Hungry or Not: What Three Levers Control Your Appetite?

If you’re trying to manage your weight, chances are that you have spent a fair amount of time thinking about hunger. How can you eat less without feeling hungry? Is there any way to control your appetite? How do people who weigh less do it? Do they simply not experience hunger? Are they hungry all the time? How can you distinguish between true hunger and the urge to eat?

As someone who coaches people on sustainable weight loss, these are questions I’ve spent a lot of time thinking (and writing) about, as well. Today I want to tell you about the three different ways our bodies register or experience hunger. 

In my recent episode on how calories in food are determined, I talked about the hazards of relying too heavily on calorie counters and calculators. I pointed out that we probably can’t rely entirely on our hunger or satiety signals to tell us if we need food and when we’ve had enough.

And I bet that might might have been what triggered a listener to phone in and ask what I thought of intuitive eating and whether there was any good research to support it.

Does intuitive eating work?

Intuitive eating is a popular concept these days and people throw this term around pretty loosely. It’s hard to know sometimes exactly what they mean by it.

For some, it just means not following rigid diet rules. I’m all for that! But if you’re having trouble managing your weight, that approach alone may not be enough to solve the problem. I talked more about the strengths and weaknesses of intuitive eating as an approach to weight management in episode #397.

On a closely related topic, Cheryl from Massachussetts emailed to ask:

Even when I eat a good sized meal with adequate levels of protein, fat, and fiber, I can feel hunger...

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