Grain Free Granola Bars + Honoring our Hunger

Happy Friday my friends. Today I have a new recipe for grain-free, chocolate-coated granola bars (you can also eat them like cookies, but more on that in a bit!). This recipe idea was sparked by my grain-free granola clusters reel, which went bonkers on Instagram (442,000 views as of yesterday 😳). While I eat the clusters occasionally for breakfast, my favorite way to eat them is as a snack or post-meal treat. I decided to tinker with the recipe to create a bar that’s sturdy enough to transport and involves chocolate (see “post meal treat”). After a bunch of testing I’m now happily swimming in granola bars, which have supplanted the granola clusters as my favorite snack when hunger strikes. Speaking of which, let’s go deeper into hunger. 

What does hunger feel like?

What does hunger feel like in your body? I’ve been having this conversation a lot lately with my eight-year-old. She’s always had a sensitive stomach (she’s been gluten-free for years, but we just discovered that she’s also highly sensitive to eggs). I realized that, while she was having pain due to inflammation after eating, she would also often complain about stomachaches before eating. As we started digging in, we realized she was mistaking the sensation of hunger for pain. Hunger can indeed feel painful—there’s a reason why we say “hunger pains.”

For me, hunger does feel like a tightening in my belly, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve found that the feeling of hunger in my body is changing. These days I often notice it first in my brain as fogginess. If I’m not careful, it can slip into anger (being hangry is real). I’ve had to start paying closer attention to and communicating with my hunger.

Hunger and emotions

We can only communicate with our hunger if we’re connected to our bodies, but we also need to be connected to our emotions. How often have I mistaken feelings of sadness, boredom, fatigue, or loneliness for physical hunger, and/or used food as a way to soothe or comfort those emotions? Too many to count. It’s perfectly normal—we all feed our emotions from time to time with food.  

Part of the reason we eat to soothe our emotions is that eating (particularly fatty, salty and sugary foods) can trigger the release of dopamine, which is the feel good neurotransmitter in our brains (see this article on food cravings). If you’ve ever polished off a bag of potato chips even though you weren’t hungry (hand raised, no regrets) then you know what I’m talking about.

Hunger and love

To go even deeper, patterns surrounding how we give and receive love are also often tied to how we feed ourselves. As psychotherapist Kelly McDaniel, LPC, NCC explains in her book, Mother Hunger (Hay House Inc, 2021) food is our first experience of love. As young babies, food is the feeling of a mother’s love, and the two things become inextricably linked. She states, “Women without maternal nurturance grow up hungry for both love and food and frequently confuse the two.” Food can become the stand-in for for an unconscious desire for nurturance and safety.

Denying our hunger

On the flip side, many of us deny our hunger (as I did as a young woman). Patriarchy and diet culture teach us that hunger is bad (you can learn more about how these systems impact the ways we nourish ourselves in this newsletter and in this podcast). When we deny our hunger, feeding ourselves turns into a battle ground instead of being a form of self care. 

So…. hunger is complicated

All this to say is that hunger is incredibly nuanced. We eat (or don’t eat) for many reasons, including emotional and cultural reasons. We’ll have dinner when we’re not hungry because our family is sitting down together. We’ll bake cookies when we’re sad because they remind us of our grandmother and provide comfort. We’ll eat that second slice of pie after dinner because our brains’ reward regions are all lit up. It’s okay. The goal is not to deny yourself of these experiences, but to recognize when you’re eating out of emotional hunger or out of physical hunger. Simply acknowledge it, compassionately, without guilt. 

As we start communicating with our hunger, we strengthen our relationship with our bodies and emotions, helping us to become more intuitive, sovereign eaters. And by honoring our hunger instead of denying it, we resist systems that try to suppress or shrink us. 

Communicating with your hunger

So how do you tune into your hunger and distinguish between physical hunger and emotional hunger? Start by simply paying attention. Tell your body that you’re listening. I’ve listed below some simple practices that can help, but I’d love to hear from you too. How do you honor your hunger? 

Easy practices to connect to your hunger

• Explore what hunger feels like in your (unique and beautiful) body. Notice the sensations. 

• Notice how the feeling of hunger in your body differs from emotions such as sadness, loneliness or boredom. Create the distinction. 

• Ask yourself if you’re physically hungry or emotionally hungry. Both are okay and valid.

• Place your hand on your belly and connect to it. 

• Tell your body you trust him/her/them. 

• Take two deep breaths before deciding what to eat. This will help calm your nervous system, allowing you to ground into your body and notice what would feel good to eat, rather than having the mind choose something it thinks you “should eat” (or simply inhaling the closest foods at hand). 

• Feed yourself gently and lovingly, as you would a small child. Honor the moment. 

Grain Free Granola Bars

As I’ve started better listening to my body, I’ve come to realize that I sleep better with some food in my belly. I therefore love to have a snack before bed, something that several “experts” have advised against. While my mind wanted to resist this for a long time, these days I honor my nighttime hunger, regardless of what others say. (For all of you who are into Human Design, I discovered that I’m an “indirect light” eater, so this makes sense). 

These granola bars have become one of my favorite late night snacks. They’re loaded with protein and fiber, keeping my belly happy all night long. The bars are made with just nuts and seeds and are bound with an egg white, which makes them sturdy enough to hold and transport. They’re also topped with a thick cap of chocolate. Oh hell yes. 

Watch how the bars come together in this video.