Satiation. I love this word and have only recently started to understand its meaning around my hunger drive.

Satiation is the pinnacle of what it means to fulfill the hunger drive, to eat when hungry. Satiation is the linchpin of my long-term success.

Discovering satiation was a confusing, complex process. I had lost half my weight and had maintained that weight loss for more than a year.

Yet, I was flailing and careening all over a razor blade even though the numbers on the scale held steady.

I was desperately trying not to fall into the abysses where one of my shadow selves ruled — either through the excesses of food addiction and binge eating, or the deprivations of anorexic restriction.

I had no idea how to maintain my success. 

I was stringing together successful days. And, the scale numbers spoke tangible evidence that maintaining a healthy weight was something I was doing.

But, this facade of success disguised the fact that failure loomed. My daily white-knuckling would soon give way to failure.

I was missing a big piece, but I had no idea what it was. I was doing everything I needed for a healthy life, and signs of improved health permeated every aspect of my life. 

Yet, I did not yet have the understanding that I needed for long-term successful maintenance, and I knew it. With each passing day, a sense of urgency intensified.

I had to get this figured out. I needed to remove all distractions to get to the root of the issue. I needed to go back to the beginning.

Eat when hungry. 

This is the root of human existence. And, I had no idea what it meant. The moment I realized this still overwhelms me.

Living with the privilege of food security in my life was and is most certainly part of my ignorance. This is a privilege for which I am grateful, and it goes deeper than I will ever understand.

While this privilege is a fact of my existence, so, too, is the fact that I did not understand my hunger drive. And, if I am going to tell the story of my weight loss, I need to tell the story of understanding my hunger drive. 

I had lots of pieces around what eating when hungry meant, but I was completely lost in how to pull them all together to form a coherent picture of what eating when hungry meant for me.

Eat when hungry.  

Recipes, food programs, nutritional information, calories, calorie deficits, calorie density charts, addictive food withdrawal processes, disordered eating patterns, the numbers on the scale, do this, do that.

These details surrounded me in increasingly meaningless ways as I got closer to falling off the razor blade.

I sought information from experts to help me understand my hunger drive. But, that information didn’t tell me anything new. It was time for me to go inward to figure out myself.

The pieces whirled in a maelstrom around me for months. I clung to bits and fragments enough to achieve success. But, the pieces still did not make sense to me from the inside out.

Unless I could figure out my hunger drive, I was going to land back in the 97% failure rate.

Like my other failures, this one would go fast and be a spectacle to behold. I had lived this reality before and had no desire to relive the experience.

Satiety. Satisfied. Satiation.

These three words fluttered around the perimeter of my reflective journey into myself, into understanding my hunger drive. 

I heard this trio of words in the language of the hunger drive that occurs in areas of the whole foods, plant-based world. But, their meanings were as elusive to me as eating when hungry.

Eventually, the words landed in my consciousness as something I needed to understand about the hunger drive, and they started to take root as missing from my understanding.

I probed what I knew in ways that were central to my dorky English-teacher self. My first insights continue to hold true for me:

  • Satiety: the word itself is an ugly sounding word, and it is a noun. I am unabashedly a verb nerd. I love verbs more than any other part of speech.

    Satiety’s aesthetics and noun-i-ness ruled out giving this word much attention.

  • Satisfy:  aahhh, yes, here is the verb, and that feels better already. But, satisfy carries a problematic meaning that irks me. I cannot get away from the idea that satisfy names the lowest threshold of eating when hungry.

    With failure encroaching on me, I needed and wanted the pinnacle of the experience, not the bottom.

  • Satiation: the aesthetics of this familiar word fascinate me in surprising ways. I sometimes say the word aloud. Its warm, hushed sounds soothe me as its softness curves softly around my tongue.

    Satiation became my word to understand, to discover, to experience.

I lived more than half a century without understanding satiation. And, satiation hides deep in my shadows, relentlessly requiring much of me to bring her out of the shadows.

I have to eat whole, unprocessed plant foods, and I have to avoid every food that disrupts my hunger drive, including all processed foods and even some whole unprocessed plants.

But, when I follow satiation’s uncompromising demands, I find her in my hunger drive. And, that has made all the difference.

This self-discovery may help me stay in the 3% success rate for long-term weight loss this time around. Understanding satiation and my hunger drive give me hope.

This is the first time I have written about satiation, and it won’t be the last time. I want to know her better.

At the heart of transformative change is personal self-discovery that we have to do by ourselves, for ourselves.

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Discovering My Trigger Foods, Part I

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Meet My Hunger Drive: A Fact of My Life, Not a Self-Made Stigma