What Are You Really Hungry For?

People often notice that they’re eating when they’re not physically hungry and assume something must be wrong.

“I know I’m not hungry,” a client once said to me, “but I feel like I have to eat.”

It sounds confusing until you look a little deeper.

What if they were hungry — just not for food?

Human beings are designed with many forms of appetite. We hunger for rest, connection, warmth, peace, stimulation, meaning. We hunger for feeling at home in our own lives. When those hungers aren’t being met, the body and mind look for something familiar and accessible.

Food is very accessible.

Eating can feel soothing. It can create a brief sense of fullness — not just in the stomach, but in the experience of being alive. For a moment, the edge comes off. Something tight loosens. Something empty feels less noticeable.

And then, because food was never what was missing, the sense of dissatisfaction quietly returns.

Most people don’t eat in this way because they’re doing something wrong. They eat because, in that moment, it’s the best solution they can see. It’s a kind of innocent self-care — just aimed in the wrong direction.

The trouble comes when we mistake the relief for the answer.

If you try to stop eating without understanding what the eating was doing for you, you end up in a tug-of-war with yourself. One part trying to control behaviour, another part still quietly hungry for something else.

But when you begin to notice what you’re actually craving — not analysing it, not fixing it, just noticing — something softens.

You might realise you’re tired.
Or lonely.
Or bored.
Or overwhelmed.
Or simply longing for a life that feels a little more like yours.

None of that means you need a strategy. It means you’re human.

Physical hunger is straightforward. You eat and it passes.

Other hungers don’t work that way. They aren’t solved by consumption. They’re resolved by understanding, by presence, by allowing yourself to feel what’s already there.

So the question isn’t really, “How do I stop eating?”

It’s gentler than that.

It’s “What is this moment asking for?”

Sometimes the answer is food.
And sometimes it’s something no amount of food could ever supply.

When you begin to see the difference, eating naturally finds its own balance — without force, without rules and without you having to fight yourself at all.