Eat When Hungry: Discovering My Golden Circle

Discovering My Trigger Foods, Part II

A couple years into my weight loss, all looked well from the outside. I had lost half my weight; I stabilized at a healthy weight; and I radiated improved wellness.

On paper, my numbers looked comfortable, controlled, and predictable. The patterns looked like successful maintenance.

I had even started to get a few comments about my success in maintaining my weight loss. These unsettled me. I felt like a fraud.

Inwardly, I was flailing on the razor’s edge, about to tumble off into a chasm all too eager to devour me back into the 97% failure rate.

I knew this space intimately. Looming failure always won. I clung to the sharp edge of success, barely making it day-by-day. I was missing something, but I did not know what.

Then, I came into a direct standoff with what I did not yet understand: Eat When Hungry. 

Not understanding hunger reflects privilege in my life and larger societal issues surrounding food, weight, and consumerism, themes found in and beyond my story. More on that another day.

Eat When Hungry:  The Why, the How, and the What

Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle helps me consider change in many areas of life. At the center of the circle is the why, which is the key motivation for change.

Change starts with the why and moves to the how and the what, actions which fall into place with a strong why. But, without the why, the what and the how fail.

I had centered a powerful why to make the change. I wanted to be healthier, to prioritize health and wellness in my life. And, I was fed up with food addiction.

This was the right work, the necessary work. Losing weight was central to my health and wellness. I had changed my whole life from the inside out with this why.

My partial understanding of food addiction was also the right work. But, all of that work had focused on avoiding excess, not getting at the central why around hunger.

I understood trigger foods and their role in overeating and binge eating, but I never thought of them in relation to hunger. Realizing this irony flabberghasted me.

These pieces got me partway there. But, I was missing the holistic understanding that cohesively held the pieces together. I needed to drill into what it meant to Eat When Hungry.

In my standoff with Eat When Hungry, I had the what and the how. But, I had missed the why. I had worked from the outside in rather than the inside out. 

Eat When Hungry: Missing the Most Important Idea

This chart illustrates how I missed the most important action needed for long-term success — even in the midst of having lost half my weight. I needed a central why to hold the how and the what together. In this case, I was unable to see the forest through the trees and missed the big picture about understanding Eat When Hungry. For more information, see Simon Sinek’s work on the Golden Circle.

Eat When Hungry:  The What

Thinking about weight and weight loss takes up a lot of psychological space. I got lost in the confounding maze of details.

For those of us who struggle with our weight, there are so many details to think about, to understand, to pull together.

In this process, I had thought about these details — so many that you may wish to skim:

… health, wellness, foods, food preparations, recipes, groceries, nutrition, nutritional excellence, food groups, balance, lifestyle changes, nutrition, nutritional balance, …

… weight, overweight, obesity, morbid obesity, healthy weight, weight loss, losing weight, losing weight slowly, healthy weight loss, losing weight quickly, losing weight too quickly, numbers on the scale, to weigh or not to weigh, weight fluctuations, weight loss patterns, and trends of losing or gaining weight, sustainable weight loss …

… calories, calorie density, counting calories, not counting calories, the number of calories in a pound, the number of calories in a binge, too many calories, too few calories, calories eaten in a day, calories eaten over time …

… food addiction, overeating, emotional eating, binge eating, avoiding binge eating, not eating excesses, trigger foods …

… eating disorders, disordered eating patterns, anorexia, underweight, bulimia, compulsive eating, undereating, eating enough, restriction, exercise, purges …

… fasting, juice fasting, water fasting, intermittent fasting, fasting windows, fat loss in fasting, fasting and health, benefits of fasting, fasting and weight loss, dangers of fasting …

The list goes on and on. Never-ending details. If thinking about these were enough, success would have been mine. And, I am not alone in that.

Eat When Hungry:  The How

I had pulled all these thoughts into a cohesive set of actions – the actions that led to success beyond what I had ever thought possible for myself. To do that, I had:

• Centered the powerful “why” of health and wellness as my reasons to lose weight. 

• Created success plans and failure plans for myself (and revised them when necessary).

• Understood food addiction at the root of my struggles with weight.

• Accepted binge-eating as my reality.

• Worked through many mindset shifts necessary for failures and successes.

• Uprooted all-or-nothing / perfectionistic thought patterns.

• Identified trigger foods and replaced them with safer foods.

• Adopted a lifestyle focused on nutritional excellence without counting calories.

• Exercised regularly.

Through these thoughts and actions, I had transformed myself into the healthiest version of myself that I have known. 

And, in all this, I barely thought about hunger itself. I rarely even used the word. And, I never ever thought about what it meant to Eat When Hungry. 

This realization stunned me. I had spent a lifetime of thinking about weight. I had spent years losing weight. I had cut myself in half and maintained it long enough for people to comment on my successful maintenance.

And, I did not yet understand what it meant to Eat When Hungry. I had missed the most central part of getting all of it right.

Eat When Hungry:  The Why I Had Been Missing

I found the answers I had been missing in the body of work done by Dr. Doug Lisle and Dr. Alan Goldhamer around hunger, including but not limited to information found in their book The Pleasure Trap. 

Dr. Lisle and Dr. Goldhamer’s work helped me understand the most important concept that I had been missing in my weight loss journey: hunger. A concept that should have been so obvious. Yet, it wasn’t.

Time to switch direction and engage this next step. Understand hunger. Understand what it meant to Eat When Hungry.

Hunger is about human survival. Hunger is a foundational force for living, which Dr. Lisle, Dr. Goldhamer, and The Pleasure Trap laid out. I focused on hunger and the hunger drive, including their ideas around rich foods:

People are drawn to the richest foods in their environment.

This idea transformed my thinking. I started to understand the biggest, most fundamental trigger: rich foods. I instinctively knew this truth, but I had lots to learn.

A new phase of my personal reflection and understanding started. I prioritized understanding the hunger drive. My hunger drive. The patterns of my hunger drive.

Understanding my hunger drive became my driving force. I reflected on the pull of rich foods to discover more, to feel the force of their pull, to understand their force, to know more about how the pull of rich foods worked in me.

Upending my world, new paradoxes confronted me: I understood everything, and I understood nothing. So incredibly simple. So incredibly complex. I journeyed further inward.

I drilled into multifaceted questions: What did it mean to be hungry? To feel hunger? To satiate hunger? To live in accordance with the rhythms of my hunger? To understand my hunger in the broader contexts of my life and society?

I made progress. Finally.

My golden circle emerged: Eat When Hungry. Understanding changes everything.

Transforming my shadows meant finding a new why in the golden center of my struggle for personal change. Reflecting to understand your why may be helpful in your journey, too.