general irritability. The term “hangry” doesn’t really do this justice!
Don’t Be Scared
If you feel scared to eat more, know this is normal! You may feel afraid that your eating will get out of control as you start to incorporate more variety back into your diet. It’s important to remember that this is a normal part of the process and is what repairs your relationship with your food. In time, you’ll start to see that one food won’t make or break your health and that all foods can fit into a healthy lifestyle.
In time, you will naturally start to crave the foods that nourish you and make you feel good so you don’t have to worry about what you’re eating right now. Categorizing foods as good or bad will only bring back a restrictive diet mindset.
Be Patient With Yourself
At the beginning of your intuitive eating and recovery process, it can seem difficult to control your food intake and you may feel like you want to eat everything in sight. Be patient with yourself and your body’s ability to relearn hunger cues that it hasn’t had for some time. As you start to eat more regularly again and continue to listen to your body, those hunger cues will come back and will be less intense.
Depending on how long you’ve been dieting, it may take some time for your hunger cues to normalize. For some, this may be a matter of weeks, for others, it may be months. There are many factors that come into play. Give yourself grace and know you will recover from this.
Don’t Restrict If You Feel You Overdid It
If you restrict after eating because you feel guilty, this can restart the binge-restrict cycle all over again. Let go of any guilt – your body needs this food, and you are doing your body good by feeding it.
If you are tackling your extreme hunger and are feeling out of control, read how my mindful eating strategies can help you achieve more of a balance. Make sure you are eating often, listening to your cravings, and honoring them. As you do this more regularly, your body will start to adjust and resume a more normalized way of eating – with less intense hunger pangs.
Additionally, get the support you need to talk things through. Talking with a professional or with others who have gone through it can serve as a reminder that you will overcome it. If you need help relearning how to eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full, schedule a free strategy call with me to get the support you need.