In this follow-up to our deep dive on Interoception, we tackle the real-world struggles of reconnecting with your body.

We discuss why you might feel "numb" when you try to scan your body, why some people feel hungry 24/7 (and what it really means), and whether you can heal your relationship with food while still tracking calories.

Key Questions Answered:

1. What if I do the body scan and feel absolutely nothing?
2. Why does it feel like I’m hungry every waking hour?
3. Do I have to delete MyFitnessPal to learn intuitive eating?
4. How do I find the "stop" signal when I’m used to cleaning my plate?
5. I know it’s anxiety, not hunger—but I still want to eat. Now what?

Action Step: Try the "Halftime Pause". At your next meal, stop eating when your food is half gone. Put the fork down for two minutes. Don’t look at your phone. Just sit. Give your satiety signal time to travel from your gut to your brain.

The Somatic Signature of Hunger: Why You Can't Tell When You're Actually Hungry

Episode Summary: You’ve been told to "listen to your body" and "eat when you're hungry."

But what if you’ve been listening for years and hear absolutely nothing until you’re starving? In this episode, we dismantle the myth of Intuitive Eating for chronic dieters. We explore the neuroscience of interoception, your body’s internal dashboard, and how years of restriction have effectively cut the wire between your gut and your brain.

If you feel like you're flying blind without a calorie tracker, this episode explains why and how to turn the lights back on.

Important points:

• The "Deafness" of Dieting: How ignoring hunger signals for years has trained your brain to treat biological cues as background noise.
• Interoception 101: Understanding the "8th sense" and the role of the Insula in regulating your weight.
• The Intuitive Eating Trap: Why standard advice to "trust your gut" backfires for dieters who have lost their somatic connection.
• High & Buzzy vs. Low & Hollow: A practical tool to distinguish between anxiety (nervous system activation) and true biological hunger.
• Rebuilding the Hardware: Why you need "physical therapy" for your interoception before you can successfully eat intuitively.

Action Step: Practice the Non-Food Body Scan three times a day. Stop for 30 seconds and locate a sensation (temperature, pressure, heartbeat) that has nothing to do with food. You are retraining your brain to receive data from the body again.

In this Q&A, we go deeper into the concept of Identity vs. Discipline.

We tackle the specific, messy roadblocks that popped up after Monday’s episode—specifically the fear that identity work is just "delusional" and the exhaustion of the evening binge.

Questions Answered:

• The Evening Crash: Why you have zero discipline after 5:00 PM (and why it’s not your fault).
• Imposter Syndrome: Is "acting" like a healthy person just lying to yourself?
• Identity Grief: What happens when your whole personality is tied to being the "funny fat friend"?
• When It "Fails": I asked the identity question and still ate the cookie. Now what?
• Starting Small: How to shift identity when you have 100+ lbs to lose.

Key Takeaway: Transformation is a grieving process. You have to be willing to "kill" the old version of yourself to give birth to the new one. This isn't just about calories; it's about who you are in the world.