If you suffer from excessive and uncontrolled hunger, on the internet you will have already found a lot of news on how to manage and control it: well, as I have often written having had eating disorders for years (and years, and years), I don’t like either the verb to manage nor the verb to control when it comes to hunger. 

However, something that in recent years has always been more accredited by doctors and experts in general, and which would allow us to manage and control excessive hunger, also has my approval, because I think it is a good way not so much to keep at bay the monster called hunger, as much as to have the time to overcome the first impulse towards food , that annihilating and destructive impulse that makes us eat everything we have in front of a mad and voracious speed.

We will call this food “awareness” . It can be achieved in many ways, and some of these involve techniques to take time out of the urgency of hunger: trying to understand what hunger is is a technique; tapping on the hands or face is another technique; getting distracted by applying nail polish or self-massage is another technique.
All these techniques allow us to distance ourselves from excessive hunger , and develop an attitude of mindful eating , or conscious eating: we eat only when we are sure that hunger is hungry, we eat calmly and with conviction, we eat by treating food for what it is. it is, food, without adding the burden of our guilt.

In this case, it is more about knowing hunger than about controlling and managing hunger.
And a last technique involves the use of food itself to achieve this food awareness: for example, with ten or twelve raisins. It is called the raisin trick or the sultana exercise : in essence, every day we have to take twelve raisins, hold them in your hands, observe them and smell them for a while, like for five minutes. Then we can put one in our mouth, hold it in the palate and guess its consistency with our tongue, and only at the end chew it, trying to get a clear idea of ​​the flavor. The same thing must be done with all the beans, one by one. According to some researchers, this daily exercise allows you to acquire greater awareness towards food, increasing the sense of satiety simply by raising the level of attention and awareness towards the food itself. In this way, the impulse towards excessive hunger is stopped by additional thoughts about food, which those who eat voraciously generally do not.
It is a harmless trick, we can very well try it and see how it goes after a few weeks: if it helps us to see the food with different eyes, we are welcome to eat more raisins (perhaps by cutting a teaspoon of sugar from the coffee).