Metabolic

ASK THE NUTRITIONIST: Are you hungry or is it a craving?

In this week’s column, Nonie De Long explains how to understand how your body reacts when it’s truly hungry

Dear readers, Naomi wrote asking if dieting is ever healthy and if hunger is a reliable marker for meal time.

Hunger. What it isn’t

To get to what hunger is, we need to address what it isn’t. Many people think the rumbling they get in their stomach or intestinal region is hunger. It’s not. You can prove this by reducing carbs to below 20g and increasing your fat intake for two weeks straight. The grumbling sensation will abate completely, even if you don’t eat for a full day. It’s a bodily response to relying on carbohydrates for energy. This is because this type of energy only lasts for a few hours.

When we fast after burning carbs for energy, we will wake to this sensation in our tummies. It’s a clear sign we need to increase our metabolic flexibility to help our bodies remember how to burn fat for fuel as well. It’s a warning sign that we are becoming insulin resistant. Consuming a low carb dinner can really help with this in the morning.

Another thing that I see people mistaking for hunger is fatigue. Often people will say they are hungry before bed, after having eaten a good meal just two or three hours before. They have not been energetic and do not require more food than fuel. The problem is that they are tired. The body is smart and knows that something sweet or otherwise stimulating (chocolate or carbs) will give it more quick energy to stay up later.

If we truly want to honor our bodies, this is a sign it’s time to go to bed! And if we know we struggled with this, we can set ourselves up for success by turning off any advertising about food and sipping a wholesome herbal tea to help us change this habit. Replacing one habit with another is often easier than just removing the habit.

I also see people mistaking cravings for hunger. They believe in intuitive eating, which means allowing the body to direct you when you’re hungry. But they are often hungry for only certain food groups. An easy way to tell if it’s a craving or real hunger is to ask yourself if a piece of natural meat or eggs or fish will satisfy your hunger? If not – if you are only hungry for a specific thing (almost always carbs) – this means it’s not hunger. It’s a craving. It will pass, usually in 20 minutes.

The best way to get past this is to create set meal times and don’t snack in between. The body becomes acclimated to new eating schedules within about one to two weeks. So we can teach our bodies when to expect food by creating a schedule and sticking to it for a few weeks. We can do this with meals every three hours (I don’t advise it – this is part of the reason we are so unwell as a society) or we can do it with two to three healthy meals a day (my advice). There is no need for more frequent meals for adults. If we are hungry more than this we are becoming insulin resistant.

Many adults benefit from keeping their meals in a time window, such as eight hours or six hours, with fasting outside of that window. It’s called intermittent fasting and can do a lot to curb cravings and help us maintain our health as we age. This is because our bodies clean house when we fast. It’s called autophagy and it means there are cells that go around eating up all the free radicals and damaged cells when other metabolic processes aren’t happening. Thus, it only happens during prolonged fasting. That’s why so many health advocates talk about regular intermittent fasting as a key to health and anti-aging.

If we find that we get dizzy, get weak, get palpitations, get foggy, or get headachey when we skip a meal these are strong indicators of low blood sugar – often related to reactive hypoglycemia. This can happen in perfectly slim and fit people who are not metabolically flexible and it’s a sign of insulin resistance. I used to suffer from this horribly.

I didn’t understand that the high-carb, low-fat diet I used was creating this problem in me. If I skipped a meal or went too long I would have horrible shifts in mood and energy. As I switched to a higher fat diet for my son’s mental health issues, all of these symptoms went away. I have since learned that fasting for a day is not difficult and does not elicit the symptoms of low blood sugar if a person is metabolically flexible.

really hungry

Real hunger shows up as fatigue. The body will signal us to slow down. We won’t typically be fixed on foods at this point. If we recognize it as hunger and do think about foods, it’s not specific to one or two foods. It’s less specific than that. Real hunger is abated by eating nutrient dense foods. Then, about 20 minutes after we eat a healthy meal we find we aren’t tired.

If we are tired 20 to 40 minutes after eating, and feel like a nap, we are definitely insulin resistant. Think of it as a carb coma. Healthy food should make us energized. When we have eaten a healthy meal, we are not jonesing for a dessert afterwards. We are satisfied and food is off our minds until the next mealtime. And when we’re metabolically flexible, we may not even feel hunger at meals! We can sometimes have one meal a day and be totally satisfied with bountiful energy and mental acuity. Food just isn’t on the mind the way it is when we are caught in the cycle of insulin resistance.

So to answer your question, Naomi, hunger as most people perceive it, is not a reliable indicator that it’s time to eat. Energy should guide us when to eat.

If this is new to you and you’d like to know more, I offer webinars on metabolic flexibility. Find my current webinars on my website. To get on the mailing list for upcoming webinars, sign up for my monthly newsletter here. As always, readers can find me online. Reader questions can be directed by email.

Namaste!
Nonie Nutritionista

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