Autism and Hunger Cues: Redefining Intuitive Eating for Neurodivergent People

Many autistic people struggle with recognizing hunger and fullness cues. You might find yourself skipping meals unintentionally, only to end up binge eating late at night. Or perhaps executive functioning difficulties make mealtimes so overwhelming, that you wait until you’re shaky and lightheaded before realizing you haven't eaten all day. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone! Neurodivergent people experience hunger and fullness differently from neurotypicals. This doesn’t mean we are unable to recognize and respond to these cues, we just have a unique way of interpreting them. In this post, you’ll learn why traditional eating advice might not work for autistic people, how interoception and nervous system dysregulation affect our eating patterns, and practical strategies for recognizing your own unique hunger signals.

Why Do Autistic People Struggle to Recognize Hunger?

To understand why traditional intuitive eating advice can be harmful for neurodivergent people, we need to look at two key challenges that affect how autistic people process hunger signals: reduced interoceptive awareness and nervous system dysregulation. First, we’ll explore each of these challenges separately, and then we’ll unpack how they interact to create unique difficulties in recognizing hunger for autistic and ADHD folks.

Lack of Interoceptive Awareness in Autism

Interoception, also known as the eighth sense, is your body's internal monitoring system. It helps you interpret whether you're hungry, thirsty, full, need to use the bathroom, etc. In fact, anything that can’t outwardly be grasped is likely tied to your interoception! Your interoceptive awareness also plays a key role in identifying emotions. This connection helps explain why many autistic people experience alexithymia, which is an inability or difficulty identifying and describing emotions. Alexithymia can make every unfamiliar body sensation feel anxiety-provoking because you can't clearly interpret what these sensations mean. So as you can imagine, we become caught in a Catch-22. The anxiety about not being able to interpret our body's signals makes us question and overthink our hunger cues even more, which in turn makes it even harder to interpret them clearly.

Many autistic people lack interoceptive awareness, which means we might not pick up on these internal signals until they're screaming at us. This is why you might suddenly realize you're ravenously hungry without experiencing any of the gradual build-up signals that neurotypical people describe, like a growling stomach. It's also why traditional advice to "eat when you're hungry" and "stop when you're full" can feel so invalidating; these cues might not show up for us in the same way, or might only register at the point of being OVER hungry.

How Nervous System Dysregulation Impacts Hunger

The second challenge is nervous system dysregulation. As autistic people, we often find ourselves in fight-or-flight mode. This makes sense when you consider that we're navigating a world that wasn't built for us – everything around you is a potential threat to your nervous system, which is responsible for ensuring your safety!

Perceived danger activates the sympathetic branch of your autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for the fight-or-flight response. When you’re in a sympathetic state, all of your energy flows to the bodily systems that are most likely to help you escape danger. Your heart rate speeds up to deliver more oxygen to your muscles, your pupils dilate to improve vision, and you may feel antsy and restless as your body prepares to run away. Because digestion, an energetically costly process, would lessen your chances of survival, the body shuts off signals that support eating and feeding behaviors. If you were being chased by a tiger, your body’s last priority would be to ponder whether or not you should pause and grab a snack!

The Compound Effect of Reduced Interoception and Sympathetic Nervous System Activation

To complicate matters, lack of interoception and nervous system dysregulation don't exist in isolation – they compound each other. When you're in fight-or-flight mode, it becomes even harder to detect your already-dampened interoceptive signals. This can create a frustrating cycle: stress makes it harder to notice hunger, which leads to undereating, which stresses your body further, making it even harder to recognize hunger signals. The tug-of-war between interoception and sympathetic activation is why you might experience seemingly contradictory symptoms like feeling nauseous even though you need food, or not feeling hungry until you feel like you’re going to pass out. It's not that your body isn't sending signals, it's that these signals get lost in translation between your body's stress response and your interoceptive processing.

Why Might Autistic People Eat More When Stressed?

It’s worth noting that everyone's body responds differently to the fight-or-flight state. Some people experience the shutdown of hunger signals we just discussed, leading to undereating. Others may find themselves overeating or binge eating, which I cover in my Autism and Binge Eating Series. If you're in this second camp, know that this is a valid survival response with a biological explanation: your body is trying to store extra energy to handle the perceived threat. Just like a bear eating extra before hibernation, your body might be trying to build up energy reserves to help you survive what it perceives as a dangerous situation. So whether you tend to eat less or more under stress, know this: your body isn’t “wrong.” Your body is doing the best it can with the resources it has to keep you safe in a world that often feels overwhelming.

Why Traditional Intuitive Eating Falls Short for Autistic People

Now that we understand how interoception and nervous system dysregulation affect our eating patterns, let's talk about why popular "intuitive eating" approaches often don't work for autistic people. While well-intentioned, intuitive eating programs are typically designed with neurotypical brains in mind, making many of their core principles inaccessible or even harmful for autistic individuals.

The Problem with Hunger-Fullness Scales

Take the hunger-fullness scale, for example. This common tool asks you to rate your hunger and fullness on a scale from 1-10. But how can you assign a number to a sensation you might not clearly feel? For many autistic people, hunger doesn't build gradually from a 1 to a 10. It might jump from nothing to extreme hunger without any warning. Rating these internal sensations can actually increase anxiety about "doing it right" rather than helping us better understand our bodies.

When Mindful Eating Creates More Stress

Mindful eating practices can be equally challenging. Traditional advice to "eat slowly and savor every bite" assumes we can comfortably tune into eating sensations. But for autistic people with sensory sensitivities, being hyper-aware of food textures and tastes might trigger sensory overload. Add to this the expectation to sit still and eat "mindfully" when our bodies need to be stimulated or are craving distraction, and these practices can exacerbate the stress response. And this isn’t even taking the connection between autism and anorexia into account!

Challenging Traditional Intuitive Eating Principles

The core principles of intuitive eating also present challenges. "Honor your hunger and respect your fullness" assumes these signals are clear and consistent. "Make peace with food" doesn't address the very real limitations of sensory sensitivities. "Challenge the food police" doesn't consider how autistic black-and-white thinking patterns might affect our relationship with food rules. Even the concept of "coping with emotions without using food" assumes we can clearly identify our emotions in the first place – something many autistic people struggle with due to alexithymia.

Redefining Intuitive Eating for Neurodivergent Minds

Does this mean autistic people can't eat intuitively? Absolutely not! We are incredibly adaptive beings, meaning we just have to come at this from a different angle. Instead of trying to force ourselves into a neurotypical framework of intuitive eating, we need an approach that replaces judgment with curiosity.

Removing judgment means letting go of previous labels, associations, and everything we've been conditioned to believe about what it means to be an intuitive eater. In other words, we must let go of the very associations we have around the popularized program of Intuitive Eating. When we invite curiosity, we can see intuitive eating for what it truly is at its essence: eating using your intuition. And here's the thing: autistic people have an incredibly powerful sense of intuition. It's this innate wisdom that makes us creative problem-solvers, allows us to think outside the box, and helps us spot patterns that others might miss.

The real challenge isn't about developing intuition – we already have it. The challenge is about trusting that intuition. Not what you think the intuition “should” look or feel like according to someone else's principles, but your actual intuition. Your body has its own unique way of communicating with you, and that communication style is valid even if it doesn't match what's described in popular intuitive eating books.

Recognizing Hunger Cues as an Autistic Person

How can you learn to trust your intuition when you've been invalidated your whole life? When you've been told your experiences aren't real, your sensory needs are "too much," and your way of being in the world is "wrong"? It's no wonder many of us struggle to tap into our intuition – we've been taught to doubt our internal experience at every turn.

This is why embracing your neurodivergence is such a critical aspect of living a life of freedom. It allows you to release the limiting beliefs you’ve acquired over a lifetime, and replace them with empowering beliefs. Creating these beliefs, once again, starts with curiosity. Because only when we become curious of what we actually want to believe and how we actually want to be living, can we start taking the actions that align with our true identity.

For me, recognizing my unique hunger signals started with creating space to simply notice (without judgment) how my body communicates with me. I had to let go of everything I'd read about what hunger "should" feel like and instead become an observer of my own patterns and responses. Through this process of curious awareness, I discovered that my hunger shows up in ways I never would have recognized if I was still trying to fit into the neurotypical mold.

What Autistic Hunger Signals Can Look Like

Here are some of the hunger signals I've learned to recognize in myself as an autistic person:

• Mental hunger (thinking about food) is just as valid as physical hunger
• A sudden pull towards the kitchen, even if I don't feel physically hungry
• Increased anxiety or difficulty concentrating
• Feeling weak or shaky (though ideally, I eat before reaching this point!)
• Changes in my mood, especially increased irritability, i.e. feeling “hangry”
• A general sense of "something's off" that resolves when I eat

Your signals might look completely different from mine, and that's okay! The key is creating space to discover your own patterns. Start noticing what happens in your body and mind throughout the day. When do you feel your best? When do you struggle? What changes after you eat? There's no "right" or "wrong" way for hunger to show up.

Building Autism-Friendly Eating Routines

While you explore and learn to trust your unique hunger signals, it's helpful to have eating structures in place. Here's what has worked for me and many of my autistic clients:

Work With Your Natural Patterns

Rather than forcing yourself to eat at "normal" mealtimes, pay attention to when you naturally feel most able to eat. Maybe you're never hungry first thing in the morning, but get hungry a few hours after waking. Or perhaps you notice you have more energy for food preparation in the evening. Use these patterns to create eating routines that work for your brain and body.

Make Eating Easier with Simple Strategies

Executive functioning challenges can make meal preparation overwhelming, especially when you're already hungry. Here are some ways to reduce this barrier:

• Keep easy-to-prepare foods on hand
• Store snacks in multiple locations (desk, bag, car)
• Create a "food emergency kit" for overwhelming days
• Remove judgment about "kid" foods or convenience meals – if it nourishes you, it's valid!

Plan Ahead for High-Stress Times

Remember how stress affects our hunger signals? This is why it's crucial to have strategies for times when you're overwhelmed:

• Set gentle reminders to check in with yourself about eating
• Prepare portions in advance when executive function is better
• Have backup meals that require minimal preparation
• Give yourself permission to eat even if you don't feel traditionally "hungry"

What Does Neurodivergent Food Freedom Look Like For You?

The goal isn't about finding a "perfect" way of eating, as our bodies and needs constantly change. Trying to control your intake will only end up controlling you. Rather, the essence of neurodiversity-affirming intuitive eating is about developing a relationship with food that accommodates your autistic traits. By removing judgment and inviting curiosity, you can tap into your natural pattern-recognition abilities to understand your body's unique way of communicating hunger.

Whatever you discover is valid. Whether you prefer eating on a schedule, following mental hunger cues, or finding your own unique combination of approaches, remember to trust your ability to adapt. When you adopt the mindset of a lifelong learner, acknowledging that you’ll never have it fully figured out, you set yourself free. You set yourself free because you stop trying to fit yourself into boxes that were never built for you in the first place.

Want to create your own unique version of food freedom as a neurodivergent person? Join us in the Autistically ED-Free Academy!