Hanger Management

Introduction

We’ve all been there.

All of us have snapped at someone just because we were hungry. And probably someone we know and love has crabbed at us simply because they had a seriously empty belly. When we’re not well fed, none of us are at our best. Irritable. Snappy. Downright angry. With my clients, I call this feeling “hangry,” a popular term that combines hungry and angry.

But it’s not just being hungry that can ruin our mood. Overeating leads to feelings that are just as unpleasant. Hanger can lead us to overeat, which leaves us feeling what I call “regretfull”—a combination of regret and full. It is the physical and emotional discomfort that comes from overeating in a mindless way. I’ll explain these concepts in more detail throughout the book. But my guess is that if you are reading this right now, you’ve experienced them firsthand already. At one time or another, we have all experienced the downright unpleasant feelings that come from being too hungry or overly full.

In my work with thousands of clients in my office and through my virtual practice, I’ve learned an important truth. Emotions have a huge impact on the way you eat. And what you eat has a significant impact on how you feel. But managing your hunger isn’t easy. It’s tricky to stay on top of hunger—feeding your stomach just the right amount, not too much and not too little.

The good news is that there are simple, effective strategies for managing hunger-induced moodiness. And strategies that don’t just prevent moodiness, but actually boost your mood through eating. Yes, that’s right. Eating well can make you feel amazing!

I call it Hanger Management. In this book, we’ll get to the bottom of what causes hanger—and how to prevent it. And using the techniques of mindful eating, you’ll learn to be on top of your eating habits and at your best. As a special bonus for buying this book, please visit my website, eatingmindfully.com, for freebies to help you kick hanger to the curb.

HANGER MANAGEMENT: IT’S PROBABLY NOT WHAT YOU THINK—AND THAT’S GOOD NEWS!

The other day I went to a birthday party for a colleague of mine who was turning forty. Her husband had it catered, and the dining room table was a sea of desserts, including cookies, cakes, and pie: everything a sweet tooth could desire. As I was standing by the table, eyeing the spread, a woman who didn’t know me well came up. “You would never touch this,” she said, gesturing at the feast. I cringed a little and quickly dispelled this idea by letting her know that I’d been eyeing the chocolate peanut butter pie.

People who don’t know me make a lot of assumptions about the way I eat, probably because they know food is my area of expertise. That makes sense. But I’m often surprised by their assumptions. They hypothesize that I don’t like food or that I’m a strict mouse who only eats salad. I guess that surprises me because what human being doesn’t like food? So over and over again, I tell them: “I love food. It makes me happy. What makes me unhappy isn’t food. It’s when I eat too much of it. Or too little. That’s what makes me unhappy.” And that is the truth.

It’s likely the same for you. It’s not chocolate-chip cookies that ruin your day. It’s when you eat five of them and find yourself deep in the throes of regret that causes you grief.

Food makes me happy in all kinds of ways. It tastes good—so amazingly spectacular. I spend my free time looking up new restaurants, food reviews, inventive recipes, and cooking videos. Next week, I am going to Charleston for the first time. The very first thing I did after making plans to be in the city was look up restaurant reviews and make a list of the best options. In fact, my favorite thing to do in new cities I visit is schedule a food tour. Almost every city has one. A guide walks you around the city taking a bite of food here and there at different well-loved restaurants. Often, the foods they choose have a historical significance to the city. For example, I mindfully tasted beignets in New Orleans and Detroit-style pizza when in Michigan. I even like to watch food being made when I don’t get to eat it: in the past few years, I’ve been mesmerized by internet videos that show just hands, at fast speed, making recipes.

Most of all, I love to enjoy great food at home. My husband and I have friends, parents of our kids’ friends, who love to cook. They bring over their creations, and my family gets to be the guinea pig—lucky us! Yesterday, they brought a vegan strawberry, blueberry, and blackberry crisp with a brown-sugar-sprinkled crust. We spend Friday nights making food together, drinking wine, and chatting. I can’t even tell you how happy that makes me.

I love the taste of my favorite flavors on my tongue and expanding my palate. This year, for example, when traveling in Sicily, I ate a prickly pear for the very first time. I remember looking at it closely. The green skin was bumpy and unfamiliar to me. I didn’t even know how to eat it. Thankfully, my friend showed me how to slice it and take a bite—seeds and all. It was sweet and different—unlike any other fruit I have had. Now it’s added to my list of dessert items that I enjoy.

Think for a moment right now. What about food makes you happy? Trying new things? The taste? Sharing food with friends? There are just so many aspects of food to love.

Still, it’s not just the deliciousness of food that makes me joyous. Yes, that’s a big part of it. But here is a confession. I am such a better person when I am well fed and eating mindfully. Maybe you are, too. Well-fed Susan is much more patient with her kids. She doesn’t let their minor squabbles bother her. She can wade through tasks she doesn’t enjoy as much, like paying bills or paperwork. The not-hungry, mindfully fed Susan is very present mentally. She can listen to your story in counseling or on the phone and remember every single word of it. On the other hand, the empty-stomached version of Susan misses details because that nagging little thought, “What should I eat?” keeps popping into her mind, distracting her.

I’m at my best when I’m like a mindful-eating Goldilocks: I don’t have too much or too little, but something that’s just right. I love the feeling of having eaten just enough—satisfied, but not too full.

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,” Virginia Woolf wrote, close to a hundred years ago. It’s one of my favorite mantras in life, and I include it in all my writing. And my goal is to help people do just that. But what I have found for myself, and others, it is that it takes some very specific strategies to make that happen. It’s not easy, but possible!

CHOOSING HAPPY VS. HANGRY

Growing up, I loved Choose Your Own Adventure books. They were a series of children’s books in which you get to decide the next step of the main character in the book, by making a choice at the end of each page: Do you want to run out of a cave because you’re afraid of dangerous animals? Then you turn to a certain page of the book. Do you want to continue into the cave, searching for treasure? Then you turn to a different page. This is very different from most traditional books, in which you follow along with the plot and have to go where it leads you, whether or not you like the ending. In the Choose Your Own Adventure series, you take a much more dynamic role, with active choices.

Unfortunately, in many ways, we treat our eating choices like traditional books, just seeing where things go. We feel powerless to change the plot. But I believe eating can be more like one big Choose Your Own Eating Adventure. You have the power to choose where you end up: how your eating will evolve, and how that will affect your mood.

Every day, we have all kinds of opportunities (#hungertunities or #hangrytohappy) to pick foods that turn our hunger into happiness. Every time we eat, we choose between happiness and hanger. And hanger isn’t something that happens only before we eat. We can also feel moody after we’ve eaten things that don’t really satisfy us or that fill us up too much. But whether it happens before or after we eat, hanger is the opposite of happy: feeling content with and sustained by our food choices. Happiness, for me, isn’t really smiling and feeling joyous. It’s a feeling of contentment and satisfaction.

Whenever I eat, I ask myself a simple question: Will eating this right now bring me hanger or happiness?

It’s a question I hope you’ll start to ask yourself, too.

Let me give you an example. This morning, I opened the refrigerator, coffee in hand. “Okay, what’s for breakfast, Susan?” I asked myself. Then I ran through my options: everything from a premade smoothie to some dry cereal. I knew I had a big day ahead of me. Clients that needed me to focus on them. A staff meeting. Soccer practice for my kids.

I like a lot of different breakfast foods. So my question wasn’t what would taste good to me.

It was “What will make me happy, not hangry?”

When I ask that question, instantly the conversation changes in my head. I start to think about the foods that will fill me and keep my energy up and prevent me from getting hangry, which can happen so easily when we’re busy. At the end of the day, it’s a chicken-and-egg experience. Which comes first in the hanger spiral, not eating well, or being hangry? It’s hard to tell, because not eating well leads to hanger and being hangry leads to not eating well.

My guess is that you picked up this book because you know all too well the downsides of not feeding yourself mindfully. Maybe you haven’t eaten enough and withered into a not-so-nice version of yourself. Or maybe you ate too much and turned into someone wracked by regret, guilt, and irritation—at yourself, most of all. Maybe, like most people, you’ve had both experiences.

I won’t promise you that there’s a magic bullet for eating mindfully 100 percent of the time. From working with hundreds of clients, I know that’s not true. And I know it from trying to manage my own hunger myself. You won’t find any magic bullets in this Hanger Management system. Instead, it’s a set of strategies and a way of being. It’s built to help in any scenario. And it works!

We’ll begin by understanding hanger—the science behind it: psychological, biological, and social. Once you learn the roots of hanger, you’ll get to know how hanger affects your life directly. Is it something that you struggle with only now and then? Or do you fret about your hunger level every day? Understanding how hanger affects you is the jumping-off point for the rest of the book: the tips that can help you deal with hunger in all kinds of situations.

As a busy professional and parent, I know that time is of the essence for my clients. Like you, they’re already busy. They don’t want to add anything extra to their day. So the tools I’ve developed to help them eat more mindfully are quick and easy to grasp, even for someone with the busiest of schedules. This book is designed so that you can crack it open and find relevant strategies in just moments.

And when you finish this book, this is my wish for you: I want you to understand that hanger is a real issue that impacts your life on so many levels that it deserves your attention. I want you to stop blaming yourself for not eating mindfully, as if it’s a personal failure. You will see that it isn’t. And I want you to have the mindful-eating tools to manage your hunger into happiness.

Hanger’s a big deal. Bigger than a lot of us realize or want to admit.

But the good news is that we can do something about it.

It’s in our hands.

It’s up to us to choose.