Do you find yourself regularly thinking about having a drink once mid-afternoon hits? Or maybe by the time you get home from work, you just cannot wait to pour a glass of wine. You may assume that your cravings appear like clockwork every day simply because you’ve trained your brain to expect a drink at a certain time. But what if your cravings are actually connected to hunger and being under-fueled is making the desire for alcohol louder?

This is episode 485 and I’m explaining how hunger can get tangled up with the desire to drink, why years of ignoring or controlling what you eat can make this connection especially difficult to recognize, and what happens to your urges when you start adequately fueling yourself.

Whether you want to drink less or stop drinking, this podcast will help you change the habit from the inside out. We’re challenging conventional wisdom about why people drink and why it can be hard to resist temptation. No labels, no judgment, just practical tools to take control of your desire and stop worrying about your drinking. Now, here’s your host, Rachel Hart.

One thing I often talk about when I’m working with people to help them drink less are their patterns around food. And I don’t mean their patterns around overeating. I just mean their patterns around feeding themselves and giving themselves enough fuel to make it through the day. And a lot of times people are surprised when I bring up food because, of course, people come to me wanting to change their drinking and they assume we’re just going to talk about alcohol. And so why are we examining what they ate for lunch if their lunch didn’t also include a martini?

But after working with so many people, I started noticing the overlap between cravings for a drink and signals that your body needs food, especially with people who had strong, predictable cravings to drink starting in mid-afternoon to early evening. This pattern of under-fueling, which then can lead to having more cravings to drink, it routinely shows up with some of the drink archetypes, particularly the Reward archetype, the Escape, the Hourglass, and the Remedy. For all of those archetypes, alcohol is often someone’s go-to way to change how they feel at the end of the day.

And what I started to notice was that some people had a hard time distinguishing between the signals that their body needed food and the cravings they were having for a drink. Because they were working with me on drinking less, when we talked about this, they wanted to put all their attention in that moment when they had an urge or they had a craving, they wanted to put all that attention on alcohol. And so they would ask me, well, how do I just get better at resisting this urge? How do I get through this craving? What can I do to distract myself?

Meanwhile, I started asking questions like, when did you last eat? Or what have you eaten today? Or how hungry are you at 3:00? And sometimes the answer was, oh yeah, I barely ate anything today because I’ve been running around like crazy. Or they’d say, you know what, I usually skip breakfast because I really like to do intermittent fasting. Or, I don’t know, I had a coffee and then I’ve just been snacking on things here and there all day. And I would ask them, okay, well, what if we just got curious about whether some of what you’re experiencing as a craving to drink is actually your body signaling you that you need to eat.

So, what if you ate something in that moment? What if you had a small snack to take the edge off your hunger and just see what happens? And even when people would tell me that they would get home and they would be so starving at the end of the day, they would come up with all these reasons why eating in that moment wasn’t an option.

So they’d tell me things like, well, I don’t really like to snack between meals. I don’t want to eat right before dinner. I don’t want to spoil my appetite, or I don’t really feel like I should be hungry because I haven’t really done that much today. I didn’t even work out. Or they would say, you know, I don’t really want all the extra calories from a snack. It’s actually fewer calories to have a glass of wine. Or you know what? I’m saving my calories for dinner.

And I started to see this really fascinating pattern. For some people, feeding themselves when they’re hungry is more fraught than pouring themselves a drink. The drink simply feels easier to justify in that moment than giving themselves food. And I want you to really think about that. You can be genuinely hungry mid-afternoon, early evening, but feeding yourself or just having a small snack can feel really hard to justify. But a glass of wine or a beer when your day is done, that can feel perfectly reasonable to have. Simply because we have all of these stories about when we can eat and how much we’re allowed to eat and whether or not eating at certain times is justified. And so we learn to bypass a lot of our signals that our body needs food by giving ourselves a drink.

And that also matters because hunger can make alcohol more appealing. When you have an urge to drink, it’s very easy to assume that everything you’re feeling in that moment is about alcohol because you’re thinking to yourself, I really want a drink, or a drink sounds really good. But that desire for a drink, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Your physical state matters. Your brain and body may simply be calling for fuel. And hunger doesn’t always announce itself with a growling stomach and the thought, I really need something to eat, especially if you spent much of your life learning to ignore, override, or control your hunger.

Maybe you spent years dieting. Maybe you got really into intermittent fasting. Maybe you learned a long time ago that what matters most is how many calories something has. Maybe you have all sorts of ideas about when you should be hungry or how much food you should need or whether you’ve done enough during the day to actually justify eating. When you don’t have a good relationship with your body’s signals for fuel, you can become really practiced at hearing your body’s request for food and thinking to yourself, no, I don’t need to eat right now, or telling yourself, I shouldn’t eat right now, and instead, having a drink.

This is where alcohol can get tangled up in everything. If you repeatedly get to the late afternoon, early evening, feeling hungry, and instead of answering that hunger, you pour yourself a drink, instead of giving yourself food, your brain starts to learn this pattern. The pattern of using the physical state of being hungry as a cue for alcohol. So instead of experiencing those sensations and automatically thinking, I need food, you may experience them and think, God, I really want a drink.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the urge for a drink isn’t real, and it doesn’t mean every craving for alcohol is secretly a sign that you’re hungry. It just means that hunger may be one of the conditions that is making that craving you have louder. And this is why I want you to get curious about something that may seem completely unrelated to changing your relationship with alcohol. How easy is it for you to simply feed yourself when you’re hungry? Do you trust your body when you get signs that it’s hungry? Do you reliably respond to those signals with food, or do you try to ignore them?

When you’re hungry, do you immediately start negotiating with yourself? Do you start thinking, you know what, dinner’s soon. I shouldn’t need a snack. I ate too much yesterday. I had a big lunch. I shouldn’t be hungry now. I’m trying to be good. I haven’t exercised today. I should be able to wait until dinner. Because sometimes we make the craving to drink the problem when we’ve also created a situation where alcohol feels permissible and food doesn’t.

So I teach this exercise called HALT. So when a craving appears, you can pause and ask, am I hydrated? Am I hungry? Am I angry? Am I lonely? Am I tired? Because these are some of the key stressors that can lead to drinking. But if you’re someone who has spent years overriding hunger, asking, am I hungry, may not be enough. You may genuinely not know, or you may decide that you shouldn’t be, or you may have all these rules about when it’s okay to eat.

So instead of asking that, you can ask more specific questions like, when did I last eat? What have I eaten today? Have I gone a long stretch without fueling my body? Am I refusing to feed myself right now because I have a rule around whether or not I’m allowed to eat or how much I should eat? And then you can experiment. So you don’t turn this into another set of food rules, you just see what happens when you make adequately fueling yourself a priority throughout the day. Maybe you eat a real breakfast and lunch instead of running on caffeine. Maybe you make sure that your meals actually satisfy you. Maybe you keep healthy snacks around you and in the office and in the car and actually give yourself permission to eat one at 4:00, even if dinner is at 6.

You can also experiment in the moment. You’re standing in the kitchen thinking, ugh, I really want a drink. Before you decide what to do about the drink, what happens if you experiment by giving yourself some food right now? Not because you’re trying to trick yourself out of drinking, but because you’re trying to parse out what this signal is really about. Maybe you eat a little something, maybe you have some string cheese and you decide, you know what? I still really want the drink. Great. That’s data. Now we know. But maybe you discover that those cravings change. Maybe they become less intense, and maybe that urge for the drink doesn’t feel quite so urgent. Maybe the thought of drinking suddenly doesn’t have that same pull.

I have watched this happen again and again with so many people. And it’s an important reminder that changing your drinking isn’t always about getting better and better at saying no to a craving. Sometimes it’s about getting better at answering that craving in a different way. Sometimes the more useful question is, what is happening in my body right now that might be turning up the volume on my desire for a drink? And could that be connected to my hunger? Because if you spent years believing that hunger is something you should control, ignore, outsmart, you may be really surprised what happens to your desire for alcohol when you simply start focusing on adequately fueling yourself.

All right, that’s it for today. I will see you next week.

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Hey guys, you already know that drinking less has plenty of health benefits. But did you know that the work you do to change your relationship with alcohol will help you become more of the person you want to be in every part of your life?

Learning how to manage your brain and your cravings is an investment in your physical, emotional and personal wellbeing. And that’s exactly what’s waiting for you when you join my membership Take a Break.

Whether you want to drink less, drink rarely, or not at all, we’ll help you figure out a relationship with alcohol that works for you. We’ll show you why rules, drink plans, and Dry January so often fail, and give you the tools you need to feel in control and trust yourself.

So, head on over to RachelHart.com and sign up today, because changing the habit is so much easier when you stop trying to go it alone.