I remember the day I came into my hunger. I was 9, maybe 10, sitting at a family-style restaurant with my mom and brother. After clearing our dinner plates, the waitress asked, "Can I get anyone some dessert?" 

My brother ordered a hot-fudge sundae. The waitress then looked at me. My mother seemed not to notice and handed back the menu. "No, thank you," she said. The waitress nodded and left.

I don't remember if I wanted a chocolate sundae before the waitress left. But I wanted one afterward, and, in a sense, I have wanted one ever since.

This wasn't some big, traumatic event. It was a moment whose time had come. If it hadn't happened that particular night, it would have happened on another. But in an instant, I went from a young girl who feels herself from the inside out to one who looks at herself from the outside in. 

I had broad shoulders, and there was a little section of my tummy that I couldn't make hard when I tightened my muscles. I wasn't fat, but I wasn't thin. I'd better be careful, I thought. My hunger -- a mix of insatiable longing and anxiety -- emerged, and like some mythical young dragon, it looked me deep in the eyes and imprinted.

I don't have an eating disorder. But like many women I know, somewhere along the way, eating -- what, when, how much, in front of whom, how fast -- got complicated. The sensation of hunger went from a physical signal with a simple response ("eat") to a mixed emotion that has no clear solution. Should I, shouldn't I? I'm being bad, I'm being good. I deserve this. I will hate myself in the morning. And on and on. 

Talk to food psychologists and you'll hear that learning to respond to your body's natural sense of physical hunger, and subsequent feelings of fullness, is a powerful tool for maintaining a healthy weight. But talk to women of all shapes and sizes, and many of them will tell you they fight hunger and, in some cases, fear it. 

How did our appetites -- for nourishment and pleasure -- become suspect? Is it possible to listen to our bodies the way we did when we were children? The answers lie somewhere in the tangle of emotional, cultural, and neurological reactions that shapes our desire to eat. "Hunger is complicated," says Jean Kristeller, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Indiana State University and president of The Center for Mindful Eating. Besides the actual physical sensation, "it has to do with a complexity of psychological cravings that may have very little to do with your physical need for food."