How can we reduce our hunger and why do we feel hungry all the time? Why these cravings and how can we avoid them?
To understand this, first of all, we have to understand why we still feel hungry or have cravings after having proper meals. What is the reason for this?
To understand this, we have to dig a little deeper, and to understand that, we have to understand dopamine and ghrelin hormones, due to which our cravings and hunger rise, or we feel hungry, or we have cravings.
When you’re hungry, you have hunger hormones like ghrelin that are released to tell you to get nutrients from food. It’s the way we survive in this world, so to understand hunger and how to avoid it, we must understand the ghrelin hormone.
What is Gherlin?
What’s causing the hunger is a hormone, and it’s called “ghrelin.” Ghrelin is the hunger hormone, and it sends signals to the brain telling you it’s time to eat.
Ghrelin is the hormone your body releases and signals your brain when it’s time to eat or when you are hungry
- It is called the “hunger hormone.”
- It is produced in the stomach/gut, which travels through our bloodstream, giving signals to the brain
- It signals the brain to increase appetite and initiate eating
- It also stores fat
- The higher the ghrelin level in the body, the hungrier you are; the lower the ghrelin level, the fuller you feel
Hunger:
Hunger is just a suggestion from your brain. Your brain’s job is to keep you alive and fed. Hunger is a physical need for food
It is a natural need of the body to get nutrients. So hunger is like this need to eat, which is tied to the biological imperative to stay alive.
Hunger is just a signal; it is just information, which is not your body’s final warning. Your body is trying to tell you that the energy it can easily access is running out. But most of us have plenty of backup energy in the form of fat, and many of us are trying desperately to part with it.
When your senses pick up on food, they immediately alert your brain and cause you to become hungry in the hope that you’ll act. Just because you receive the suggestion doesn’t mean you have to act upon it.
When you get a hunger signal, it’s not that your body necessarily needs food every time you get the signal, but rather your senses have picked up on the chance for you to get it.
Hunger Waves
Hunger doesn’t build endlessly. It comes in waves. It’s important to know that not every hunger wave that hits you is going to be a huge wave. Well, it’s a wave of hunger that, if you ignore it, will go away.
Sometimes, it’s just a ripple that you can simply step over. For example, if you see a tray of pastries pass by you in a bakery, you may have a thought cross your mind that you want one, but just as quickly as it disappears, the strong urge to get it also disappears.
People always assume that hunger starts and then just gets worse and worse. But have you ever had one of those days when you were so busy, maybe you were busy with work or running around with the kids, that you forgot to eat and then suddenly realized your hunger was gone?
There’s no constant hunger that happens. And if you go far enough, the hunger disappears.
When a person fasts, they have these waves of ghrelin up and down, up and down, but over time, these waves go further and further downward to the point where it becomes easier and easier to fast, where a person doesn’t have that sensation of hunger anymore.
According to experts, during fasting, the hunger waves that hit us typically come within the first 24 to 48 hours. After that, things change dramatically. By the time we pass the 48-hour mark in a fast, in many cases, those waves disappear altogether.
So the thing is, we are able to regulate our appetites, but we need to do that by not getting into a fight with them.
So you have two things:
You have one, which is the sensation of hunger, and number two, you have, wow, my blood sugars have dropped, I’m really hungry, I’m feeling irritable, I’m getting weak, and I’m getting dizzy… Well, that means that you need to eat
So the question is, why these feelings of hunger? Why are these cravings? What created it?
To understand craving, you first have to understand the dopamine hormone.
You crave that food so badly that you just want to almost make yourself not feel the pain anymore. And so the dopamine hormone has this effect on us that we’ll eat it and we’ll get pleasure from it.
What is dopamine?
- It is a chemical messenger in the brain.
- It is most involved in helping us feel pleasure as a part of the brain’s reward system.
- It gives you a feeling of pleasure when you do something enjoyable.
- It is basically a neurotransmitter made in your brain.
- It is also known as the feel-good hormone.
- Dopamine release also activates neural pathways that make us feel uncomfortable, agitated
- Each of us has a pathway that connects the taste buds on our tongue to dopamine-producing cells in our brain.
Dopamine is the only neurotransmitter in our body that can get us out of a seat, whatever we’re doing; stop whatever we’re doing; get in a car; and go get that thing that dopamine is telling us to get.
Dopamine is the most powerful motivator, and food companies, video game companies, gambling, porn—they all know that dopamine is so strong
What is craving?
A craving is the desire to eat a specific food. Cravings increase your appetite and can occur regardless of whether you are hungry
Craving is the pleasure hormone cycle. It’s a whole different pathway. Mostly, it is going through the dopamine pathway, a completely different area of your brain. Hunger and cravings are completely separate.
Each of us has a pathway that connects the taste buds on our tongue to dopamine-producing cells in our brain.
You must have noticed that at a certain time of the day, even though you have eaten, you are not hungry, but you feel like eating sweets. You crave sweets, and even though you have eaten, you are not hungry.
Most people can identify cravings as being based on this description, and some foods trigger that in them.
And it could be a
- warm chocolate chip cookie. It could be, you know, you just eat it, and you’re like, oh, I can’t wait to have this again. And that’s often a craving cycle right there.
- Some people crave that glass of wine or two glasses of wine at the end of the day, and it’s almost as if they don’t get it; they’re irritable, and they just don’t feel right.
- The processed foods that don’t occur in nature, that dopamine explosion happening day after day after day—you’re not even as happy anymore.
Why do we crave, and what do we do about it?
Today, we are going to dig deep into the science.
Have you ever felt that craving thing with an apple? Or have you ever felt that with broccoli?
No, not at all….
But you do feel that in the case of chocolate or French fries, or when you go to your favorite bakery, you crave your favorite brownies.
The first few bites are heaven, and then we start this conflicted inner dialogue around it, and that inner conflict, which is actually going on inside, is created by the dopamine.
So Dopamine created this inner conflict
And so the problem is, you need more and more and more food to get that same dopamine release.
Dopamine has this weird aftereffect where it makes you irritable, and it makes you uncomfortable, and that’s the cravings pathway right there.
So you’re eating it, but you’re almost like, oh, should I be eating this? When can I get this again? Am I having too much? When am I going to get it again? I need to stop eating it right now. That inner conflict is created by dopamine
So, in reality, what is happening is that most of us are not struggling with our natural need to eat. We are struggling with the dopamine cycling and crashing, and the drive that comes with cravings.
How do you use leptin to hack hunger?
Leptin is one of the principal suppressors of appetite. Leptin signals to your brain, which helps you feel full and less interested in food. Leptin is our fullness signal because it tells us, “Hey, you’re full; you don’t need to eat anymore.” And when it gets released, it makes us just say, “I’m good.”
It decreases appetite and increases energy expenditure
What is leptin?
- Leptin is a hormone produced by our body fat.
- It regulates hunger and
- It helps the body maintain its weight over the long term by providing satiety (feeling full).
- Leptin is also called a satiety hormone.
- It is the opposite of the ghrelin hormone
- which sends a signal to your brain that helps you feel full and less interested in food.
- It sends signals to the brain that you don’t need to eat.
- It sends signals to the brain that the body has enough fat reserves, which helps to suppress appetite.
- It also signals the brain to burn calories and prevents overeating
- Food intake and total body fat, as well as several hormones, regulate leptin secretion.
- Insulin is the primary regulator of leptin production.
- The reduced level of leptin in the circulation observed during high energy consumption is associated with human hunger
- Regular physical activity, enough sleep, and a balanced diet can help your body to produce more leptin
- Poor sleep, high stress, and inflammation can affect how well leptin does its job.
Sleep more
If you’ve ever noticed, after a bad night’s sleep… You want to eat. Why? And you just don’t want it; you just don’t feel full. You do wake up after a bad night’s sleep feeling like you’re starving. But after a really good night’s sleep, you wake up feeling calm and relaxed. And you don’t have the hunger pain or have the craving dopamine cycle either.
So if we think about it, we can use our inner signaling pathways to hear what our body is telling us.
Eat more omega-3s.
Another really great way is to eat more omega-3 fatty acids. So omega-3 fatty acids are one of the things in salmon. For people who don’t eat fish, it’s an algae oil, so you can take the algae oil. Nuts have omega-3. It’s a great way to start to get your leptin back up so that a lot of people will start eating more omega-3 fatty acids, and all of a sudden, they’re not as hungry anymore.
Eat a balanced diet.
Consuming whole foods—such as vegetables, high-quality protein, and healthy fats—can help support proper leptin function. This may reduce the risk of leptin resistance, a condition in which the brain becomes less responsive to hunger-suppressing signals, potentially leading to overeating.”
How to stop overeating or how to stop feeling hungry all the time?
My appetite is out of control. I’m experiencing cravings and desires so frequently that it is harming my mental health, and I believe it’s harming my physical health, too.
Whenever I used to get that strong urge, especially if I’d just eaten and I was full, and it just kept going and kept going, I felt like I couldn’t tolerate that feeling. It’s like, I feel the discomfort. My brain knows what might make this discomfort go away, and it just keeps fixating and fixating and fixating on the food.
If you also have the same problem, then you have come to the right place.
8 Strategies that help control hunger and cravings are
- Pair the good activity right after the bad activity. This is known as a positive replacement strategy. So you did something that you didn’t want to do. Maybe you ate an ultra-processed food that you were trying to cut down on. Immediately after, go for a sunny walk. The positive replacement behavior will slowly get longer and teach your neural pathways that you don’t want to be doing the negative.
- Retrain your brain to control craving. If you crave this candy bar like a Snickers, what you can do instead is take a piece of dark chocolate, which is also another pleasure-creating food. And you replace the Snickers with the healthier chocolate.
- Avoid everything that might trigger your senses. If you smell coffee brewing, you want some. If you hear someone open a bag of chips, you want some. And when you spot candy bars in the checkout line, you suddenly want some. So control your senses. Stay out of the kitchen. Don’t walk past your favorite bakery. And also stay away from the television and your phone, where food is passing in front of your eyes constantly.
- Predict the clock’s hunger. What you need to know about hunger is that the waves that are going to hit you are predictable. This is called “clock hunger.”
Your brain has come to expect food at certain times. Breakfast at 7, lunch at noon, dinner at 6. When you start incorporating more fasting, you are retraining your circadian clock. If you’ve cut down your eating to just twice in the day, your brain’s hunger cues become consolidated
- Physical movement is the best way to ignore hunger and cravings. Because movement flips your nervous system from rest and digest mode into fight or flight. When that switch happens, digestion, including hunger, shuts down. That little bit of movement increases your body’s energy demand, which pushes your metabolism sooner into burning fat for fuel. Getting up and going for a walk immediately comforts your brain and quiets it down.
Fasting: So over time, when you fast, you have these waves of ghrelin up and down, up and down, but over time, they go further and further downward to the point where it becomes easier and easier to fast, where you don’t have that sensation of hunger anymore. Fasting over a period of time will make you less and less hungry. When you become well-adapted to fasting, it gets easier.
- Vegetable Test: When you start to crave sweets, even though you’re not hungry. And so you ask yourself, am I hungry, or am I just wanting something sweet? And that’s the first question. And then you ask yourself that vegetable test, like, should I eat? You know, would I want a bowl of vegetables right now? No. So then you say, “Let me just drink a glass of water and see how you feel in 15 minutes.” And then ask yourself, like, are you still hungry or craving, or are you fine? And that’s a way to kind of get back with yourself.
- “Anticipate your hunger before it hits—and have a plan ready. You should anticipate when the hunger is going to hit you and have a plan of attack ready. You must do something. You have to support your body, and you also have to distract your brain to win this game. Think of fasting like playing chess with your brain. When your brain makes a move and sends you a hunger signal, you must also make a move to distract it. So let’s talk about some options.
- You could get up and get yourself a drink. Drink a glass of water and then wait a few minutes. Sometimes your hunger will pass. Maybe add a squeeze of lemon into that water. Lemon is a nice appetite suppressant.
- Have a cup of broth or some pickle juice. Saltwater hydrates you better than plain water.
- Your coffee or your tea does the trick also.
One key thing to know about hunger and cravings is that they tend to rise when a person begins dieting, whether for weight loss or other health reasons.
During dieting, your dopamine levels, meaning your cravings, go up, but so does the volume of your ghrelin because your body is sensing that you’re not eating enough, that you skip meals, and that you might be going into a deep caloric deficit, so it is turning up the volume. So on the hunger side, it’s turning up the volume on ghrelin (hunger hormone). On the craving side, it’s turning up the volume on dopamine (a feel-good hormone). So the two separate pathways become one, and people will say, when you’re dieting, you’re just starving yourself, both, you know, for food and for desserts. Your hunger is just out of control, and so are your cravings
So we fill ourselves up to satisfaction so that we can keep going until the next time we eat. And our brains are always anticipating when that’s going to be, whether food is going to be readily available or not. So in order to make any changes to the way that we eat, we want to understand what’s going on.
So your brain is constantly scanning your surroundings for food. And when it senses food, it signals you
Once the body adapts, the struggle fades. When your body transitions to full fat-burning mode, your hunger disappears.
What is appetite?
Appetite is a conditioning response to food. It is a sensory reaction to the thought, look, or smell of food. You could be watching a commercial on TV about food, and now you want to eat. You must have noticed that when we are sick, and we have not eaten anything for a long time, and we are just not interested in eating food because we do not have that much appetite, we do not have the desire to eat
This is the “pleasure” of eating. It can be triggered by seeing food or feeling emotional. Appetite is the desire for food. When you are sick, you are hungry, but you don’t have an appetite. Just like when you smell the aroma of something, like a bakery item or your favorite food, you feel like eating it. Your appetite increases. So even though you are not hungry and you don’t feel hungry, you have an appetite to eat.
So, how I’m distinguishing between the two is that appetite is a desire or a want for food, and hunger is the need to eat. So these two, hunger and appetite, can happen together.
So these two can happen together. If we’re hungry, quite often we have an appetite, we desire to eat as well, and then we eat. And that can be quite a satisfying combination.
They can also happen independently of one another. It’s less frequent, but we can be hungry and not have an appetite. But on the other side, more commonly, we can have an appetite even though we’re not physically hungry. So part of the work of healing our relationship with food is to be able to understand our appetite triggers and respond to them appropriately, which means sometimes we will eat in response to appetite, and sometimes we won’t.