What to do when nothing sounds good to eat
It’s been hours since you’ve last eaten and it’s well past lunch time. You know you need food, but you don’t feel hungry and nothing you have sounds good. Even when you scroll through the options for food delivery near you, it’s all falling flat in your mind. You pick up a bag of tortilla chips and eat a few. They taste like nothing so you shove the bag back into the pantry and go back to what you were doing. You skip lunch, hoping your appetite returns for dinner, only to repeat this cycle at 7pm.
If the above scenario sounds familiar, you’re not alone. It can be so frustrating to be stuck in that place. An even more excruciating variant is when you DO have hunger pangs but can’t bring yourself to choose something to eat because none of it seems worth it or appealing. This can happen to us all from time to time, and if it’s a one-off day or even week, it may not present many problems. However, too many of us get stuck in these patterns for longer periods, or return to them at various points in life like a roller coaster. That’s when we need to step in with an action plan to take care of ourselves. If this has been your reality for a while now, in addition to reading on, I’d urge you to reach out – to a friend, family member, medical provider, or dietitian if that’s feasible for you. Sometimes simply speaking it out loud can prompt action, but you may need more coaching and external support to get things back on track
First a quick summary of why and how this can happen (bear with me while we geek out on the science for a minute, or feel free to skip ahead to the action steps if that feels better for you). Because adequate food is necessary for life, humans have complex and powerful mechanisms hard-wired into our physiology to help us obtain food in adequate amounts to support our metabolic demands (maintaining body temperature requires SO much energy, as does keeping these brains functioning 24/7). These mechanisms include our physical hunger cues like stomach growling as well as the pleasure/reward pathways in our brain that makes food taste good, which motivates us to go seek it out. An appetite for food (and water) is so key to life that a full examination of all the biochemical, physiological, and hormonal pathways involved in appetite and energy balance would require an entire semester’s worth of college lectures.
That said – sometimes the drive for obtaining food is overridden. Stress, depression, and burnout can all take a major toll on the normal processes associated with procuring, eating, and enjoying food – making those tasks feel like chores you’d rather put off for later. The underlying driving force in many instances is a dysregulated nervous system – the biological meter that determines “OK-ness” is detecting trouble.
The autonomic nervous system is tasked with 24/7 vigilance to threats to our very survival in this wild and crazy world. When it detects one, it mounts a complex fight/flight/freeze/collapse response to address the threat and return us to safety. All resources are devoted to surviving the threat. In fight or flight, our heart starts pumping faster to provide more oxygen to our limbs (for fighting and running away), our body is releasing cortisol to help our blood sugar rise so we have extra energy we need for this endeavor, and our digestion nearly grinds to a halt, turning normal appetite cues (hunger, pleasure in food) way, way down. A collapse response looks different – breathing and heart rate slows dramatically, we feel overwhelming fatigue/low energy, and we may feel numb or dissociated. It’s our “playing dead” response. The freeze response is a chaotic combination of the two, if you can imagine it. In all of these responses, our pre-frontal cortex, the brain area responsible for rational thought and decision making, goes dark. All of this is happening outside of our cognitive control. Automatically!
All is well and good when the system is correctly detecting a life-threatening situation. If we’re walking across the street and a bus is about to hit us, we need all hands on deck to get us to jump out of the way to safety. We can’t be deciding what to tackle next on our to-do list or picking out what sounds good for dinner. And when we do return to safety, the nervous system senses we’re out of danger (we watch the bus drive by, we see our feet planted safely on the sidewalk, our breathing starts to normalize) and after a few minutes we can move on with our day.
The problem comes in when this system is activated in response to life events that aren’t imminent threats to survival and aren’t resolved in a matter of minutes. A difficult relationship with a family member, a stressful period at work, planning for an upcoming trip, fears about the current world events, etc. It can be anything, and it’s very individualized. If our nervous system is chronically activated into fight/flight/freeze/collapse, we are not feeling in charge of our lives. We are not connected to our rational minds, nor are we attuned and responsive to our body’s hunger cues. If we’re in fight or flight, we’re ping-ponging through life, overpacking our schedules, jumping from one activity to the next, making long to do lists, feeling no appetite whatsoever, and claiming to be “too busy to eat”. In freeze and collapse, we’re so overwhelmed or emotionally numb that nothing seems worth the time and energy to make. Even choosing what to order is too much effort. We might notice hunger when it’s really severe, but responding to it feels like too much.
As if all of that wasn’t bad enough, falling into a pattern of chronic undernourishment as a result of these forces at play will actually exacerbate the problem, because starvation activates the nervous system threat response. The result is one big vicious cycle of hot mess express.
So how do we break the cycle?
Ideally, we’d be able move through life without our nervous systems erroneously sensing threat all the time. Retraining your nervous system is possible, but it takes a lot of time and practice. And we need to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner TODAY. And tomorrow. And the next day. So we need some skills and techniques to use right away to get things back on track with food.
Practice mechanical eating: We need to remind ourselves that our body needs the same amount of food everyday, even if our hunger cues or desire to eat are absent. On these days, eating in a mechanical way is an act of self care. In mechanical eating, we drop the pressure of needing the meal to taste good or provide pleasure. We look at food as pure fuel. A mantra I use is: “When nothing sounds good, anything will do.” In other words, you can’t make a wrong choice here. Literally any meal that you know works for you on a good day will work. This mantra frees you up to let go of making the perfect choice, allowing you to go through the motions of eating and moving on with your life. And remember - this feeling won’t last forever.
How to put this into action: Combine what you have on hand into a balanced plate (or bowl) of roughly 1/3 each of starchy foods (bread, pasta, rice, wrap, potatoes, crackers/tortilla chips), protein-rich foods (eggs, canned tuna, yogurt or cheese, frozen meatballs or falafel, deli meat, nut butter), and fruits or veggies (canned or frozen count). Then, try to add a source of fat (dressing, nuts, peanut butter, butter/oil, single serving cup of guac). Maybe it’s a cohesive meal that makes sense, and maybe not! If you’re ordering food delivery, just order whatever you ordered last time.
Practice real-time nervous system regulation before and during your meal: Provide sensory information to your body that you’re OK, and no threat to your life exists in this moment. Eat with a caring friend or family member, sit under a weighted blanket, situate yourself with your food so you can gaze out a window (ideally a window with a view of some kind of nature, or a view of the horizon), listen to soothing music, light a lavender or citrus scented candle.
Be proactive: When you are having a better day and food doesn’t feel hard, take a moment to prepare for more challenging days or weeks. Make a list of quick, easy to prepare meals that you usually like and hang it on the fridge or inside the pantry. On your next grocery trip, stock up on the non-perishable or long-lasting items from your meal ideas so you’ll always have most of what you need on hand. Some ideas to get you started:
Eggs, toast with butter and jam, and fruit.
A turkey and cheese sandwich with baby carrots and yogurt.
A can of bean soup with cheese and crackers.
A bowl of oatmeal with fruit and peanut butter.
A yogurt bowl with fruit, granola, and a drizzle of peanut butter or almond butter.
While I don’t wish this struggle on anyone, the reality is we live in a stressful and oftentimes frantic world, so having some basic self care skills around feeding yourself will go a long way to staying grounded and connected to the things that matter to you most.