Why Does Hunger Just…Disappear?
My focus from a strength and fitness standpoint for the past few years has been to kill two birds with one stone. Strength and Cardio built into 30-45 minute high intensity circuits. I noticed how my usually needy appetite would become instantly suppressed during and for the hour or so after the session. What was making my hunger disappear and how can we attempt to overcome the embarrassing 21st century problems or overeating.
First lets understand what hunger is, there are two scientifically defined types:
Homeostatic hunger – The natural signals throughout the body and brain that tell us we need food for fuel, most commonly this is your stomach grumbling
You can solve the problem of Homeostatic hunger pretty simply…….. by eating. The real challenge is fighting off the (hedonic) urge to eat just to eat, stress/comfort eat, watch food porn(courtesy of social media), constantly day dream about food and so on.
Lets look at some recent examples in my life:
- At this very moment I’m thinking about the peanut butter that I hid in the fridge (but clearly forgot to erase from my memory) and mostly likely will not stop until I dig in to it.
- One month after starting a new job I received an email on a Fall Tuesday morning that we were being acquired. I proceeded to put on my shoes, walk to the bodega and grab some cookies and milk.
In both scenario, I’m falling back on food not because I Need It, Simply because i want it…….Now I really want that peanut butter
I have a few suggestions on overcoming Hedonic hunger;
- The best way not to eat the whole pack/bag/box of “Insert guilty pleasure here” is keep it out of you kitchen. Plain and simple – if its not there you cant eat it. Unfortunately there is no pill for this….yet, only a thing called self control.
- Start substituting you food choices for healthier alternatives. Were always going to be battling the urge of eating just to eat, to crave something that can put you on a crash course with diabetes. Funny thing is, if you consistently swap out that candy bar for a banana or apple your body miraculously begins to crave those healthy foods. I know, Ive been living it for the last year.
- Focus – channel you energy towards a goal you want to accomplish. You have a binary amount of brain CPU cycles available at a given time. If you are in deep focus then you simply will not be thinking about food unless you are truly hungry.
- Exercise – 30 minutes is perfect, the key is to keep the intensity level up. See this excerpt from LiveSciences article below:
But not all types of exercise appear to have the same effect. Most people actually feel hungrier after doing low- to moderate-intensity exercise, Hazell said, and this is the preferred type of workout for many people. [How to Make Sense of Heart Rate Data]
It seems logical that the body would try to replenish the energy it used during exercise, and when the intensity is low to moderate, it’s relatively easy to do so after exercise, Hazell said. In other words, to restore balance, the body wants to eat food to replace the calories it just burned. But, in contrast, when someone does a high-intensity workout, the body experiences many more changes in metabolism than just losing calories, he said. So although the body does want to replenish its energy stores, it prioritizes dealing with these other changes before doing so, he said.
All of this begs the question, if you’re feeling hungry, could exercise possibly squash the feeling?
“I think if the person were hungry and performed an exercise session of sufficient intensity, there would still be a benefit by reducing hunger,” Hazell said. Exercising around times when you know hunger tends to strike “could be an interesting preemptive option too,” he added, though this idea has not yet been looked at in a formal study.
Check out our workouts of the week that give you everything you need to try this out
Update – Eating the Peanut Butter
In a very short period of time,(last 200 years) technology has enabled a large part of the human race to evolve from a food scarce society to a food over-abundant one. We’re pretty much living like were in Panem in the Hunger Games(Strictly from a food standpoint).
Humans were all about fulfilling their Homeostatic hunger for the the past 2000 years. Now in 2017 (for the majority of Americans) we’ve seen so many years of food abundance that a new era of disease has come along with it (heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune),…. There are no perfect answers, for every advancement we make we need to expect a counter punch and be aware enough to adapt.
Source Credit: https://www.livescience.com/54248-controlling-your-hunger.html
