You Are What You Hunger For

A while back, I was talking with a woman about a section of a book I was writing. I mentioned that so much of what we need to return to, what truly brings us home, is our relationship with appetite.

The moment I said the word, she recoiled. There was this visceral response of disgust, almost as if I’d said something indecent.

It struck me how deep that reaction runs in most of us. Somewhere along the line, we learned to fear hunger itself, as if it were the devil, temptation, something shameful or dangerous.

We’ve been taught to say, you are what you eat. But I would say, you are what you hunger for.

What we consume, in food or in life, is often a reflection not of who we truly are, but of who we think we should be, who we’ve become through layers of unconscious adaptation. Very rarely does it express the essence of our being. That’s because we were never trained to understand the language of hunger, to listen for its subtleties, to meet it with precision and reverence.

In time, we’ll explore the different hungers of the body, how to recognize them, how to feed them. But first, we have to begin with the most essential act: repairing our relationship with hunger itself. To stop treating it as an enemy, and begin to feel it again as the raw, divine intelligence it truly is.