Is it really hunger?

An interesting blog by Brad Pilon

Source: http://www.theshapeshifterblog.com/is-it-really-hunger/

We all want food. We want it from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. For some of us, this desire is barely noticeable. For others, it’s a deafening noise in the back of our head, like the thump, thump, thump coming from the Harley Davidson motorcycle idling next to us at a stop light. It’s there, we try to ignore it, but we can’t.

But is this ‘want’ for food actually true hunger?

The true feeling of real hunger is difficult to explain, and I’m not sure many of us have ever really experienced it. Sure, we’ve felt the withdrawal of not being able to eat when we wanted to, and the disappointment of not being able to eat what we wanted to. But true hunger is reserved for those who are not sure when or where their next meal will come from …or if it ever will.

Consider that most people get noticeably hungry or irritated if they’ve gone more than 2 to 3 hours without eating. But during this time, metabolically speaking, they’re still in the fed state. Some people can finish a giant dinner, and then twenty minutes later be in the kitchen searching for a snack. In this case they are technically ‘full’ but they’re still ‘hungry.’

How can this be?

The role of taste and smell in motivating a person to eat (and in the foods they select to eat) is fairly obvious. Perhaps less obvious is the role of habit, social influence and cephalic reflexes.

According to Brian Wansink, author of “Mindless Eating” and dozens of scientific publications on why people eat, we make as many as 200 food related decisions every day, and we’re subjected to countless food advertisements.i

For the most part, I believe that hunger as you and I understand it is a conditioned response created through a mix of tastes, smells, habits, and social influence. In other words, our desire to eat is determined by a combination of our body’s response to the amount of food we have eaten, and our mind’s response to the environmental factors around us, such as TV commercials, snack food packaging colors, fonts , graphics, logos, etc…

It’s easy to suggest that ‘hunger’ and ‘cravings’ are a purely learned phenomena developed from infancy until we are adults. However, other researchers suggest that hunger is actually more of a biochemical phenomenon.

It’s been argued that our constant desire to eat may even be related to a form of addiction. However, the total body of research on ‘why we eat’ seems to suggest both biological and learned influences on appetite, and that these two influences are highly intertwined.

Evidence from a wide variety of sources supports the idea that eating motivation is not regulated according to a simple cycle of ‘depletion and repletion,’ but rather a series of motivational effects of the presence of food, its taste, smell, palatability, and a whole host of other external cues.

Within the last decade, it has been recognized that an increasing proportion of human food consumption is driven by pleasure. This is known as ‘hedonic hunger’.ii And this hedonic hunger creates many of our learned eating habits.

In other words, it’s the way we eat each day that ‘teaches’ our body when to expect food, and even what kinds of food to expect.

The exact term for this phenomenon is ‘food entrainment’. In animal studies we refer to the reaction to food expectation as ‘food anticipatory activity’. And it isn’t just a ‘psychological’ thing. It’s not just ‘all in your head.’

Food anticipatory activity includes increased locomotor activity, body temperature, corticosterone secretions, gastrointestinal motility, insulin secretion, and activity of digestive enzymes.iii,iv,v,vi So we truly can ‘teach’ our bodies when, where and even how to be hungry.

And because much of hunger is a learned phenomena developed from infancy to adulthood, the desire to eat specific foods in particular contexts (celebration) or in relation to particular feelings (stress foods) or situations (beer while watching football) can be regarded as a feature of normal appetite, rather than being an indication of some sort of eating pathology like an addiction or dependence. It’s simply ‘how we learned to eat’.

It is mostly social factors that teach us which of these learned ‘hungers’ is right or wrong.

The desire to eat eggs at breakfast time and the desire to eat chocolate while watching television in the evening may both be examples of specific learned appetites. However, only one of these learned appetites would be viewed as an addiction or craving (the chocolate, not the eggs).

Appetites are also culture specific. Where you live determines what’s weird and what’s normal.

In this sense, eating things you don’t want to eat or that don’t move you toward your goal is nothing more than bad habit learned and ingrained through years of practice. This isn’t meant to downplay the severity of this kind of entrainment. Depending on the emotions and rewards that have been associated with these eating habits, they can be nearly impossible to break.

Nearly impossible. Which means it IS possible.

This first step is identifying your eating habits. And this is one of the main benefits of taking an occasional break from eating (or fasting, as we like to call it these days).

Essentially, taking short breaks from eating gives you an opportunity to identify those periods where you would typically eat out of habit or emotion. These are the times you grab for food, even though you are consciously NOT eating.

It could be the coffee and donut when you’re in the car, or the midday snack at work. Whatever it is, the key is to identify those times when you eat even though you’re NOT hungry.

If these periods are identified often enough while you’re not eating, it gives you the opportunity to slowly retrain your food anticipatory activity to allow you to eat less even on the days when you are eating. In other words, you’re ‘resetting’ your body’s expectation of when and how much you’re going to eat.

The bottom line is that for the most part hunger is wanting to eat. Often called hedonistic hunger, it’s a collection of habits developed over a lifetime of overabundance—we have food available whenever we want it, and most social walls around eating have been broken. Heck, we’re even encouraged to eat in bookstores nowadays!

Taking the occasional break from eating allows people to unlearn some of these eating habits, or at the very least become aware of the cues that cause them to overeat. Short periods of fasting do not induce a powerful or uncontrolled need to compensate on the subsequent day by vastly overeating.

Doing this allows us to truly eat when we are hungry or when we will most enjoy it. The basic premise of the relationship between fasting and hunger is that fasting makes us more aware of our eating habits, as opposed to unconsciously going through life unaware of how or why we eat.

This does not have to involve rigid or strict fasting that alienates you from friends, family and social events. It’s simply a matter of adopting a point of view that says it’s okay to take the occasional break from eating so you can examine the reasons you eat in the first place.