Let’s face it. Very few people in our society use food strictly as fuel for their daily activities. We eat for flavors. We eat for entertainment. We eat to alleviate boredom, fatigue, excitement or heartache. We eat to be part of a social event. We eat because advertisers spend millions of dollars seducing us into equating their food products with happiness, sex, excitement and other wonderful things. It’s no wonder that we use food to soothe and satisfy a vast array of human needs – we hunger and crave lots of things that are not food.

Hunger is an incredibly complex phenomenon that we experience in many areas of our lives. We hunger in our relationships if our emotional needs are not being met. We hunger for physical energy or for sensory stimuli if we are bored and in need of entertainment. A craving or hunger for food is not always a physical need for caloric intake brought on by low blood sugar.

To get to the root of your hunger try this quick exercise. Pause for a few minutes before you eat and think about how you know you are hungry. Write down everything you are feeling at that moment to help give you clues to what you are really hungry for. Then, brainstorm non-food related activities that deal directly with what you are feeling. For example, if you if want to eat because you’re tired, consider taking a nap. If you’re eating because you’re lonely, call a friend. If you’re eating because you’re stressed, take a bath or try some relaxation techniques.

To lose weight, we must eat less. However, if the focus is shifted away from food restriction towards getting to know our hunger cues and our real reasons for seeking food, eating less slowly becomes more natural and much easier to handle.