One of most common, yet strangest, things I have noticed with people learning to eat normally, is that even a year into the process, they are still waiting for the day when they won’t be hungry anymore.

They often don’t fully realize it, but there is still a little part of them that is waiting to be healed from their hunger, as if it is a symptom that must be cured. Part of us believes that the real goal of all of this, is to end up losing our appetites.

That’s because it has been so consistently ingrained in us that having an appetite is unhealthy, and that not wanting to eat is healthy. We think, that if we can re-feed ourselves enough, and fix our metabolisms, that eventually we will get to a time and a state when we aren’t hungry anymore.

And I am here to tell you that is never going to happen.

That is also what lots of us attempted to do with obsessive “intuitive eating”. We thought that if we were really being intuitive, we would not want to eat. If we were really listening, we wouldn’t want to eat much at all. It is something to do with the unspoken belief that having an appetite is weak.

Now, I have written things in this book that might have subconsciously added to that underlying belief or hope. I say things like “eat yourself to the other side”. What other side? The side where you aren’t as ravenous or afraid of or fixated on food. But what I mean is, eat to get yourself out of famine mode. Famine mode is the extreme, biological, constant fixation on, and need for, extra food. We don’t want to live in a survival famine mode forever. However, even once you “get to the other side” where food is just food, you will still have an appetite. Because an appetite is a sign of health and a functioning metabolism.

Having an appetite or wanting to eat is not weak, it’s… being alive. And it is never going to go away. And if it does, go to your doctor because you might be dying.