Behind the Plate with Heather Soman, RD

What If I Never Feel Full? Understanding Fullness and Satiety Cues

• Heather Soman, RD • Episode 8

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Ever wonder why you can feel “full” and yet still think about food? We take you inside the biology and behavior of appetite and show how to move from stuffed to truly satisfied. As a registered dietitian and intuitive eating counselor, I connect the dots between hormones, the gut-brain axis, and everyday choices so your meals start working for you instead of against you.

We break down fullness versus satiety in clear terms, then explore the hormone lineup—leptin, CCK, PYY, and GLP‑1—that helps your brain say enough. You’ll hear how the vagus nerve relays signals from the gut, why fiber variety feeds the microbiome and boosts short-chain fatty acids, and how those molecules support steadier appetite. I also share a personal story about dieting, big hunger, and the turning points that rebuilt trust with my body, especially after long stretches of restriction and food scarcity.

From there, we get practical. Learn how to time meals every three to four hours, compose balanced plates with carbs, protein, fat, and fiber, and layer flavor so satisfaction lands. We dig into sensory-specific satiety, why the first bites hit hardest, and how to use that cue to stop earlier without feeling deprived. If you’ve been choosing the “right” foods and still end up rummaging for snacks, this conversation reframes choice, pleasure, and permission so cravings calm down naturally.

If the science of fullness, the role of GLP‑1, leptin resistance, and gut health intrigue you, or you’re ready for straightforward steps to feel truly satisfied, you’ll walk away with tools you can use at your next meal. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s tired of white-knuckle eating, and leave a review with the one habit you’ll try this week—slowing down, adding flavor, or building more variety. Your body isn’t broken; it’s communicating. Let’s help it be heard.

Learn more at behindtheplate.ca

Grab the free Hunger & Fullness Cues Guide: behindtheplate.ca/hunger-fullness-cues

Explore The Empowered Eating Journey: behindtheplate.ca/empowered-eating-journey

SPEAKER_00:

Today we're diving into a question that I think is really important around intuitive eating and learning to become an intuitive eater, which is why don't I ever feel full? Maybe you've felt that before, like you could just keep eating and eating, or maybe you finish a meal and you're still thinking about food right after. It can feel frustrating and confusing, especially when you've been trying to eat intuitively or listen to your body, but your fullness cues seem unreliable. And trust me, I know from firsthand experience how frustrating this can feel. In this episode, we're going to unpack what fullness and satiety really mean and how they're actually different from one another. The science behind why you might not feel full, and including the role of hormones like leptin and GLP1, why satisfaction matters just as much as nutrition does, and some practical ways to reconnect with your satiety cues. I'm also going to share a little bit of a story about my own appetite and what finding satiety and understanding it meant for me. I'm Heather Somman, a registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor. This podcast is where we ditch food guilt, question diet culture, and learn how to nourish our brains and bodies in the way that nature intended. So let's get into it. Alright, let's start by defining a few things because the words fullness and satiety often get used interchangeably, but they're not quite the same. Oftentimes when I'm talking to people about the concept of fullness and satiety, I'm often getting them to reflect on their own body's cues. So oftentimes when we think of fullness, we think of a slightly uncomfortable feeling, or maybe a varying uncomfortable feeling, where our stomachs feel full. They feel like sometimes people describe it as like a balloon's been blown up in their stomach, not in the same way as bloating, but more just their stomach feels full. It feels like they've eaten quite a bit. Some people notice like their heart rate might go up, they might feel hotter, they might feel more tired, they might feel the need to lie down or sort of unbutton their pants because they're getting a little too tight because of that fullness feeling. These are all signs of fullness. And when I go through the hunger and fullness scale with people, oftentimes they might describe their fullness as getting to that point of quite uncomfortable. Especially if you grew up in a household where you were taught to finish your plate, even if you were, you know, full or not full. You were kind of taught from an early age to bypass satiety. You were taught to just go to this place of uncomfortable. So it can get really confusing when we're trying to relearn our body cues. Now, satiety is referred to feeling satisfied. And again, this can be a hard place to come to if you're somebody who's used to having really large meals or feeling that discomfort after eating. Satiety is about feeling satisfied both physically and mentally and emotionally with food. And you can be physically full but not satisfied or satiated, especially if your meal didn't include enough balance or flavor or variety, or if you didn't eat what you actually wanted. And we're gonna dive into that a little bit more as we move on here. But first, I want us to understand a little bit more about what our fullness or satiety hormones do and kind of the science behind it. So again, both fullness and satiety are influenced by a complex mix of factors. So it's not just what or how much you eat, but also how regular how regularly you eat or your stress levels and your body's hormonal responses. Of course, we know that we all have different hormonal responses to things. One of the main players here that you might already be familiar with is the hormone called leptin, which is released by your fat cells that signals to your brain that your body has had enough energy stored. Essentially, leptin helps to turn down hunger and increase that satiety feeling. What happened, which is something that kind of happens a little bit later on in the digestive process. Another hormone that is important to note is called cholecitokinin, CCK for short, which is when you eat, there are certain cells in your gut that release hormones that help your body digest food and signal to your brain that you've had enough. It's released in the upper part of your small intestine when fat and protein enter that part of your body. It's essentially one of the first I've eaten signals that your body sends. It also can slow down how quickly your stomach empties, which essentially just gives you more time to digest and absorb nutrients. It also can help us feel that fullness for a little bit longer. It's interesting because it actually communicates to your brain through your vagus nerve, which we know is connected to our digestive system. And so that's kind of where that gut brain connection comes in. And again, it helps you feel satisfied. A couple of other hormones to note here are peptide YY or PYY for short, or glucagon-like peptide GLP1, which is something that you might be familiar with. No, it's not just a drug, it's actually a hormone that our body produces, and both of which sustain fullness and slow gastric emptying. They can suppress appetite as well for several hours after eating. So another interesting thing that we need to add to understanding the science of fullness, and as you can tell, it's quite complex, is the gut microbiome. There are trillions of bacteria living in your gut, which you've probably heard at some point by now, that play a critical role in appetite regulation and digestion. They produce these things called short chain fatty acids, and some of the names for them would be acetate, proprionate, and butyrate. When they ferment dietary fiber, these fatty acids are secreted essentially. These short chain fatty acids essentially stimulate the release of that PYY and GLP1 hormones, which can reinforce things like the gut barrier integrity and may even communicate directly with the vagus nerve. The science on how this impacts weight and preventing weight gain is still debated in the literature, although it is something that is still being researched. But if you've been chronically dieting or eating in a calorie deficit or ignoring hunger cues for a really long time, your body can become less responsive to some of these fullness signals, especially things like leptin. It's almost like the body's brain has stopped communicating in a way that's really clear. That means that even when you've eaten enough, you might still feel hungry. And that's not because you're broken, it's just because your body's trying to protect you because it's in survival mode. It's trying to make sure you have enough energy. So if you've ever had that thought, and I know this is common amongst many of my clients, which is, why can't I ever just feel full like everyone else? Just please know that there's nothing wrong with you. Your body might just be trying to rebuild trust and regulation after a period of restriction. And this brings me to what I wanted to share about my own journey with understanding fullness and satiety. I've always been somebody with a really big appetite and a huge love for food, but I have never felt more out of control than I did when I was dieting. I felt like I couldn't control my appetite. I felt like no matter how much I would eat, I would still be hungry, still wanting more, still having lots of cravings. When I first started dating my now husband, he would take me on dates and just could not believe the volume of food that I was eating. And that's because during that time period, I was one, still a student, so I didn't have a lot of money for food. I didn't have a lot of access to a ton of foods in the home that I was living in. And I also was trying to eat in a calorie deficit. So both of those two factors combined just really made me want to eat a lot of food. And I also saw this in myself when I would come home for the holidays. Having so much food around, I felt really out of control with my hunger, and I couldn't really figure out what was wrong with me. Um, kind of a side note there that limited food availability and food insecurity have been shown to have major implications on things like our hunger and fullness hormones as well as our relationship with food. But I think we should save that for another episode. But essentially, what I'm trying to get at here is I know my experience isn't unique. I know a lot of people have felt this way before, and I think a lot of the time when we're stuck in this dieting mindset, we think that there's something wrong with us and our willpower when really our body is just trying to regulate some of these hunger and fullness hormones, and it sends us these cues that maybe our appetite feels a little bit higher in the moment, and it's also sort of dulling those cues that are telling us that we're feeling full. Alright, so as I've said a few times here, fullness and satisfaction are not the same thing. You can feel your stomach and feel physically full, but not necessarily feel satisfied. One example of this I often refer back to is you might eat a salad because you think it's the quote unquote right choice, but what you really wanted was something warm and hearty like the pasta or having fries. And in this case, your stomach might be full from the salad, especially you know, if it had like the dressing and the fat and some kind of protein on it, but your mind and your senses might still feel deprived. And if you've ever done this before and you have left that meal feeling like, oh, really wish I just chose the fries or really wanted the fries, or why didn't I just enjoy that quite as much? This is because satisfaction comes from joy, pleasure, flavor, and honoring what you actually want. If you're still in a diet mentality, you might be choosing foods that don't align with what you truly crave. And when satisfaction isn't met, it often leads to thinking about food more, snacking later, or feeling like you just can't stop eating. But when you allow yourself to eat what you actually want, not just be think you not just because you think you should, your body's cues tend to regulate. Cravings often decrease and eating tends to feel more balanced. And this is often where when I hear the feedback from people of, oh yeah, I know you're just gonna tell me to eat healthier, but it doesn't taste good. I really try to get people to explore what that means and sort of where that comes from. Because just because we're eating nutrient-dense meals doesn't mean that it has to be bland or boring. Nobody said you have to have plain chicken breasts. And if they did, they don't understand nutrition because nobody should live that way. You really should be enjoying the flavors of your food. And this is also a big reason why I advocate for, yes, we should definitely have lots of vegetables, but if roasting them in different seasonings and sauces and flavors is what makes you enjoy eating those vegetables, then do it because you're still getting in those nutrients. And I think that's really important. There's also something called sensory-specific satiety, which is a little bit of a mouthful, but basically it means that as you eat one type of food, your enjoyment of that food decreases. Think about it like this: if you've ever had, I don't know, I'm somebody who likes chocolate, so I'll bring up the chocolate example. If you've ever had a chocolate bar, the first piece of chocolate versus the last piece of chocolate are a very different experience. You might not feel that heightened sense of pleasure that you get when you eat something tasty like chocolate. And if you haven't noticed this before, I definitely implore you to experiment with this. Maybe it's a food that you really like. See what happens the first bite versus the last bite, because that is exactly what sensory-specific satiety does. And then your interest in other foods with different textures or tastes might still be strong. So an example might be when you're done your main meal and then all of a sudden you feel like having something sweet or crunchy afterwards. That is that sensory-specific satiety. It's not a lack of your control, it's actually your body's way of trying to get more variety in, which I think is just a really interesting thing to observe. All right, let me give you some practical ways to reconnect with your fullness and satiety. If you're listening to all of this and you're like, okay, cool, love hearing the science and the background stories, but like, how do I actually start to regulate some of this? So the first thing I want you to try to do is start asking yourself, what do I really want to eat and why? The why is such an important thing here, okay? Diet culture doesn't get to own salads. You might want to have a salad because you're feeling like something that's really refreshing and crunchy, and you might be feeling like having vegetables. And that's great. Let's let's choose that if that's what you're actually craving. But if you're forcing yourself to have something because you think you should, or it reaches a certain calorie amount, or whatever it is that you're looking for, you might want to reconsider that and see if you can find something that is nutritionally balanced, but also achieves some flavor. So that brings me to my next tip here, which is aim for a balanced plate that includes flavor. So, yes, I want you to try to include the carbs, the protein, the fats, and the fiber, but let's also not forget about the importance of taste here. So again, it's not just about nutrients, it's also about enjoyment. Eating regularly is a huge and important one here because if you've been skipping meals all day, if you skipped a snack, if you skipped lunch, you're probably gonna be feeling quite a lot of hunger going into a meal, and it's gonna make it really difficult for you to connect with those hunger and fullness cues. So, eating regularly, what I mean by that is eating around every three to four hours, that's when most people need to eat. Um, it does vary for some, but usually that four-hour mark is when we want to be having a meal and or snack. The long gaps, again, can make it really hard to notice some of those more subtle fullness cues when they start to come in, which if you find yourself stuck in this sort of like entering a meal where you're really, really hungry, having a large volume of food, and then entering feeling really, really full, it might be because you're not eating regularly enough. Next one is going to be to slow down and engage your senses. I know this might sound like kind of, I don't know, like hippy-dippy advice, but it is really important stuff. So noticing the smell, taste, texture of your food and taking time with your meals helps your body and brain sync up because that communication between your stomach, your intestines, and your brain takes a little bit of time. So you can actually feel when you've had enough when you are actually slowing down. And not only that, when we are slowing down, it allows us to get more pleasure from the food that we're eating. I don't know if you've ever eaten something really tasty really fast and immediately have just wanted more. That could have been stopped by you just slowing down and having that thing and actually enjoying it and enjoying the process. So if you're somebody who eats really fast, consider slowing down and seeing if that impacts you at all. And then if you feel chronically hungry, consider your history with restriction. This is a really important one, especially because of the world that we live in. If you've been dieting or restricting calories, your body might not feel in a safe place yet to be offering you reliable hunger and fullness cues. So it keeps those hunger cues high and it keeps those fullness cues really far down. With consistency and nourishment, that does start to settle, but it really does take quite a bit of time. I'm talking months here, and for some people, years. It really depends on how long that restriction's been going on for. And another thing I want to talk about is like actual food that we're eating. So remember that part when I was explaining the science when we were talking about gut bacteria? Well, fiber plays a really big role in our gut health. I'm sure this comes as no surprise. I'm I know you've probably heard this before, but it's not just one type of fiber that we need. We need lots of variety. Specifically with those saturated fatty acids, not saturated, short chain fatty acids that we were talking about. We want to consider eating more things like yes, vegetables and fruits. Some things that come to mind would be like artichokes, leeks, things like beans, uh, bananas, things like legumes, potatoes, apples, carrots, oranges, things like again, more legumes, things like our grains, our barley, our rice. Those types of foods give us a variety of different types of fiber that play a really big role in our gut microbiome. So, yes, if you're hitting the balance with your meals, that's wonderful. But if you're really only eating one to two different types of carbohydrates or vegetables, you are doing yourself a disservice because variety is a really, really important part here of regulating that fullness and satiety. I say all this again to remind you the importance of variety in all food groups. So not just with fruits and vegetables, but with all foods. If you want to learn more about this topic specifically around sort of like that gut bacteria connection and sort of like the foods that can help with that, please let me know by DMing me on Instagram. That's where I'm the most active. You can find me at Behind the Plate Nutrition. Um, and I'd be happy to do a deep dive episode, but I'm only gonna go in that direction if people are interested in it. So, learning to feel fullness and satiety again takes time, especially if you spent years overriding those signals because you are trying to dull your hunger cues because you are trying to fit a calorie target, for example. Some days you might hit this sort of intuitive eating right on target, and other days you might miss the mark and eat to a place where you're feeling uncomfortably full, and that's okay. Just so you know, that's also a part of normal eating. It's not about eating in a way that's perfect, it's about getting curious with yourself and your body instead of criticizing it all the time. And when you start feeling fullness and satisfaction as forms of communication from your body and not a test or like a pass or a fail, that's when our real change starts to happen. If this conversation resonated with you, stay tuned for next week. We're gonna be talking about something that I didn't cover here, which is emotional eating. And this is something that often shows up when the physical and emotional needs sort of get tangled. It's also what I hear to people when they say, okay, I know I've eaten enough, my body is satisfied, and yet there's something else going on here, and I think it's coming from emotion. So if you're interested in learning about emotional eating, definitely stay tuned for next week. If you're looking for a little extra guidance on understanding your body's cues, you might want to check out my free resource on my website, which is all about hunger and fullness cues. You can find me at behindtheplate.ca, and that'll include some more practical tips and tools for you to use to sort of understand these hunger and fullness cues a little bit more. You can also check out my empowered eating journey where I walk you through step-by-step ways to connect with hunger, regular eat, talk about things like diet culture, fullness, and all of these different things. Um, and you can find the links to all of this in the show notes, along with my newsletter. I also share a lot of tools and reflections each week. Usually they're based on this podcast, but I always include some different sort of unique tips in there as well. Thank you so much for listening. And I just want you to remember your body isn't broken. It's just trying to communicate with you. The more you listen, the more it learns to trust you back, and the less you're gonna start to feel at war with your body. I'll see you next week.