09/08/2026
Sometimes the urge to eat isn’t asking for food.
It’s asking for something to happen inside you.
Something to move you.
Something to touch you.
Something to look forward to.
Something that makes you feel pleasure, sensation, desire - anything that brings you back into your body.
You’ve been thinking, planning, working, controlling, being useful, trying to get things right.
And somewhere along the way, you stopped feeling the warmth of the water on your skin.
You stopped noticing how good it feels to stretch your body.
Music became background noise.
Beauty stopped reaching you.
You stopped moving slowly enough to actually taste your food, feel someone’s hand on your body, notice the evening light, or feel the strange pleasure of simply existing inside yourself.
And then suddenly:
I want something.
You walk into the kitchen.
And food makes perfect sense.
Because food is immediate.
It has texture. Temperature. Smell. Color. Anticipation.
It gives you something to desire.
And when you eat it, something finally happens inside your body.
For a moment, you are feeling again.
I think this is something we often miss when we talk about overeating.
We focus so much on the food that we never become curious about the state we were in before we reached for it.
Because there is a difference between physical hunger and the feeling of being empty of experience.
When we spend too much time disconnected from the body, a deeper hunger can easily become:
I want to eat.
The feminine, to me, lives very close to this.
In our capacity to receive life through the body.
To be touched by something.
To experience beauty.
To feel pleasure without needing to earn it.
To move at the pace of the body rather than constantly at the pace of the mind.
To feel sadness when sadness is there.
To feel desire when desire is there.
To be affected by music, nature, touch, another human being.
To actually inhabit the moment we are living.
When this part of us becomes starved, food can become an incredibly efficient substitute.
Because eating is receiving.
You put something pleasurable into the body.
You taste.
You feel.
You anticipate.
You fill.
Something finally moves inside you.
And this is why trying harder to control food can sometimes deepen the cycle.
You may already have too much control.
More rules.
More monitoring.
More discipline.
More living from the neck up.
While underneath all of it, the body is whispering:
Please. Give me something I can feel.
Think about the moments when food naturally becomes less interesting.
When you are dancing and completely inside your body.
When you are creating something and lose track of time.
When you laugh until your stomach hurts.
When you lie in the sun and actually feel its warmth.
When someone looks at you and you allow yourself to feel beautiful.
When you put on music and let it move through you.
When you cry instead of swallowing the feeling.
When ordinary life becomes sensual again.
Food no longer has to carry the entire weight of pleasure.
Of course, sometimes hunger is simply hunger. Restriction, inadequate nourishment and dieting can create very real biological urges to eat.
But there are other moments when “What do I want to eat?” may not be the deepest question.
Try asking:
What am I hungry to experience?
Maybe you don’t need to become better at suppressing your appetite.
Maybe your appetite is trying to lead you somewhere.
Toward pleasure.
Toward presence.
Toward beauty.
Toward feeling.
Toward a life that actually reaches you.
