What if Your Body Doesn't Know Hunger or Fullness?

I read recently that the infant’s body discovers hunger when it has a feeling that is addressed when the mother feeds it. Oh, so that empty, aching feeling inside of me is connected to the mother, to what she can give me. The feeling of fullness, of satiety, of being recognized and seen, of being addressed, of being taken cared of would also become an awareness when the infant is fed by the mother.

When I was out driving through town as a teenager, I saw a man mowing his lawn. I remember this all these years later because the curiosity in me was so strong: I wonder if he thinks about food all the time. I wonder if he’s earning another sandwich by staying outside to rake another hour. I wondered how the man could bear the constant hunger, the constant negotiations in his brain: If I do this, I can eat this. If I don’t eat for two hours, then I can eat this.

What do you do when you can’t begin to touch your own hunger? I was a runner and tall, so I stayed fairly thin, but inside of myself I was enormous. I had the sense that if someone baked a house out of bread, I could easily eat the whole thing and then ask for dessert. There was shame and fear attached to this knowing, this inability to feel full.

I was like a forest fire with a conscience. Oh, god. I just took down that stand of trees. Oh, lord. I just destroyed that apartment building, the office building, that city.

I practiced not eating and got even thinner, but the hunger always won out. Hello, chocolate covered peanuts. Hello, hamburger and fries. Not eating was not the answer. But neither was eating.

How could I feel complete?

We eat to live. We know to stop eating when our bodies tell us we have had enough. But what if that signal, the signal of enough, wasn’t introduced to your brain when your brain was creating the way you would exist in the world?

In adoption land, the term “hungry ghost” is used to describe the black-hole feeling many adoptees live with, the need for more more more and the corresponding failure to feel satisfied. Being a hungry ghost or living with one is no fun.

How much can you shove in a hole before you die?

I wish in elementary school I’d taken classes on hunger and satisfaction instead of history, for example. In a selfish way, who cares what happened in the past if I can’t take care of my own self in the moment? How can I care about others, deeply and mindfully, if I don’t know where my own off and on switches are?

Hunger 101.

Satiety 101.

If you go to a mindfulness retreat, chances are good you might be asked to eat a single raisin or almond and fully experience both the food and the act of eating the food.

That sounds like hell to me.

Give me the whole bag. I don’t have time to taste, to savor, to sit with the story of this single raisin is enough. I would burn up with rage.

This.

Is.

Not.

Enough.

Do you know what I mean?

I imagine babies now, their mothers texting as they breastfeed, the babies less full because they are not getting the entire experience of the mother. I wonder about future generations. I wonder about how hungry we will become as people. I wonder what will happen next.