Early in my fruitarian journey, I got an intimate look at how many ways I was attempting to satisfy my deepest inner hungers...and all the many ways in which I used food. My fruitarian path gave me ample opportunities to get to know my body's true physiological hunger signals too, and to learn to distinguish them from my emotional needs and habits around food.

A mentor of mine invited me to make a commitment to eating only bananas for three weeks. He called this “going to banana island.” It could be done with any one fruit, and for a shorter or longer time frame. Bananas are especially convenient, affordable, easy to ripen, and filling. What I noticed on my ‘trip to banana island’ was that new space opened up in my days – other than bringing a case of bananas home from the store occasionally, there was no shopping to do, no meal planning to do, not much thinking about food, and almost no food prep or cleanup. I suddenly had lots of extra freedom. I was excited by this expansion of time….though I have since noticed with my clients that it can actually make some people feel uneasy and a bit disoriented. Food takes up a big space in most people’s lives.

When only one type of (healthy) food is available, it becomes easy and natural to wait for true hunger before eating again. This is the relationship animals in the wild have with food. Satiety signals become clear, too – I knew when I’d had enough bananas at a meal, and there was no desire to keep eating more banana at that point. What foils our body’s natural signals is hyper-palatable, hyper-stimulating unnatural food-stuffs, and/or lots of tempting variety at a meal. Even when my body was fully satisfied from a meal of bananas, I probably would have managed to eat a few sweet dates if they had been passed around for ‘dessert.’

Our bodies have a built-in physiological reward system which is essential to our survival, and encourages us to seek out pleasurable things. It’s the ‘dopamine response.’ In our natural environment, this leads us to make choices that insure our health and vitality. The anticipation of reward provides the motivation to act. Everything that is actually good for us is also pleasurable! Amazing, right? A problem we face in the modern world is that we now have access to so many things that are not good for us, but that we also experience as pleasurable, and our innate system is hijacked and tricked.

There was a time, about two weeks into my stay on ‘banana island,’ when I became a little extra restless for ‘something else.’ I was committed to following through on my experiment with just bananas, and I watched my mind get creative. It was an emotional and psychological need, more than anything physiological. I made some ‘ice cream’ from nothing but frozen bananas pureed in a food processor, blended more bananas with a little water and poured it over the ‘ice cream’ as a sauce, and topped my banana sundae with some diced bananas. All bananas! I enjoyed the change, my appetite was well satiated, and my kids were very amused by me.

True physiological hunger is experienced as a feeling of emptiness in the stomach, accompanied by a pleasant drawing sensation in the mouth, throat and neck area. There may be extra saliva in the mouth. If the signals are ignored they will fade, and then return shortly to make us pay attention. It’s not uncomfortable. Thirst can be uncomfortable, because it is more important that we honor our need for water, whereas we can safely go a much longer time without food. True hunger makes food taste much better when we do eat it. If everyone was in touch with and always honored these signs of true hunger, and ate only at those times and only the foods naturally meant for humans, it would be almost impossible to be overweight, and we would hardly know degenerative disease. Nature has designed the system very well.

False hunger, on the other hand, can cause us all kinds of problems. When most active digestion is finished and the body’s nerve energy is once again available, symptoms can result from sensitivity to the mobilization of waste products. Energy has been freed up once the digestive task is done, and the body will intelligently use it for cleansing and healing. Headache, fatigue, light-headedness, weakness, crankiness, foggy-brain, trembling or shakes, sadness, boredom, anxiety, stomach rumblings, congestion – these are common symptoms of the body’s cleansing and detoxifying process. It becomes confusing to people because when they respond to this toxic hunger by eating, the symptoms will often temporarily improve. But this is only because the waste mobilization process is once again halted because now the body’s energy is diverted back to the critical digestive process. On a truly natural diet, the inner terrain of the body is much cleaner and less toxic, and the necessary daily cleansing process is much more efficient and generally not uncomfortable at all.

Food Addiction is a real thing, but only with cooked, processed, and otherwise unnatural foods. When our bodies have acclimated to noxious agents it is called addiction (essentially an addiction to the physiological changes and sensations, not a biological addiction by the body which would be a ‘devolution’ that the brilliance of natural design would not permit). Processed and spiced or salted foods can cause artificially big releases of dopamine within the brain's pleasure centers, creating a deceptively intense short-term feeling of well-being. The ratio of sugar, salt, and fat in commercialized processed food has been calibrated to hook us, so that we will buy more. Many grains and animal products can also stimulate us unhealthfully due to chemical components naturally found in them such as opioids and caso-morphine.

It’s truly a vicious cycle, in which highly palatable food (with an unnaturally ramped-up pleasure factor) activates opioid circuits in our brain, and activating these circuits increases our drive to consume these highly stimulating foods. Hyper-palatable foods alter the landscape of the brain (tricking the dopamine response and appestat), and our desire remains unnaturally high. Animals, humans included, seem to have a built-in preference for super-normal stimuli, or features larger than those that occur naturally (likely a natural survival mechanism to push us to seek out the best available). Unnaturally rewarding foods are rewiring our brains.

My own most challenging cravings early in my raw vegan journey were for cheese, pizza, and processed sweets. Learning to eat sufficient quantities of fresh ripe fruit, and gradually learning how to take care of my other human needs, such as for love, community, self-care, happy movement, rest, sunshine, nature, creativity, play, etc., continues to be the best and only real antidote. Will power only works for so long. Attending well to all of our human and spiritual needs fixes the addiction problem permanently.

I heard about a research experiment where a rat was placed in a cage with two water bottles, one pure and the other laced with heroin. The rat came to prefer the toxic water and soon died, and this happened every time the experiment was repeated. A scientist came along who decided to expand this experiment by adding a second cage with the same two water bottles, but in this cage there was a group of rats, and an interesting and rewarding play-scape. All of these rats also tasted the toxic water, and even returned to it occasionally, yet none of them became addicted and they all remained healthy. The rats in this cage had community, play, and purpose - some of the most important things we hunger for!

Addictions to negative or low-vibration emotions and to negative or low-vibration foods go hand-in-hand. Strangely, we become attached to and comforted by negative emotions such as grief, sadness, hopelessness, depression, anger, bitterness, frustration, regret. Identifying with these frequencies helps us to fit in, since it’s where most people hang out much of the time and we love to commiserate, and it can bring us attention and excuses (people feeling sorry for us, and us feeling sorry for ourselves). Feeling badly gives us permission to take the ‘easy’ road and live small, avoiding the responsibility which comes with claiming our real power. Choosing negative-health foods helps us keep wearing this comfort-cloak. We can stay in a perception of ourself and our life that is familiar, even if it is disappointing or depressing. Also, our food preferences may be strongly influenced by what has happened to us in the past. Memories interact with the reward pathways that drive our behavior. If our mother made her special chicken soup for us when we were sick as a child, we may associate chicken soup with love, and we may also unconsciously perceive a benefit in being sick, if that was the primary time we got mother’s special attention.

By negative emotions, I am referring to the lower emotional frequencies, that are other than our calm, peaceful, joyous, loving natural state. It’s important to allow all the feelings on the spectrum as they arise, but I find it helpful to view the lower-vibe ones as indicators that I have moved away from my harmonious, high-vibe natural state. Seeing it this way helps me not to dwell in the negative state longer than necessary, and to activate a shift back to my natural homeostasis which I now recognize as my preferred, natural place to dwell.

As I continued on my fruitarian path, I started to make some interesting observations about my changing relationships to certain things. As my body was cleaned up and re-calibrated, I gradually became less interested in conflict, drama, gossip, overeating at restaurants or parties, or passive activities. I gravitated much more toward inspirational or nature films and documentaries, and I no longer wanted to ‘get lost’ in fictional novels much. I was more interested in my own new visions, and I wanted to get outdoors and do active things with friends, rather than sit in cafes talking for hours. Or if engaged in long conversations, I wanted them to be about things that felt REAL. I wanted my shoes off more, and my skin exposed to the sun and air. I wanted simpler meals, without much mixing of ingredients. I wanted to shed my belongings, and to live more lightly and closer to the earth. It became very clear that I was more hungry for self-development and true connection than for fancy food and drink and entertainment.

Food was relegated to its naturally appropriate role in my life, and I no longer used it like a drug. In a sense, the rug was pulled out from under me when I adopted a low-fat raw vegan diet. I still found great pleasure in my food – fruit is delicious! - but minus the over-stimulating or numbing processed or spiced-up cooked-food options, food did not have a hold on me in the same way. Its true purpose was revealed to me as fuel and nutrition, and it was a nice bonus that the plain whole fruit in its natural state of perfection tasted fantastic (remember, nature made it so that what is good for us is pleasurable).

Honestly, for me, changing the food I ate has been the easier part of my journey. I discovered that navigating raw emotions and spiritual needs was much more complex. Shifting to this simple natural diet in today’s modern world sometimes felt akin to standing naked and alone on a mountaintop, in a raging thunderstorm. For a while it felt as if there was no protection from the storms. But facing this experience with courage and commitment - instead of eating to numb the discomfort - helped me to build amazing new muscles and reach new heights of sovereign self-hood. My senses became more acute than ever, and my mind clearer. My experience of emotions became more overwhelming at first, but I noticed that strong emotions would pass through me more quickly, more as young children experience them.

I became aware of just how hungry I was for sincerity, and to be able to speak my truth and be heard and accepted. I wanted to hear other people speaking their truth. I needed to connect with my true purpose and share my gifts in ever more radically honest ways. I needed to sing my own unique song, to move toward my own true alignment, and to connect deeply with the people who were on a compatible path. I needed to live more fully from my heart, and to clarify my purpose and mission for my life. And for this I needed more stillness, more spaciousness, more immersion with nature, more sincere connection with other seekers, and closer attention to the energies moving through me each day. My fruit-centered diet unleashed an insistent hunger of a spiritual kind.

Something opens our wings.
Something makes hurt and boredom disappear.
Someone fills the cup in front of us:
We taste only sacredness.
-Rumi

Living Heart with Ellen Livingston

De-Coding True Hunger