A growling stomach may be a late indicator of hunger, like crying is for a baby, but it is a good indicator. What makes it a good indicator?

• it can’t be misrepresented as something else
• even a child can understand what it means
• it exists for everyone (to the best of my knowledge)
• the average human can go without food for days (or in my case many many days) without suffering major medical problems. Therefore there is little physical risk in waiting to be hungry enough for your stomach to growl (unless you have a medical condition that makes this untrue).

This method of hunger detection is a great one in my opinion, but if you don’t want to always reach this point then you’ll need to recognize your other hunger signs. These might include:

• irritability
• feeling weak
• feeling tired

Some people recommend eating based on the time of day rather than based off of hunger. This can work well initially for binge eaters, because in some cases this may keep you from getting excessively hungry (which can start a binge).

My problem, however, was that I “felt” like eating all the time, and my binges weren’t triggered by true hunger. I don’t think I even let myself get to the point of true hunger most of the time. Thus eating based on a clock didn’t make much sense for me, but for some people it may work o.k. intially.