On The Feeding of Quirky Mammals, Part 2

2. "Feeling Hungry" (or not) - Body Awareness and Eating

I.

The phrase "body awareness" is used here not in any strict scientific sense or in any flaky New Agey sense, but rather informally as something along the lines of: the capacity or tendency to specifically notice and identify that one is feeling a particular internal sensation.

Hence, body awareness (as I am using this phrase in this context) is going to be relevant to a person's eating habits, as if you don't "feel hungry" very intensely (or if you just have difficulty in general sorting out what you are feeling), your need for nutritive input is not necessarily going to match up with your sense of wanting food.

And if this is the case, you may find yourself missing meals without necessarily even realizing you've done so until you start feeling really horrible (and possibly not even then, at least not without someone else coming along and reminding you about food).

Needless to say, this isn't exactly an ideal situation. But a lot of its power to wreak havoc, as often seems to be the case with this kind of thing, comes from not realizing what is going on. For people with atypical sensory and information processing, our culture often doesn't provide the means or the language for us to readily figure out what might be causing a particular problem -- which means that we can end up going years before encountering information that actually usefully explains what is going on.

E.g., for ages I just went around implicitly presuming that if something was wrong I would "just know", and that there was no need to do anything extra or different than anyone else around me in order to stay healthy and functioning well. Moreover, I have always been severely emetophobic, which as a child often meant that I would refuse food when I probably needed it most, because I couldn't tell the difference between feeling very hungry and feeling sick.

Later, even in college, when I crashed or felt horrible I would either figure it was a sign of laziness or character flaws -- or in some cases jump to some hypochondriacal conclusion, like in when I was worried I had a brain tumor or something because I kept getting headaches and didn't even consider that I was perhaps dehydrated.

This sort of internal conviction (that I should expect to know when I needed to eat or drink based on bodily signals alone) stubbornly maintained itself even through instance after instance of ending up in vastly unpleasant and even injurious situations because I didn't know what I wasn't aware of until it was too late.

I still tend to not be able to immediately identify and articulate sensations like hunger, thirst, etc., but I have been able to avoid many potential crashes since figuring out what signals I do tend to feel strongly. And one particularly strong signal I tend to feel is what I might describe as "sense of routine".

My brain is very good at mapping certain kinds of patterns, in time as well as in space, and hence I've been able to perform a "partial hack" to utilize this capacity in the service of making sure I eat regularly. E.g., I set up the following "rules" for weekdays:

- I will eat breakfast as soon as I get to work (and since my breakfasts usually consist of an energy bar or something similarly user-friendly, I can actually accomplish that during the first morning e-mail check).

- I will eat lunch at 11:15 AM.

If that sounds too simple to even bother mentioning I apologize, but for me it was not a trivial thing at all to come to understand that by taking advantage of my pattern-detection abilities (through first establishing a particular pattern), I could in effect gain access to a signal that was a lot more reliable than hunger.

Since establishing these rules, I've ended up skipping breakfast or lunch far less frequently (dinner has usually been less of a problem as I've never lived alone and have hence had the "cue" of seeing other people eating and smelling food, etc., to remind me about food in the evenings).

When I have skipped meals more recently it has generally been due to a disruption of the routine (such as an early morning meeting or one that starts at 11:15 and goes until after noon), but as time has gone on I've noticed myself starting to feel a sense of "something missing" if I don't eat lunch simply because I know I haven't gone through the activity of taking food out of my lunchbox, etc.

This brainhack doesn't work perfectly and can be thwarted at times by being really absorbed in something so deeply that the routine-signal gets buried, but it works way better than expecting to feel hungry or thirsty in a timely manner ever did. In short, I've made it so eating meals is part of a pattern I expect to exist during the day, and this has made their absence a bit more conspicuous.

II.

Another thing that has helped me is the plain old external reminder. That wonderful invention, the mighty checklist (lately my tricorder iPod Touch has been serving this purpose handily with several of its to-do programs) is a lovely "signal booster" for the routine-orientedness that I've described herein. Knowing that something should be happening is one thing, but having that thing written down tends to make me even more likely to actually do it.

Of course then there is the matter of actually remembering to write stuff down, but since discovering writing a checklist tends to almost instantly settle my brain down when I am beginning to feel overloaded, I've been able to maintain the habit with a reasonable degree of success.

And then there is the truly external reminder of the sort that you may not get to access unless you are lucky enough to have certain kinds of people in your life -- and that is the one which comes from someone who you either live with or know reasonably well who knows you well enough to offer you periodic sustenance-related reminders.

(My partner is excellent at this -- he started doing it initially after noticing how grumpy I was after work some days and thinking to ask me if I'd eaten lunch, and for quite a while now he's been doing things like having me try drinking water or having a snack if I feel nonspecifically "weird" or seem to be acting in an agitated or spacey manner.)

But still, while I am very grateful for this I also know that you can't just go out and "get" help like this. There is a major problem right now with lots of people probably not being able to get even as "simple" a service as the regular food reminder because either they are considered "too high functioning" to qualify for it or because they don't know where to start in the administrative maze.

I wouldn't know where to start there either so I can't really advise in that regard -- but I can say that it probably wouldn't hurt to maybe try asking a roommate, a sibling, or some other person who you have at least some amount of regular contact with to perhaps say "hey, did you eat?" once in a while.

Summary

So, in summary, if you have body awareness issues around eating for whatever reason, if you haven't already you may want to try:

(a) Identifying some signal other than hunger or thirst that you are actually likely to notice more readily

(b) Using self-initiated reminders (checklists, post-it notes, electronic organizers, etc.)

(c) If possible, making sure someone who you have at least semi-regular contact with you knows you might sometimes need reminders about food or drink.