3505: Hunger and Satiety by Becca Shern of Minimal Wellness on Mindful Eating

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[00:00:55] This is Optimal Health Daily. Hunger and Satiety. By Becca Schoen of MinimalWellness.com. And I'm Dr. Neal Malik. Welcome back to Optimal Health Daily or welcome for the first time if you're new here. This is the podcast where I act as your very own personal narrator and read to you from some of the most popular health and fitness blogs online. And with that, let's get right to it and start optimizing your life.

[00:01:27] Hunger and Satiety by Becca Schoen of MinimalWellness.com. There is a lot of confusion about the best way to achieve and maintain a healthy weight long-term. Many think of weight status through the flawed traditional calories in, calories out framework. However, I found that learning to interpret and properly respond to our internal hunger and satiety cues is a far more successful and maintainable approach.

[00:01:52] From birth, humans are wired to be able to automatically regulate their intake if given access to age-appropriate nourishing foods in sufficient quantities. Infants respond to their hunger cues and initiate eating by crying or rooting for their mother's breast. Then, when they are full, they stop eating. Unless food is withheld or a rare medical condition exists, this cycle repeats itself several times a day for months until solid food is introduced.

[00:02:19] Generally, the move to solid food is the first time a child's internally directed intake can begin to be overridden by external influences. During this time, caregivers have more control over meal timing, the types and quantity of food offered, and the rules around meals. As children grow, their intake patterns and food environment begin to influence their emotional relationship with food, hormonal signaling, the gut microbiome, and gene expression.

[00:02:49] If children are fed adequate amounts of whole and nourishing foods in a safe environment, they usually maintain their ability to properly regulate their intake. But, what happens when this is not the case? What happens when food quality or quantity is poor, or there are unnecessary rules placed around food, like clean your plate, or there's shame around food waste, or you can only eat meals at certain times, or maybe there are forbidden foods, or you have to follow a certain diet, etc.

[00:03:18] Children begin to respond less to healthy hunger and satiety signals, and respond more to improper hormonal or gut signaling, and to emotional or environmental cues. Of course, as we age, the problems that may have begun during childhood are compounded by more external factors, like peers, food advertising, the ubiquity of low-quality convenience foods, and societal norms. Food choices through childhood and the teenage years often deteriorate,

[00:03:48] and we consume greater amounts of highly processed junk foods laden with sugar, refined carbs, added colors, preservatives, and chemicals. These foods are particularly damaging to our ability to self-regulate, as they directly interfere with brain and gut health and hormones. The first step to retraining ourselves to listen to our hunger and satiety cues is to clean up our diet and our lifestyle. Focus on whole, unprocessed foods with an emphasis in descending order of the percentage

[00:04:17] each food group should have in your diet, vegetables, protein, healthy fats, legumes, fruit, and grains. Drink lots of water, sleep, move your body, ideally every day. As you improve diet and lifestyle components, begin to pay attention to how you feel during and between meals and throughout the course of your day. Compare those feelings to how you felt prior to making these beneficial changes. Is anything different? Do you have fewer sugar cravings? Are your energy levels higher

[00:04:46] or more level? Has your mood changed? What do your hunger patterns look like? Does your hunger between meals return gradually or does it surface suddenly and violently, demanding your immediate attention like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum? Ideally, your hunger and satiety should gradually move from one side of a spectrum to the other, never getting too extreme and never appearing out of nowhere. A great way to visually conceptualize hunger and satiety is to think about it along a 10-point scale.

[00:05:15] We have all likely encountered every point on this scale, but our individual interpretations of the discrete points are likely to be different. When considering the scale, think about what each point feels like to you. When taking the concept of hunger and satiety and applying it to your diet, I recommend keeping a few points in mind. One, it's most ideal to begin eating when you're near 3 on the hunger side and finish when you're around 7 or 8 on the satiety side of the scale. This pattern works well for people

[00:05:45] who eat 3 square meals per day. Two, the further to one extreme you allow yourself to go on the scale, the harder it is to respond appropriately to hunger and satiety at your next meal. Some people get ravenously hangry and then eat everything in sight, landing them on the opposite end of the spectrum, feeling Thanksgiving-ful. Sometimes the response to overconsumption is restriction, which can lead to becoming overly hungry, and a binge restriction cycle can ensue.

[00:06:14] This pattern can appear on daily, weekly, or even monthly cycles, and can be broken by working to honor your hunger and satiety, and by not allowing yourself to get too hungry, and ending your meal at an appropriate place of fullness. Three, be aware of other eating cues. Hunger and satiety should be the primary driver of intake. This is an enormous challenge for many of us. We eat because food is available. We eat because of emotions,

[00:06:43] stress, boredom, and fatigue, and we eat to celebrate and to mourn. Coincidentally, as we get better at paying attention and responding to our hunger and satiety cues, it becomes easier to navigate our intake of, and relationship with, food. There will always be times when we eat even though we aren't hungry, or when we continue past the point of fullness, but eating in accordance with hunger and satiety means we make consumption decisions consciously and with awareness. Four,

[00:07:13] if you are substantially over or underweight or are struggling with disordered eating, this scale can be very helpful, but I suggest working with a registered dietitian or a nutritionist to help you learn to appropriately interpret and adjust your intake for your specific needs. Once you've begun to tune into your physical and emotional feelings as they relate to your intake, consider tracking this information in tandem with what you eat. The process of food journaling is one of the most powerful tools to help us identify patterns between

[00:07:43] our food choices and how we feel. A simple spreadsheet is a great place to do this journaling, but a notebook or food tracking app are also good options. Armed with this insight into our habits around hunger and satiety, we can make adjustments that respect our biological wisdom and result in weight optimization. You just listened to the post titled Hunger and Satiety by Becca Schoen of minimalwellness.com and I'll be right back

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[00:10:11] Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast Indeed.com slash podcast terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Dr. Neal Malik here for my commentary. Basically what Becca was discussing was this concept of mindful or intuitive eating. We need to pay attention to how we're feeling before,

[00:10:41] during, and after our meals and snacks. We've kind of lost track of that here in the US at least. I'll quote Dr. Walter Willett from the Harvard School of Public Health here. He said, we Americans, when we eat, tend to run up to the trough, scarf our food down in under 15 minutes, and then run away. But instead, what he and other health professionals like Dean Ornish recommend is staying mindful of your eating. Enjoy the sights, sounds, smells,

[00:11:11] textures of the food you're about to eat. And then pause for a moment before you go for seconds or thirds. Sit back, relax, think about how you feel at the moment. There's a difference between feeling satisfied and feeling full. Think about that. When you feel full, it usually means you've consumed too many calories at that meal. But feeling satisfied means the hunger's simply gone away. You don't feel full, but you don't feel hungry either. You're finding that middle ground

[00:11:40] where the hunger's gone away and you know what? You feel pretty okay. That's the goal. That's what we want to shoot for, especially if you're interested in maintaining your weight. And one of the best ways to do that is to just slow down the eating process. And yes, keeping a food journal so that you can track what time you ate, about how much you ate, how you felt before, during, and after. That is an absolutely great tool to use. And I almost always recommend that as a first step when I deal with patients. I'm actually

[00:12:10] old-fashioned and prefer people actually write down their food journal as opposed to using an app or something else, but let's be realistic, not everybody's old-fashioned like me, and some may find it actually interesting to use apps out there. And there are many free ones. In fact, one such food tracking app that happens to be free is called Chronometer. It has a pretty robust database of foods, and it's relatively accurate. So, maybe you can give it a try and see if you like it. All right, that's it from me for today. Hope you have a great Tuesday.

[00:12:40] Thank you as always for listening, and I'll be back here tomorrow as usual, so I'll see you there where your optimal life awaits.