When was the last time you were actually hungry?

Not peckish. Not bored. Not eating because it was lunchtime or because food happened to be there. Actually hungry?

I had to think about this for a while before I could answer honestly. And the uncomfortable truth was that it had been a long time. Before I started looking at food and health through an Islamic lens, I ate for almost every reason except hunger.

I ate because food was ready. Because it was dinner time. Because it tasted good and there was no point saving a small amount for later. Because everyone else was eating. Because I was watching something. Because I had a break. Eating had become automatic, detached from appetite and physical need.

Why we eat without hunger now

This isn’t unusual. It’s normal.

Most of us eat according to clocks, routines and availability rather than hunger cues. Hunger has become something to manage or prevent, not something to respond to. We snack so we don’t feel it, eat “just in case” and top up constantly. When hunger does appear, it can feel strange or uncomfortable, sometimes even alarming.

Hunger itself isn’t the problem. Our unfamiliarity with it is.

Hunger in the Sunnah

One of the striking things when you read about the life of the Prophet ﷺ is how ordinary hunger was.

Abu Hurayrah (رضي الله عنه) reported that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ would sometimes go to sleep hungry, and so would his family. Hunger wasn’t dramatised or treated as an emergency, and it wasn’t constantly avoided. It was simply part of life.

This challenges the modern idea that hunger must always be silenced immediately.

Hunger as a signal, not a failure

In modern life, hunger is often framed as a failure of planning. You didn’t snack properly, you didn’t eat enough earlier, you let it go on too long. So we rush to silence it.

But hunger is simply a signal. It tells you that the body has used what it was given and that space has been created. In the Sunnah, that space isn’t automatically filled just because it exists. There is room for patience, restraint and choice, and that pause matters.

How constant eating removes awareness

When eating is constant, hunger disappears, but so does good judgment.

You stop knowing when you actually need food, how much satisfies you and when stopping feels natural. Eating becomes something you do by default rather than something you respond to. Over time, food loses its boundaries and becomes attached to routine, emotion and distraction.

Relearning hunger takes adjustment

When I started paying attention, hunger felt unfamiliar. Not dramatic, just noticeable. Because I wasn’t used to it, my instinct was still to eat immediately, not because I needed to, but because that’s what I had always done.

The difference was awareness. I noticed how rarely I ate because I was hungry, how often eating was filling time rather than need and how much food had been solving problems it was never meant to solve. That awareness alone changed my relationship with eating.

Why restraint feels easier when hunger exists

One of the reasons restraint feels so difficult today is that it’s often attempted without hunger.

Stopping when you are not hungry feels natural. Stopping when you’ve been eating continuously does not. The Sunnah assumes that hunger exists, that there is space between meals, and that appetite arrives before food. It also assumes that stopping before fullness makes sense because hunger had a beginning.

Without hunger, restraint feels arbitrary. With hunger, it feels proportionate.

This isn’t about seeking hunger

This isn’t a call to chase hunger or treat it as virtuous suffering. Islam does not glorify deprivation, but it also does not teach constant comfort. There is a difference between neglect and restraint, between hunger that harms and hunger that simply exists. Recognising that difference is part of wisdom.

Eating in response, not by default

The biggest shift wasn’t eating less; it was eating in response.

Sometimes hunger meant eating. Sometimes it meant waiting a little. Sometimes it meant realising I wasn’t hungry at all. That clarity didn’t come from rules or plans. It came from attention, and attention is something the Sunnah helps restore.

A question worth keeping

When was the last time you were actually hungry?

Not as a judgement or a target, but as a point of awareness. Because when hunger disappears completely, something else usually takes its place: routine, distraction or excess. And once you notice that, eating starts to make sense again.