Making Friends With Fullness
Written by Sam Wierzbicki
What comes to mind when you think about the sensation of fullness?
When’s the last time you ate till comfortably full?
What does fullness feel like to you?
If any of these questions left you scratching your head or maybe even wrinkling your nose, you’re not alone. For many of us who have a fraught relationship with fullness (and if this is something you’ve never thought about, I invite you to keep reading), post meal fullness might feel elusive or even downright scary. And how you feel about fullness can tell you a lot about how you more generally relate to food and your body.
If cultivating a neutral, supportive relationship with food and body is your goal, it can be helpful to start exploring both how fullness feels physiologically and how you feel about fullness from an emotional standpoint.
Let’s start with the physiology component. What is fullness and how do we experience it?
Fullness is a signal produced in your body that is meant to help regulate nourishment. Our body is always trying to keep us in a state of homeostasis (a scientific word for its “happy place”) and both the sensations of hunger and fullness serve to help you to eat the approximate amount of energy and nutrients needed through food.
Fullness, specifically, is a cue that tells you the stomach is reaching its relative capacity in connection to food eaten. It’s elicited through complex mechanisms in the nervous, digestive, and endocrine system: GI hormones as well as gastric nerves designed to monitor the expansion of the stomach wall play a role in how we experience the presence of fullness and whether our brain signals that we need to eat more or can finish up our meal.
For a lot of folks, physiological fullness in the GI tract might feel like a pressure or gentle tightness in the stomach or chest, but it can also manifest as decreasing thoughts about or interest in food, an absence of hunger, less irritability, and more energy.
While this sounds relatively objective, the experience of fullness can be anything but that. Based on how we interact with food and the beliefs that we hold, fullness can start to feel like less of a supportive friend and more of an adversary.
Why is it that this bodily signal meant to help us gauge what we need through food can feel like it’s working against us? Let’s talk about it.
First, we first have to consider how we have been socialized to think about fullness. Living in a society where diet culture and fatphobia are pervasive, the feeling of fullness itself can become conflated with the idea that we’ve eaten “too much” or “overdone it.” And when there is so much focus on how food connects to body size, reaching fullness (even if it means we are eating to our needs!) becomes associated with the underlying fear of weight gain.
Now let’s go one layer deeper. Because food choices, eating habits, and body size are falsely and harmfully moralized (i.e. we are “good” for manipulating our body to be smaller through eating less or not eating “too much”), fullness can take on the meaning that we have done something wrong and result in feelings of shame, guilt, or anxiety. I call this response “emotional fullness.”
Emotional fullness itself doesn’t feel great. But even beyond that, emotional fullness can significantly complicate an objective stance on fullness, which can make decisions about food feel really confusing.
Consider this scenario:
In order to avoid emotional fullness, we might try to avoid physiological fullness by eating less (because who wants to feel emotionally crappy every time they eat?) But eating less results in our body not getting the nutrients that it needs, a.k.a. undernourishment.
Undernourishment can lead to primal hunger, where the part of our brain concerned we might be starving effectively takes control of our decisions around food, and typically results in eating far beyond comfortable fullness in order to make up for the nutrients that we’re no longer getting.
This pattern can reinforce the belief that our bodies can’t be trusted (even though primal hunger is a protective measure), and we end up cycling between not eating enough and eating far beyond what feels physically comfortable, which just exacerbate fears around fullness.
The process of disentangling fear from fullness and reclaiming our body’s ability to regulate our food intake*** involves both physiological and psychological interventions. One of the ways you can start healing your relationship with fullness is by beginning to identify the differences in how physical and emotional fullness manifest for you.
We encourage you to explore those differences with the following questions:
When did I start avoiding or fearing the sensation of fullness? What else was going on during that time in my life? (For many of us, going on a diet, intentionally trying to lose weight, or experiencing gastrointestinal issues can be the first link in a chain of experiences that lead to avoidance of fullness.)
If I am able to experience fullness currently or based on how I’ve experienced fullness in the past:
What does comfortable physical fullness feel like? What does uncomfortable physical fullness feel like?
What does emotional fullness feel like? When does emotional fullness arise?
Do certain experiences, like the environment I am in, the people I’m eating with, or the foods I am eating change how fullness feels?
If I’m experiencing discomfort when I’m full, is it possible that discomfort is influenced by emotional fullness?
Am I able to truly separate physical fullness from emotional fullness
Fullness can be a tool to nourish and care for our bodies, but the process of returning to it can be challenging. If you’re struggling in your own relationship with food or recovering from an eating disorder, it’s helpful to work with a dietitian who can help you explore what barriers exist when it comes to reacquainting yourself with feeling fullness.
***Note: our ability to feel, interpret, and respond to fullness and other bodily sensations - called interoceptive awareness - is dependent on a large number of factors. Interoceptive awareness is not accessible to all. Assuming that all individuals are able to and should utilize interoceptive awareness in the goal of staying nourished and fostering a supportive relationship with food and fullness is rooted in ableism. We as a practice believe there are many tools we can use to keep our bodies nourished and reject ableist frameworks.