Confident Eaters

Help! I'm too hungry!
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Georgie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Confident Eaters Podcast, where you get proven methods to end overeating, emotional eating, and stressing about food. We are heading for harmony between your body, food and feelings, hosted by me, Georgie Fear, and my team at Confident Eaters.

Hunger is a powerful force of nature. It's like a tsunami wave or hurricane force wind. It can tear the roof off your house and destroy the whole city. Okay, so that's an exaggeration, but hunger sure is not something you can just ignore forever or try to outlast. We can override the desire to eat for a considerable time, but in the long run, it always seems that hunger gets the last word.

How to stop being so hungry, or how to suppress appetite, are two of the most common questions asked on Facebook groups [00:01:00] or Reddit threads for weight loss support. And some of the advice given is reasonable. While some of it is downright painful to read. Today, I'll go through some of the basics of appetite regulation, as well as some things which can dial up or down your hunger.

I'll focus mainly on the things we can modify. Because talking about things we can't change doesn't feel like the best use of our time, does it? What makes us feel hungry? The first point to clarify is that hunger is different from simply desiring food. These are super easy to mix up. And just like you can desire, drink, and enjoy a beverage without being thirsty, you can desire, eat, and enjoy food without necessarily feeling hungry for it.

Desire for food. is a more complicated psychological topic. So in this episode, I'm going to stay focused on physical hunger. That's the empty, hollow, possibly growly sensation you get in your upper abdomen. Although we feel hunger in our abdomen, the signals are actually coming from our [00:02:00] brains.

Specifically, the hypothalamus. This region of our brain has to integrate many incoming signals, which is why appetite is so complex. Some of the signals come from the blood Your hypothalamus is able to sense the concentration of glucose and insulin present in your bloodstream. It also picks up on hormones secreted from your digestive tract, which signal, Woohoo!

We've got food down here! The stomach, large intestine, small intestine, and pancreas all send their own signals via the bloodstream to inform your brain about the levels of food and fuel currently available. The bloodstream carries still more signals from other areas of the body. Your fat cells, for example, secrete a hormone called leptin, which suppresses your appetite when your fat stores are more plentiful.

Corticosteroids from the adrenal glands, which are involved in your body's stress response, can also trigger or suppress hunger. Estrogen, which is present in both men and women, [00:03:00] also plays a role in how hungry you feel. As if this were not complicated enough The hypothalamus is also getting signals from everywhere else in the brain via neurotransmitters like serotonin, norepinephrine, and adenosine.

These levels of neurotransmitters are impacted by things like caffeine intake, pharmaceuticals, and the amount of sleep and exercise an individual has gotten. So if you can imagine being a hypothalamus for just a second, that's a huge job. That would be like trying to monitor conversation on a dozen different phone lines at once. And based on all of that information, your job is to dial up or down hunger on a minute by minute basis, based on how your current fuel stores are compared to the fuel needs of your body.

That's some job. That also might give you an idea of why it makes me roll my eyes when someone comments that they're really hungry lately, and some helpful person on the internet says, without asking for any other information, [00:04:00] Oh, it's because you're dehydrated. Drink more water.

Or, that means you're not getting enough protein. Or, it must be the birth control pill or antidepressant you're taking. When a client of mine is struggling with being too hungry, we need to have a conversation to figure out why. Today, I'm going to share pieces of what that conversation typically looks like.

So, if you're struggling with feeling ungodly amounts of hunger, you'll know what to try adjusting. So, if you reached out to me and said, Georgie, I am so freaking hungry, it's making my life hard. First, I'll want to sort out whether what you're experiencing is in fact hunger, or as I mentioned earlier, a desire for food.

We would address those in completely different ways. I'd ask you if what you're experiencing is the true physical hunger, an empty, hollow sensation in your abdomen. If that is true, then we've got agreement on one thing: you're hungry! Next, I'm going to want to know what you're typically eating. I'll give you a few sample food logs, and we can talk about why [00:05:00] each of these people is feeling overly hungry, and what we can do to help them.

Case study number one, Becky. My typical day starts with a latte, and that's pretty much all I have until noon, Becky says. Morning is easy, I don't really feel hungry then. For lunch, I bring a sandwich from home and an apple. The sandwich is two slices of bread, some turkey, a piece of Swiss cheese, and mustard.

The hunger starts to annoy me soon after lunch, and if I can hold out, it's just there all afternoon. But a lot of times I end up grazing on whatever food is around the office. If I make it home before giving in, I raid the pantry for crackers and cheese or chips before dinner. I usually eat too much of those, and then I'm not hungry for dinner, but I eat it anyway.

So what's going on with Becky? Simply, she's not eating enough. The latte she has for breakfast, plus the apple and simple sandwich she has for lunch, only add up to about 500 calories, or a quarter of what she probably needs in a day. No wonder she's feeling hungry [00:06:00] throughout the second half of the day.

My advice is to add some real food for breakfast, an inch up the size of her lunch. This will allow her to not spend all afternoon distracted by hunger, and she can finally break the habit of eating crackers and cheese or chips as soon as she gets home.

After spinning her wheels, staying the same weight month after month, Becky started to see a gradual loss. Okay, so that was pretty straightforward. Not eating enough is a common source of hunger.

People who want to lose weight often decrease their planned food intake too far. They get very hungry, and they end up making up the calories in unplanned food intake, no weight loss, and a lot of effort expended. Instead, making small shifts to meals can help reduce calories and help you learn to accept a little hunger before meals, which is a lot more realistic than attempting to accept feeling hungry for most of your waking hours in an effort to lose weight quickly. Case study number two, Fiona. Fiona [00:07:00] says breakfast is a bowl of oatmeal. Lunch is a pre made salad from the cafeteria with ranch dressing. Dinner is often take out Chinese, Thai, or Indian food. Sometimes pizza, sometimes sushi. She and her wife are both vegetarian, and they don't cook a lot, but if they do, it's basic, like pasta with red sauce or jarred pesto. During the day, she frequently gets hungry and snacks on raisins, fresh fruit, or granola bars, but she's really busy as a nurse, so a lot of the time she just has to keep working, even though her stomach is growling so loudly patients have even commented on it.

So why is Fiona so darned hungry? I asked her a few questions about her oatmeal for breakfast and her usual lunchtime salad to see if they were, like Becky, not providing enough calories. But it seems that they were. She had almond milk and walnuts in her cereal, and she had a pretty big serving of it.

The salad was full of veggies, had olives and chickpeas on there, and she liked the regular full fat ranch [00:08:00] dressing that came with it. Plus, she was eating several servings of fruit and granola bars throughout the workday, so it seemed that her energy intake was adequate. But what she wasn't getting much of was protein.

Other than about the two tablespoons of chickpeas on her salad, there was hardly any protein rich food in Fiona's diet, at least during the day. Sometimes the take out food she got for dinner would have some tofu, but she estimated that was only once or twice a week. So, what did we change? We boosted the protein in Fiona's breakfast by switching to a high protein milk instead of almond milk in her oatmeal.

We added collagen powder to her coffee as well. This gave her an extra 20 grams of protein in her breakfast, without it really being a different meal. For lunch, she started bringing two hard boiled eggs with her to work, chopping them up and putting them on the salad. She really didn't want to boil the eggs herself.

I told you, she hates cooking. But she discovered she could buy already boiled ones at the grocery store. Instead of using [00:09:00] granola bars and raisins for snacks, we made a list of options like protein bars, soy nuts, or roasted fava bean snacks that she could leave in her locker. And for dinners, we talked about making sure that there was some protein like tofu, cheese, edamame, chickpea pasta, or other vegetarian proteins in the meal.

So, what happened? She felt much less hungry during the day. In her words, Breakfast and lunch seemed to last me twice as long before I felt hungry. It's like magic. She ended up eating far fewer of her snacks, and seeing her weight come down about four pounds over the first month. Okay, last case study here.

Phil. Phil is eating plenty. And he's also eating plenty of protein. His usual breakfast includes eggs. Toast and yogurt with fruit. His lunch is leftovers from home, always including protein, always vegetables, and always a whole grain or potatoes. He has a long gap between lunch and dinner, so we developed the habit of leaving half a peanut butter sandwich in the car so he could eat it on the way [00:10:00] home and not graze before dinner.

But Phil says I'm still super hungry. I'm hungry before breakfast, for at least an hour before lunch, I look forward to that car snack from about 3 p. m. onward, and then I'm nagging my wife about when dinner will be ready because I'm so hungry for dinner. He said, I also have sweet cravings that are insane, but I think I've got a handle on them drinking Coke Zero throughout the day.

That helps. I asked him how much Coke Zero he was drinking, and he laughed in the way that is undeniably code for, it's a lot. But he said, well, I used to drink about 10 espressos a day, and now I'm down to only about three of those. So lots of Coke Zero is an improvement, right? 10 espressos, I thought. How does this guy sleep?

So that was my next question. Are you able to sleep okay with all of that caffeine? And he said, well, I work late and then I also get up and work early because of my overseas meetings. So after a 20 hour workday, yeah, I sleep as soon as I hit the pillow. I asked if [00:11:00] 20 hours was an exaggeration, and it turns out, it's not an exaggeration.

The norm for him ranges from 16 to 20 hours of work a day. Ah, now we know where that hunger is coming from. The human body isn't going to function optimally on that little sleep.

He was only getting about 5 hours a night on average, and because his steady infusion of caffeine kept him functioning during the day. He thought this was workable, but his appetite was begging to differ. Chronically short sleep is one of those signals that skews your hypothalamus to drastically turn up hunger.

It doesn't even have to be chronic, though. One night of being up caring for a sick dog or a child is likely to leave you noticeably hungrier the following day. So from the three cases we went over today, we see three of the most common reasons people complain about being too hungry. They're eating too little, creating a huge calorie deficit, or [00:12:00] they're consuming too little protein, or they're getting too little sleep.

There are less common reasons that I see, but these are behind almost every case of someone whose weight loss feels impeded by excessive hunger. I hope this episode gives you some insight on how you might take steps to improve your eating.

It's really important to me that you take care of yourself, because you are important to me. I'll see you next time. Lots of love.