Hi, my name is Brenda Thompson, registered dietitian and owner of Life Skills Nutrition. In this segment I am going to talk about eating when you are hungry and stopping when you are satisfied. Some people use a hunger fullness scale instead of counting calories to monitor their eating habits. Learning how to manage your favorite foods without denying yourself foods that you enjoy is great when you're using a hunger fullness scale. You eat when you start to notice a sensation in your stomach and stop when you begin to feel satisfied. Satisfied is when you begin to feel the bulk in your stomach. You may mentally want to keep eating but your stomach is feeling satisfied, so you eat slow and chew your food well. A lot of times your stomach may not send the signals to your brain as quickly as it should, as far as your hunger and fullness sensations are occurring. It usually takes between 10 and 20 minutes for your hunger feeling to reach your brain signals. So you want to try to eat slowly and then gauge yourself with this hunger fullness scale. This is a sample of what a hunger fullness scale looks like. There are many of them available from different dietitians and also online. This is a hunger fullness scale rating between zero and nine. Zero being that you are extremely hungry, and this is the point at which you would never want to get. Five is when you are in the center, and nine is when you are extremely full. It's on those days, days like Thanksgiving, when you eat so much food your so full you just can't do anything but lay there and moan. This is about where you want to stay, is in the center here. At this point, depending on the hunger and fullness scale that you are using, is when you would start to feel hungry. This is when you might have the first or second thought of feeling like your stomach is a little empty, and you may feel like you want something to eat. This is the point at which you start to feel that sensation of feeling bulk in your stomach. You may feel like you want to eat just a little bit more, but you go ahead and you stop here, because like I said before, it takes 10 to 20 minutes to actually tell your body when you're full. So leaving that little bit of what you might think is room in your stomach may get you just to the point that you need to be at. So using a hunger fullness scale is another way that you could log your food instead of counting the calories for your weight loss.