As a health professional, I am often asked to define the biggest problem with eating habits.  If I could pick one thing that most contributes to obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc, what would it be?

It seems like a tough question, doesn’t it?  With all the nutrition advice out there, how can I pick one piece of it as being most important?

But, I have an answer.  It fact, it comes to mind quickly for me.  If I had to define the most important piece of nutrition advice, it would be to listen to your hungry, to truly get in touch with your body’s signals that it needs nourishment.

In reality, we all have many external cues for eating.  We make our kids eat breakfast each morning before catching the school bus.  You schedule a networking meeting, and plan it at a coffee shop.  It’s 12:00 and that means lunchtime.  You head to the movie theater, and the smell of popcorn convinces you to visit the concession stand.  Your coworker keeps a jar of M&Ms on his desk, and after walking right by it 50 times, you decide to grab a handful on walkby 51.

Then there’s the internal, non-hunger, related cues driving us to eat.  A stressful meeting at work, a breakup with a girlfriend, financial problems – any and all can drive us to eat.

Somewhere in all of this, we need to find a way to listen to our bodies and only eat when physically hungry.  But how?  Here are some ideas:

1. Get in tune with your body’s physical signs of hunger.  A rumbling stomach is the telltale sign.
2. Remember that you should be able to go 3-5 hours in between meals and snacks.
3. When you think you’re hungry, rate your physical hunger on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being not hungry at all and 10 being very hungry.  Eat or don’t eat based on this, and if you do eat, make it a portion in line with the level of your hunger.
4. If your hunger rating is a 1, consider what other cues are telling you to eat.  Is it emotional?  Something in your environment like the time on the clock or the smell of popcorn?  Once recognized, think about what you might do to help the hunger such as …

• • Taking a quick 10-minute walk.  Soon you’ll be thinking about something other than eating.
  • Use your hands.  My neighbor Becky finds knitting to be a great weight management trick.  She knits while watching TV, during downtime shuttling kids to their activities, etc, and finds her hands aren’t available for snacking.
  • You’ve heard this before, but drink a glass of water.  Often, when you think you’re hungry, you’re actually thirsty.

When your hunger rates a 10, visit www.nuval.com to choose foods with the most nutrition to fuel your hunger.