The ideas behind this page come from Intuitive Eating, the approach created by dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. Two of its ten principles are honoring your hunger and feeling your fullness, and a hunger scale is one of the plainest ways to practice both. This worksheet is an independent project: Tribole, Resch and their organization did not make it, review it or endorse it.

A hunger scale puts a number on something your body reports all day long. On this one, one is ravenous and ten is painfully full, with neutral at five. You check in as you sit down to eat and again when you finish, and after a week or two you can see the shape of your own eating: where your meals usually begin, and where they usually end.

A noticing tool, not a diet

Many hunger scale handouts set target zones, such as begin at three or four and stop by six or seven. This page leaves those out on purpose. There is no correct number here, and nothing on the page tells you when to put the fork down. The job is to notice, and to get curious about the meals that run differently. The one exception is hunger that lingers after a meal, which is a signal worth answering, and the reading points it out when your meals keep ending there.

The ten stops

• 1, ravenous: weak or shaky, and food is all you can think about.
• 2, very hungry: short-tempered and low on energy, with a gnawing ache.
• 3, hungry: a growling stomach, and almost anything sounds good.
• 4, a little hungry: the first quiet signs, with food drifting into your thoughts.
• 5, neutral: neither hungry nor full, with food off your mind.
• 6, a little full: the edge is off, and there is still room for more.
• 7, comfortably full: satisfied and content, with hunger gone quiet.
• 8, very full: a little heavy, somewhere past comfortable.
• 9, stuffed: uncomfortable and sluggish, ready to lie down.
• 10, painfully full: aching, and maybe a little sick.

Treat these words as a starting point. Your three may feel like someone else's four, and that is fine, because the only comparison this page makes is you against you.

How the worksheet works

Before you eat, tap the stop that matches how you feel. The page holds that mark while you eat. Afterward, tap where you landed, choose breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack if you like, add a few words (took my time, ate on the go), and put it on the scale. Each meal becomes an arc from its before to its after: a meal that started very hungry and ended stuffed draws a tall arc across most of the scale, and a small snack makes a little hop.

Once three meals are on the scale, a green arc marks your usual meal, joining the middle of your starting points to the middle of your ending points, and a sentence spells it out with a note on what to notice next. The card holds fourteen meals, roughly five days of three a day. When it is full, remove one or clear the card and begin again.

What the evidence says, and what it doesn't

Appetite researchers routinely rate hunger and fullness by marking a point on a line. A review of those line scales found that they are consistent within the same person, that they predict when people start eating, and that they work best for comparing someone's ratings with their own under different conditions. The same review found they track with how much people eat but cannot stand in for it, which is one more reason not to turn any number into a portion rule.

A meta-analysis of ninety-seven studies found that people who score higher on intuitive eating report fewer disordered eating symptoms, a kinder body image and more well-being. Nearly nine in ten of those studies measured people at a single point in time, so they show a link rather than cause and effect, and none tested a hunger scale on its own.

When to use it

Try it for a week or two when meals have started to feel rushed, skipped or automatic, or after a long stretch of eating by someone else's rules. If your meals keep starting at the very hungry end because the day gets away from you, planning the week's dinners in the Meal Planner can put the next meal in place before hunger gets loud. If a pull toward food feels more like a feeling than an empty stomach, The Emotions Body Map is a gentle place to find where that feeling sits.

If eating feels hard

If you are being treated for an eating disorder, ask your care team whether a scale like this fits the stage you are in; some teams start with a set meal plan and bring hunger cues back later. In the US, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline (866-662-1235) is answered by licensed therapists on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Eastern, and ANAD's helpline (888-375-7767) is open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Central. And if a hard day ever turns into thoughts of hurting yourself, 988 takes calls and texts in the US around the clock; anywhere else, use your local emergency number.