The Absence of Appetite is Not the Presence of Health.
Lessons from a hard week. Plus, does your dog eat better than you?
This past weekend, our dog Grey was bitten by a rattlesnake. After a frantic trip to the emergency vet, a couple of days in the animal hospital, and a round of medications, she’s home and healing, but she hasn’t had much of an appetite.
I’ve found myself doing everything I can to help her eat. I’ve bought multiple types of food, rotated through different bowls and plates, sat beside her while she sniffs and walks away. I’ve fed her from my hand. I’ve whispered encouragements, rubbed her ears, and offered tiny pieces while I eat my own meals next to her on the floor. When she lifts her eyes toward me — tired, unsure, not yet ready — I pet her gently and tell her it’s okay.
Somewhere in the middle of all this effort, it hit me:
I wish this was how we were taught to treat ourselves when we lose our appetite.
Over the years, I’ve sat with countless clients — through grief, recovery, anxiety, overwhelm, burnout, and chronic illness — who describe how food simply doesn’t sound good. They tell me they aren’t hungry, or that they forget to eat until late in the day. Sometimes they feel guilty for skipping meals, ashamed for picking at their plates. They say things like, “I know I should just eat,” or, “It’s my fault — I’m being lazy.”
But just as often, they tell me something else, more quietly:
“Part of me feels like this is a good thing.”
Because diet culture has taught us that not wanting food is virtuous. That losing our appetite is a convenient path toward thinness. That less eating is always better eating. So instead of responding with concern or care, we sometimes respond with approval.
There’s a seductive logic to it, especially for those of us who’ve spent years tracking, managing, or distrusting our hunger. If the appetite disappears, doesn’t that mean we’ve finally gained control of “the noise”? If we’re not craving anything, isn’t that something to celebrate?
That illusion is powerful, because it mirrors everything diet culture has taught us: that hunger is a problem to solve, that desire is chaos, and that quieting the body is a sign of strength.
But the absence of appetite is not the presence of health.
In fact, losing the desire to eat is not even a neutral experience — it’s a biological distress signal.
In clinical and palliative care settings, appetite loss is often one of the first red flags that something is wrong, whether physically, emotionally, or metabolically. In fact, anorexia of aging (the natural decline in appetite with age) is associated with increased frailty, poorer outcomes, and higher mortality rates in older adults (Landi et al., 2016). In end-of-life care, a diminished desire to eat is considered a hallmark of the dying process (Delmore, 2017). And outside of these contexts, appetite loss can be a physiological response to mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, trauma, and PTSD, where the nervous system shifts into survival mode and deprioritizes digestion.
So when we lose the urge to eat, it’s not a sign of discipline or moral strength. It’s a sign that the body is under threat and struggling. Our entire system is telling us — begging us to see — that something important needs attention.
And we know this, deep down.
Why else would we fret when our dog or child or parent loses their appetite for days in a row?
Hunger is not a failure — it’s a sign of aliveness. It’s how your body reminds you it wants to stay here. When it fades, it’s a cue that your system needs support, not applause.
And yet, many of us don’t know how to respond to ourselves with that kind of compassion. In a culture that has trained us to listen to our bodies only when they’re convenient or compliant, we’ve learned to fear our appetite and to shrug off its absence. But nourishment is not a reward we get only when we’re hungry. Nourishment is our birthright.
If my dog deserves to be fed with softness and permission and patience, surely I do too.
Surely you do too.
The impact of stress on our appetite has been top of mind for me for many months. Way before this rattlesnake debacle.
As a human being living in the world right now, there is no shortage of overwhelm and despair. This can flood our nervous system, leave us disconnected from our physical bodies, and dampen our hunger signals. This has been a huge struggle for the clients that I work with, and many of our conversations have centered on how to cope.
It’s incredibly common to lose our appetite due to stress and anxiety, but also in times of grief, sickness, and while recovering from disordered eating, among many other reasons. I have so much compassion for this experience, because it makes food hard, and it can feel nearly impossible to muster up the desire to make yourself something to eat when nothing sounds good.
It’s important to understand that when we don’t eat enough, that just puts our body in a further state of stress. To add fuel to this fire, stress produces symptoms like nausea, upset stomach, acid reflux, and cramping. And while of course that makes eating less appealing, those same symptoms are unfortunately made worse by not eating. A vicious cycle, you see?
This is one of many reasons why I’m a big proponent of taking care of yourself with food, even when food doesn’t sound great.
But what does that look like, and how can we put it into practice?
(As in: how much, how often, what kind of foods help, the exceptions, and disentangling all the mental and emotional blocks that arise)
Personally, in stressful times, my digestive system will get super funky. As a highly sensitive person with anxiety and OCD, this has been a common thread throughout…