3471: Is Your Hunger Real or Habituated by Laure Carter on Healthy Eating Habits

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[00:00:30] This is Optimal Health Daily. Is Your Hunger Real or Habituated by Laure Carter of LaureCarter.com. And I'm Dr. Neal. Welcome back to Optimal Health Daily, where I read to you from the best health and fitness blogs on the planet from a bunch of different authors, and always with permission from the sites, and always with a bit of my commentary at the end.

[00:00:52] Now on Fridays, I do something a little different. That's when I answer your questions. You can send me a question by going to oldpodcast.com

[00:01:09] Thank you so much in advance for doing that. I am sure you have some questions. Maybe you heard about some potential diet, nutrition, or physical activity, or stress management myth that you want an answer to. So send me that question, and I'll answer it right here on the show. And with that, let's hear today's article and continue optimizing your life.

[00:01:35] Is Your Hunger Real or Habituated by Laure Carter of LaureCarter.com Physiological Hunger vs. Habituated Hunger In an excellent article on the biology of hunger, John Immel, founder of Joyful Belly, talks about the four internal mechanisms that control hunger. The first mechanism, the physical sensation of either emptiness or fullness.

[00:02:00] When your stomach is empty, ghrelin, the hunger hormone, is produced to stimulate appetite, so you'll feel hungry. The second mechanism, the amount of nutrients in your bloodstream. When you're eating nutrient-dense foods, like fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and healthy fats, you will feel satiated. However, if you don't have enough of these foods, you'll feel deprived and hungry. The third mechanism, the hunger-abating hormones.

[00:02:27] Hormones in the small intestine will be released to suppress the sensation of hunger once enough food is in the gut. They give you a sensation of fullness. And the fourth mechanism, the satiation hormones. Leptin, a hormone secreted by the fat cells in your body, will make you feel satisfied when you eat. Your body is highly intelligent and wise. It strives for balance. And it needs your support, your love, and care.

[00:02:53] However, in this Western modern society, our lifestyle is often in opposition with the body's natural biorhythms. We skip meals, eat calorie-rich and nutrient-poor foods. We overeat. We diet. Detox and overeat again. While running businesses, raising children, cleaning the house, and doing the dishes. Your appetite becomes habituated to incorrect eating habits.

[00:03:17] If this is your life, then chances are what you feel as hunger is a habituated hunger and not natural physiological hunger. The consequences of habituated hunger is weight gain, hormonal imbalance, insomnia, and other physiological symptoms linked to biorhythms. In order to come back to balance, you need to reset your hunger. Five tips to reset your hunger. Number one, eat without distractions or portion out your food.

[00:03:46] When you're eating while reading a book, watching a movie, or while you're on the computer, you won't be able to recognize the signals your body's hormones are sending you. You won't feel full and will overeat, burdening your digestive system and liver. The result could be a buildup of waste and toxins due to faulty digestion. Now, I understand that sometimes it's difficult to stop doing what you're doing. So, the next best thing is to portion out your food. How do you do that? Open the palms of your hands. This is the size of your stomach.

[00:04:16] This is the amount of food that you want to have on your plate. A little less will be even better, so you leave space in your stomach so it can churn your food. Number two, leave at least three hours between each meal. It takes about three hours for your body to digest a right-portioned, plant-based meal. If you eat meat and other animal foods like eggs and cheese, it will take a little longer. When you wait at least three hours before eating again, your blood sugar levels will have come down and insulin and ghrelin will be secreted to give you a hunger feeling again.

[00:04:46] Tip number three, don't snack. Instead, have a mini-meal. Some naturally have strong metabolisms. Also, when you work out intensely and regularly, your metabolism will increase. In this case, instead of snacking, have mini-meals. Or make your snack part of a mini-meal. That means eat less, but maybe every three hours. And eat a real meal. This will prevent you from adding sugary snacks that will spike your blood sugar levels.

[00:05:14] What you think is intuitive is really social conditioning. And tip number four, don't skip meals. Most of us skip meals either because we're distracted by something or we don't feel hungry. So it would seem that stopping to eat then is counterintuitive, right? Possibly. From an Ayurvedic point of view, our hunger is stronger during breakfast and strongest during lunch. So it's possible you need to respond to your body's messages. Dietitian and nurse practitioner Robin Noling writes, Quote,

[00:05:43] With ignored hunger, ghrelin continues to increase and over time. If you continue ignoring that hunger, your body now goes into energy conservation mode because it's not getting the energy it needs. It's how the body compensates. Ignore or suppress hunger, then ghrelin levels rise. Then ignore and suppress hunger, then stress hormones rise because of assumed starvation. Then the body compensates by conserving energy. And then frustration because you're eating less and not achieving your goal of losing weight.

[00:06:13] Or even more frustrating, weight gain occurs from elevated stress hormones. End quote. So what are you hungry for? Tip number five, become aware of the underlying thought processes. In a previous post, I shared that hunger can also be our body's way to let us know that something is amiss. A person's behavior deeply bothers us. A relationship is no longer working for us. We can't stand our job. Stress eating feels like we're hungry, but the body is not.

[00:06:42] And it is a sign of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is when our actions are in contradiction with our deepest beliefs and aspirations. First, you want to be aware of this. And second, you want to face the underlying issue. Quote, hunger is not something to suppress or associate with shame or judgment. End quote. I agree with Robin. A healthy approach to hunger and really anything is to seek to understand rather than suppress.

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[00:09:36] I've talked about the importance of journaling on this show many times before. If someone wants to change their behavior, whether it's lose weight, gain weight, manage their stress, do more exercise, whatever it is, I often encourage them to write things down. Basically keep a journal. It could be a food journal if they want to gain or lose weight, a stress journal if they want to manage that better, an exercise journal where they count reps and sets and weights, whatever.

[00:10:03] Writing things down helps us focus our attention on what we're doing. And it helps establish what's called a baseline. It tells us what we are doing, have been doing, and therefore where to go next. When folks keep journals, especially food journals, I encourage them to add an extra column. A column that says, am I really hungry? Why? Well, because as Laura mentioned, sometimes we eat for other reasons entirely. We don't eat because we're hungry.

[00:10:31] We eat because it's simply time to eat. It's a habit. I remember a patient of mine once told me, as soon as he walked in the door after work, he would go straight to the fridge. And I would ask him, are you hungry after you come home from work? And he said, no, that's just what I do. And so I had him start keeping a food journal. And before he would eat anything, he had to answer this question, am I really hungry? Just by doing that, it slowed down the process.

[00:10:58] It encouraged him to think twice and recognize whether this behavior was just a habit or whether, again, he's truly hungry. Oh, and in case you're wondering, it worked like a charm. All right, that'll do it for today. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening every day. I hope you're having a wonderful weekend. And I'll see you back here tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.