245. What Your Hunger Is Really Telling You—It’s Not Just About Food

Your physical hunger is actually trying to tell you something deeper about your emotional and spiritual needs—and science proves it.

Even with powerful appetite-suppressing medications like GLP-1s (Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro), Dr. Adrienne Youdim reveals why emotional hunger still demands to be heard—and why that's actually a good thing for your wellbeing.

In this science-backed episode, discover how stress, loneliness, and unmet needs literally trigger the same hunger hormones as fasting, and why appetite suppression doesn't equal emotional regulation.

What You'll Learn:

• The surprising science of how emotional hunger triggers real biological hunger hormones (ghrelin, leptin, GLP-1)
• Why stress literally makes your hunger hormones spike—it's not just willpower or weakness
• How to identify what you're really hungry for: belonging, respite, validation, or connection

"Appetite suppression does not equal emotional regulation. Emotional regulation requires its own attention because emotional eating is a form of reactivity—an automatic, habitual attempt to distract, soothe, or suppress some emotional or spiritual experience." - Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Common Hidden Hungers Explored:

• Hunger for Belonging: Loneliness and isolation driving you to the pantry instead of toward connection
• Hunger for Respite: Self-neglect and caretaking burnout manifesting as food cravings
• Hunger for Validation: High-achiever patterns that once served you now becoming destructive

The Three-Part Framework for Emotional Hunger:

Regulate: Break the reactivity cycle with pause practices

• Before: Immediate reactive response to emotional triggers—reaching for food, scrolling, overworking
• After: Space between trigger and reaction, calmed nervous system, intentional choice
• The Tools: Deep breathing, body scans, nature walks, guided visualization, five-minute pauses before acting

Restore: Build rituals that support emotional regulation

• Before: Sporadic self-care, inconsistent coping mechanisms, reliance on reactive behaviors
• After: Sustainable practices that consistently address emotional needs
• The Rituals: Morning journaling, lunch walks, Sunday hikes, creative expression, structured eating and movement routines

Reframe: Transform hunger from shame to signal

• Before: Viewing emotional hunger as weakness, something to suppress or fix
• After: Understanding hunger as valuable information about unmet needs and misalignment with values
• The Practice: Ask yourself: "What am I truly hungry for? What deep-seated need is my mind and body trying to attune me to? How can I live more aligned with my true north?"

Why GLP-1 Users Have a Unique Opportunity:

With the "food noise" quieted, you have the perfect window to build emotional awareness, develop coping skills, and retrain habitual pathways for lasting change beyond medication.

Your emotional hunger is a signal—a call to action from your nervous system saying something critical needs a

3 Ways that Dr. Adrienne Youdim Can Support You

1. Subscribe to Dr. Adrienne's weekly newsletter https://www.dradrienneyoudim.com/newsletter
2. Connect on Instagram : Follow @dradrienneyoudim for tips and inspiration on well-being and peak performance.
3. Come back next week — Every episode of Health Bite explores the physical, emotional, and spiritual hungers that drive us, and delivers the essential “nutrients” you need to thrive.

Transcript

The Hunger You’re Fighting Isn’t What You Think—Here’s What It Really Means

This week, we're going to talk about hunger and why the mind-body connection is critical, whether you're on GLPs or not.

We often think about hunger as something physical. It's a sensation to suppress or to control. But hunger, as we've discussed on this podcast many times, is much more than just a signal from your stomach. It is a signal to yourself. It is a signal of your unmet emotional and spiritual needs.

And this is grounded in the science. This is wired in your DNA. As a physician who specialized in weight loss and mind-body medicine, I have seen this time and time again with my patients and even with myself—that even with medications like GLP-1s that quiet the physical hunger, like we discussed last week, the emotional hunger, the spiritual hunger still remains to be heard, to be felt, and to be addressed.

And so that's what we're going to talk about today on Health Bite. We're gonna talk about the mind-body connection behind hunger.

WELCOME

Welcome back to Health Bite, the podcast where we explore the essential nutrients that support your physical, mental, and emotional health and wellbeing.

I'm your host, Dr. Adrienne Youdim. I'm a physician, author, and expert in medical weight loss and mind-body medicine, and I help people like you understand the deeper hungers behind our reactivity, our burnout, our self-neglect, and self-sabotaging behaviors.

Each week, I will offer you solutions that are grounded in science, in personal experience, and my decades of experience working with patients, from obesity medicine, to nutrition, to mind-body practices, designed to help you shift from depletion to a place of clarity, intention, and vitality, so you can achieve your personal and professional success without sacrificing your health and well-being.

And that's what we are all looking for, right? So let's dig in to this week's episode.

THE SCIENCE OF HUNGER HORMONES

So let's talk a little bit about hunger and the mind body connection behind it. Because hunger, as we know, is a physical drive for food, but hunger is also emotional and spiritual. And even that—even the emotional hunger—is tied to and driven by our hunger hormones, driven biologically. So let's get into that.

Your hunger, our hunger, is managed by a set of hormones. Hormones that are released by the stomach, by the intestine, by our fat cells, by our pancreas. All of these hormones converge on the appetite centers that are found in the hypothalamus of the brain.

So for example, when you eat food, ghrelin, which is a hormone that signals hunger to the brain, will be suppressed, driving down or limiting that hunger signal. At the same time, these other hormones—GLP-1, for example, which is what is mimicked in Ozempic and Wegovy and Mounjaro and ZepBound—GLP-1 goes up. And that signals to the brain that you're full.

At the same time, when your fat cells grow, fat cells will release a hormone called leptin. Leptin also signals energy sufficiency to the brain, telling the brain that you're full. That makes sense, right? More fat cells means more energy being stored, means you don't need to eat as much in order to reclaim and store more calories, more energy. And so, it signals to the brain to slow down and stop eating. These are all biological factors that manage our hunger that are very sensible, right?

EMOTIONAL HUNGER IS BIOLOGICAL

But what about emotional hunger? What about the hunger that we feel when we experience difficult emotions? Emotions like stress, or loneliness, or even merely boredom?

How often have you sat in bed, scrolling on the phone, or browsing the channels on your TV, and you're just plain bored, and you find yourself making your way to the pantry? You're full, your biological hunger is sated, and yet you are hungering for something more.

Your emotions, your difficult emotions, literally drive your hunger hormones. So remember we talked about ghrelin, the hormone that signals hunger released by the gut. Fasting will make ghrelin go up, but difficult emotions, including stress, also make ghrelin levels go up.

So literally, emotional hunger will drive biological signals to eat. This is not just willpower. This is not just a lack of control. This is a physical, biological drive to eat.

And so it makes sense that even if we are using these very effective drugs like GLP-1s to suppress hunger and to suppress appetite, appetite suppression does not equal emotional regulation. Let me repeat that. Appetite suppression does not equal emotional regulation.

Emotional regulation, it's its own thing. It requires its own attention because emotional eating is a form of reactivity. It is an automatic, habitual attempt to distract, soothe, deviate, suppress, some emotional or spiritual experience. And that hunger may be suppressed for a while, it may be dormant and silent for a while, but that underlying need remains.

HUNGER AS A SIGNAL

And you know what? That's a good thing. Because your emotional hunger, being that it is a signal of your unmet needs, your unmet emotional and spiritual needs, it's actually a call to action. It's saying, hey there, there's something here that's really important to me. There's something here that requires our attention. Please don't ignore it because it's critical to our well-being.

And so if we can learn to number one, not shame that hunger, not suppress that hunger, but actually to lean into it, to be curious, to be inquisitive, to ask, what is that hunger actually telling me? Then it gives us an opportunity to meet that need, to meet us where we are at and to satisfy that itch, that thing that we are longing for.

COMMON HUNGERS

What are some common hungers? Let's get into the nitty gritty of this. For example, and I chronicle so many of these in my book, Hungry for More. If you want a short version, you can also listen to my TED talk on emotional hunger.

Hunger for Belonging

But for example, hunger for belonging. Who doesn't want, need, and require belonging? It's hardwired in our neurobiology. It's essential for our survival. And so our nervous system has made it so. Our biology has made it so that lack of belonging actually triggers a whole cascade of neurohormones, biological hormones, that make us reactive, that make us or drive us to act or react.

But what if we slowed down and noticed what that hunger was? That hunger for belonging. It means that we feel perhaps loneliness or isolation. Or we're craving connection. What are the things that we are doing perhaps to promote that feeling?

Unbeknownst to us, maybe we are overworking and not making time for family or friends. Maybe we are being stubborn in a relationship. Maybe we're being selfish in a relationship, or merely not giving time or attention to seeing the relationship through the eyes of another. Maybe we've been hurt by a family member, a parent, a partner, a sister, a best friend, and we are feeling that hunger to connect.

What if we leaned into that hunger for connection or for belonging, noticed where this disconnect was in our relationships, or how we were handling them, or why we were feeling isolated or lonely, and then took time to really cultivate the relationships that would help address that hunger. That is a perfect example of how we can lean in.

Another variation of this hunger for connection or hunger for belonging is something that I describe that I experienced personally when I was really young. We moved from Los Angeles to Texas when I was seven, eight years old, and I stuck out there like a sore thumb. I looked different. Being a child of immigrants, we acted different. My parents, my family was undergoing financial distress. And so, you know, we lived different because we didn't have the means to live like people in our cohort.

And this elicited a strong feeling of—a strong hunger for belonging. A hunger that I remember I addressed with chocolates that I used to hide in my closet and under my bed. These hungers are real.

Hunger for Respite

Another real life example is hunger for respite. How many of us are so busy? Busy working, busy caretaking, busy addressing the needs of our family members, of our partners, our children, our parents, our bosses, workplaces, and consistently neglecting ourselves, our own well-being.

This can go on and this can be tolerated for only a certain period of time until your nervous system is going to react, until your mind and body is going to say enough is enough with self-neglect. I cannot tolerate being put on the back burner indefinitely.

When we neglect to see those cues, when we suppress that hunger for respite, it will blow up in our face as burnout, for example, or even depression and anxiety. There are so many ways in which this can manifest.

And yes, it's distressing. That hunger is hard to tolerate, but it's also a signal. It's also a message from your mind and body that is telling you, hey girl, you need to take a minute. You need to take a beat to engage in some self care.

And that doesn't necessarily mean massages and manicures or a round of golf, although it could, but like deep self-care, which means really taking the time to take stock of how you're living your life, what you're getting, what you value, what are your goals? Are your actions aligned with those things? Are you living a life that is actually aligned with your true goals and values? And if not, what shift do we have to make? Where do we have to shake things up?

And this is hard work. This is why I say self-care is not necessarily manicures and massages. Get that along the way. But it's actually deep thinking, deep excavating, and difficult work to address that underlying hunger. But you know what? When we make it to the other side, there is so much to be gained. Because on the other side of addressing this hunger is a place of true alignment with the person who you really are.

Hunger for Validation

And another one I'm just going to mention—I mean, there's so many, like I said, Hungry for More catalogs maybe four of them—what about hunger for validation? How many of us are so conditioned and so desirous of approval from others that we are running ourselves ragged?

And I can tell you this one resonates so deeply with me personally, that desire to appease, that desire to gain approval, that desire to gain other people's validations, that desire to continuously achieve, to ratchet up my successes. This is, by the way, a major hunger that is so common to high achieving professionals. Because the very thing that got us here, the very thing that got us to professional success ran out its course. It can only get you so far before it starts to become maladaptive and destructive in your life.

THE CHALLENGE OF DISCERNMENT

So these are just some of many examples of difficult emotions. And again, this is not—the emotional eating is not just, you know, about being petty or weak willed. This is really physiologic because as I said, the beginning, your emotional hunger will trigger your biological response.

And so, if your physical and your emotional hunger are so intertwined, if your emotional hunger can literally present in the same way as your physical hunger, if your hormonal response to emotional hunger is the very same as fasting, for example, then how in the hell are we supposed to tell these two apart? How are we supposed to discern?

THE PRACTICE OF PAUSE

And the answer is, by developing a practice of pause. The ability to pause between the trigger and the reaction. Between the desire and the habitual response. That space, that is an area and an opportunity for intentional action so that you're not just reacting, so that this is not just reactivity but intentional activity, intentional, aware action.

And by the way, since we spent so much time talking about the GLP-1 drugs last episode, and we will be talking about them going forward as well, people on GLP-1 drugs actually have an incredible opportunity to do this work because you are suppressing that food noise, that buzzing, that compulsion to go after food. And so that is a perfect place. It's a perfect opportunity to build emotional awareness, to build coping skills, to create and to retrain habitual pathways so that we can create sustainable change.

WHY REACTIVITY IS SO STRONG

Let's go back for a minute and talk about practices that develop or cultivate pause. Because reactivity, my friends, that is real. That desire to act out how you're feeling, act out your anger, your sadness, your grief, your loneliness, your fatigue, your frustration, that is real. It is hardwired in our neurobiology, our nervous system, made us reactive so that we could survive immediate threats and immediate predators.

And then layer on top of that the fact that so much in the modern world has made us more reactive. Our highly palatable foods, foods that have been designed and developed to have an instant surge of blood glucose, to have an instant release of insulin, to have an instant release of dopamine, and serotonin so that we are not only wanting and feeling pleasure, but we're chasing. Dopamine is actually the neurohormone of chase. This is all, again, baked into our environment.

What about our phones? What about the Amazon app? The ability to buy everything on demand? All of these immediate rewards are building our need for immediacy. It's building our reactive pathways. So we really need an intentional process to peel ourselves away from all of this reactivity. And pause practices is how we do that.

PAUSE PRACTICES

What if when you felt that craving, when you felt that trigger, when you felt that surge of anxiety or anger—instead of acting immediately, instead of writing out that text message or email or responding with harsh words towards our partner or our coworkers, what if we took a beat to take a deep breath? What if we told ourselves, nope, I'm going to walk outside for five minutes. And then I'm going to decide whether I want to write that email, whether I want to go into the pantry, whether I want to respond to that person.

Go out in nature. Take a deep breath. Do a guided visualization practice. Imagine yourself in your happy place. Allow yourself to self-regulate.

Do a body scan. Notice that your heart rate is up. Notice that your blood pressure is up. Notice that you're tensing your jaws. You're clenching your jaws. Your shoulders are tense. Your fists are ready to go. You're feeling a knot in your gut. Your sphincter is all tight. Breathe into those places. Create and soften the body.

Break that cycle of reactivity. Difficult thoughts and emotions leading to physical sensations that are then perpetuating more difficult thoughts and emotions. Break that cycle. You can do that with your pause practices.

RESOURCES

The practices that we address in our Resilient Minds course, practices that I've talked about throughout this podcast. You can scroll back and take a look. Practices that are available and downloadable on the website at dradrienneyoudim.com. There are so many resources that I have for you because these practices have been a personal lifeline. These practices have been life-saving for me personally.

So, peruse. You have a menu to choose from. Find a pause practice that suits you. Learn to create space between the trigger and the reaction.

BUILDING RITUALS AND STRUCTURE

And then once you've done that, you can create new rituals that support emotional regulation. Maybe you do a journaling practice every morning. Maybe you take a walk outside at lunch. Maybe you hike every Sunday. Maybe you listen to soothing music. Maybe you start a creative practice and create your own music. Maybe you engage in expressive drawing or expressive writing. You create some ritual that supports emotional regulation.

And then you create some structure, structured eating, structured movement, structure and routine. These are your guardrails that help cement those routines because that is the way that we are going to create sustainable change.

Whether our reactivity is resulting in a physical hunger that we soothe with overeating or with drinking, smoking, scrolling, overworking, people pleasing, more and more achieving, whatever your drug of choice is, however you are soothing over your hunger, suppressing your hunger, being reactive to your hunger—these are practices, creating pause, creating rituals that support emotional regulation, building routines around these rituals.

These are ways in which you can lean into your hunger, understand the signal that it is trying to share with you. It's trying to get your attention. It wants your compassion. It is a desire to be aligned so that you can live well, so that you can live authentically, so that you can live in a way that matches your true goals, your true desires, not your superficial desires that soothe.

YOUR PRACTICE

And so I want to leave you with this practice. I want you to ask yourself this question: What am I hungry for? What is that trigger actually suppressing? What is it that my mind and body are actually trying to get my attention to do? What deep seated need am I avoiding that I could be open to? Where is the opportunity to live in a way that is more aligned and intentional?

What is the way in which I can live more aligned with my goals, values, with my true north? Where can I tap into my inner knowing and inner wisdom to live in a way that ultimately gives me more joy, more vitality, more pleasure on a deep level?

THE REFRAME

Okay, so here's my ask. I want you to reframe this notion of hunger. I want you to reimagine hunger from something that is shameful, that needs to be soothed and suppressed, to actually an opportunity. I want you to ask yourself, what is it that this hunger is representing? What deep-seated need is my mind and body trying to attune me to?

And then I want you to go deep. Ask yourself, what is that true north, that inner wisdom, that guided intuition, and see where it takes you. See how this very question can help you uncover the very thing that perhaps will soothe the distress, the difficulty, the painful emotion, the hunger, that you are intended to address.

CONNECT & NEXT WEEK

I'd love to hear what you guys come up with. Feel free to reach out and DM me on Instagram at Dr. Adrienne Youdim or at my website, dradrienneyoudim.com. You can email me from there. I actually read and respond to every email and message I get on both those platforms.

Join me again next week where we are going to go in even deeper into the hungers that we experience, physical, emotional, spiritual, and where I will offer you the nutrients to heal and address them, mind, body, and soul.

I look forward to seeing you and have a great week.