Are you looking for weight loss! Find the Hunger Quotient
If you are a regular reader of our IWB, then you must have read a lot about mindful eating and its positive results for weight loss efforts. It is a proven strategy for weight loss, though a little difficult to practice easily. Mindfulness means a conscious effort to connect to your body and while doing so try to figure out how much food should you intake. Certainly, it is a hundred times better way to connect with your own self than measuring your food or even counting calories. I comment so after doing and experiencing everything personally. Yes, I have done the ritual of weighing my food before cooking and eating to find out how much I am eating but if you ask me, that was a really awful experience as every time my food scale showed a particular number, my heart used to sink thinking, how would my stomach be full with this small amount of food! While I talk about this, I also realized that there was no point in counting calories after you have already consumed them, thus decided to just eat to my heart’s content and there was an issue there…. my heart was never content. So what to do? Here is something I found as a solution to my eating aka food dumping problem for weight loss! Find the Hunger Quotient.
For weight loss, Find ‘The Hunger Quotient’
Now you will ask me what it is. Well, the Hunger Quotient is a great tool that was devised by a registered dietician named Keri Glassman to make things easier for people trying to lose excess weight. It makes it easy for them to figure out exactly how much they should eat and when to stop eating.
Knowing and using the Hunger Quotient can be a great way to eat mindfully and understand about eating without overeating. Following your Hunger Quotient, you can lose all extra weight by eating in a particular way in order to retrain your fat cells.
The hunger quotient helps you understand the basics of eating and that is not to follow any pre-planned and pre-assumed numbers as far as food is concerned. Well, that doesn’t mean that you keep eating without bothering about numbers, rather eat thinking about what your body needs. Tracking calories and weighing your food isn’t the best way to find out how much your body needs on a particular day in different situations. According to Glassman, you don’t need a whole meal if you have not worked out hard for that. In such a situation, it would be better to consume half the amount of regular food. Similarly, if you have been running around all day, the regular light snack might not be enough.
HQ, how does it work?
The basic principle of the Hunger Quotient is that there is always a number on a scale from 1-10 that helps you understand and decide how hungry you actually are. Eating after using it, you can easily figure out how big or small your appetite is at any given moment. While a 10 on the HQ scale would mean that you are starving and famished with ready to pass out at any moment, a 1 would mean that you are too full and so stuffed that you would feel like getting into loose waist clothing. So and so forth, you can use it any time you think you are hungry.
We all know that most of the munching happens because of wanting to eat for emotional reasons like boredom or stress instead of being hungry. That makes rating your HQ all the more pertinent even as you eat meals. It can help you know when you should stop eating. So what should be the perfect HQ score to start eating? Hmmm, it should be between a 4 and a 6 according to the rule.
Check your Hunger Quotient
- 1. Stuffed
- 2. Extremely full
- 3. Satisfied
- 4. Slightly satisfied/ just right
- 5. Neutral
- 6. Slightly hungry
- 7. Hungry
- 8. Very hungry
- 9. Extremely hungry
- 10. Famished
I am sure we are all smart enough to understand that HQ between 1 and 3 is too full, which means overeating, while 7 to 10 is being too hungry, and that can cause overeating. It is always better to stay in between the 4-6 sweet spots as that will help you stay satisfied…
Is finding your HQ easy?
I am sure you are also about to dump all this in the back lanes of your mind as it surely seems not so easy to follow. It will require some serious practice to figure out your 4-6 spot. Here we need to think about our bodies and practice some self-love.
We all need to show love to ourselves first. We all require to pay serious attention to our bodies. We need to understand if the food that we are thinking about is a need to satisfy hunger or is just simple gluttony. The more you do it, the better we will get. Surely all this will not come fast, so taking it slow can only help.
These tips might help…
- While eating a regular meal, put the spoon down and check if you really need to finish the meal in front of you?
- Start with a small serving.
- Stop fearing hunger thinking let me stuff myself lest I feel hungry later.
Finally remember, that every individual HQ is different, and losing weight doesn’t mean eating less food. Know what your body is asking to stay energetic and what makes it dull and you will never fail yourself.
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By: Sugandha K
Title: Looking for weight loss! Find the Hunger Quotient
Sourced From: www.fitnessvsweightloss.com/for-weight-loss-find-the-hunger-quotient/
Published Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2022 04:30:50 +0000
