We all get hungry. It is an important part of how the body works and keeps itself alive, a reminder to eat and provide your body with essential nutrients. But what does it really mean? Are you in the drivers seat, or is hunger dictating your schedule, food decisions, even your mood?
Feeling hungry when you’re trying to focus can be inconvenient or annoying, but you have more control over your body than you might think. Understanding how all your hormones and neural signals combine to generate hunger or satiety can help you put hunger in the back seat and take full control of your life.
What is Hunger?
Many people envision hunger as a measure of how much fuel they have left — like running out of gas in your car or your phone being low on battery. In reality, there are dozens of various signals that add up to a perception of hunger or fullness. The system is more complex than just being empty or full. With an unhealthy diet, you may actually feel more hungry despite eating.
How to create hunger
Hormones that stimulate hunger include ghrelin, cortisol, insulin, and others. When these are high, it can signal that your body needs more food and generates a feeling of hunger.
Other hormones like leptin, peptide YY, cholecystokinin (CKK), glucagon, glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), pancreatic polypeptide (PP) are produced when digesting certain foods and can replace hunger with a feeling of satiety. Elevated ketone levels can also lower ghrelin and reduce perceived hunger.
These chemicals in our bloodstream are only a part of the puzzle. Physical signals, like receptors for how stretched your stomach is will also contribute to appetite. Hunger can also be emotional or habitual, coming from high stress, boredom or daily routines.
Hunger can even come from external triggers outside your body. Pavlov’s experiment with dogs is a famous example of classical conditioning. After ringing a bell at the same time as presenting food, the dogs quickly became trained to salivate and expect food simply at the sound of the bell. The human brain is only slightly more sophisticated, and equally trainable. Advertisments, habits, or a simple mention of a food can cause us to be hungry or crave something unrelated to a physical need for food, especially after decades of conditioning and habits.
You don’t need to memorize this entire list, but it is important to realize the complexity of the chemical and neural pathways behind the scenes, that ultimately determines whether you are “hungry” or “full.”
Bugs and Vulnerabilities
Hunger and fullness cues evolved so you would eat the right foods, in the right amounts, to keep your body functioning optimally when food was scarce. Your ancestors didn't have a refrigerator stocked with foods, or restaurants and food delivery just a minute away. Food was often hard to get and finding your next meal may have required hours or even days. A complex assortment of hormones served as detailed food sensors in a time before food tracking apps or calorie counting.
Since then, the world has changed significantly, while our body and underlying operating system haven’t. Our well tuned hunger systems are starting to fall apart when exposed to strange new foods. Most people experience a few common issues...
- Hunger feels more urgent than it needs to be
- Low quality foods don’t make us full for long
- Higher stress causes cravings & emotional hunger
- Ads and habits condition us to eat certain foods
Food is now readily available. If you skip a meal, nothing really bad will happen and you can quickly get more food later. Once your body is in good condition, you should be able to decide when to eat or not eat and function smoothly in either case. However, it doesn’t always feel like that. Being hungry feels like a loud alarm going off, rather than a simple notification that can be dismissed.
In the convenient, highly-processed food environment we live in, the hunger signals that initially worked well may now be working against you. You may find yourself eating more than your body needs but still feeling hungry, even a few hours after you just ate.
From Hunger to Satiety
Now that we know finally all the chemicals and mechanisms involved, we can use science to fix these problems rather than be mystified by hunger or let it rule our lives. This likely requires changing both what you eat and how you eat it, until all your hormone levels are at the right balance. Then you’ll feel satiated rather than constantly hungry!
Just eating one salad won’t fix the problem, but after even just a few days of consistent practice you should notice significant changes. Working backwards from the various signaling hormones, we can derive an optimal “high quality” diet and new habits to check all the necessary boxes.
Prioritize Protein at Each Meal
Protein is the superstar of satiety because it requires a lot of time to digest, making your stomach feel full for hours. The presence of protein in a meal stimulates the peptide-YY (PYY), a hormone that reduces hunger. Protein consumption can also suppress ghrelin, which otherwise increases hunger.
Center your meals around a good protein source. Fish, poultry, meat, eggs, or legumes can be great sources of protein. For vegetarians, tofu, nuts, seeds, seitan, and dairy products like cottage cheese or greek yogurt can provide essential protein to your meals as well. Additional protein can be supplemented with a protein shake or protein bar, though those should not be your only sources of protein.
Stop Avoiding Dietary Fat
Fats are very filling and satisfying. When fats reach the small intestine, they stimulate cholecystokinin (CKK), a digestive hormone that sends a signal to your brain that you are full and satisfied. Certain fats like essential fatty acids (EFA’s) are especially critical in the proper functioning of your brain.
When you avoid eating fat, you aren’t triggering this important satiety hormone and can still feel hungry. Though low fat foods are often marketed as a way to lose weight, in reality you may feel more hungry and end up eating more. Try adding fat-containing foods like avocado, olives, olive oil, fatty fish like salmon or tuna, nuts, and seeds to every meal to increase satiety.
Fill Up on Fiber
Your stomach lining contains receptors that when stretched, signal that you are full and should stop eating. High-fiber and high-water foods can be an effective tool for feeling full without worrying about having too many calories.
High-fiber foods to add to your meals could include cabbage, broccoli, lettuce, beans, raspberries, quinoa, brown rice, or chia seeds. Drinking water at mealtimes and eating high-water fruits and vegetables like cucumber, celery, watermelon or apples can help fill up your your stomach receptors as well.
Avoid High Carb Meals
Your body requires a specific concentration of glucose in your blood to function optimally. When it gets too high, your body quickly brings it back down using insulin. When glucose gets too low, your body increases hunger hormones to motivate you to bring it back up — and you also start to get tired and conserve energy.
Most carbohydrates (except fiber) are composed of sugar at a molecular level, even if they taste “salty” and not sweet. They quickly convert into sugar during digestion process, and go to your blood for use.
When you eat a meal that contains mostly carbs (like bread, pasta, rice, sugar, candy, pastries, or many other processed foods), a lot of glucose enters your bloodstream at once. This high blood glucose levels stimulates a high amount of insulin, to urgently remove that extra sugar which would be toxic otherwise. With an excess of insulin, the blood sugar concentration drops again.
Now with high insulin and low glucose, your body is back to feeling hungry despite having just recently eaten! The process is like a roller coaster, with a big rise followed by an equally steep drop. If you crave food shortly after finishing a meal or find it hard to focus during the day, you might not be balancing your blood sugar correctly and eating too much sugar.
Properly balance your plate
To avoid riding this unpleasant blood sugar rollercoaster, avoid eating meals that are predominantly sugar or high in carbohydrates. Instead, eat a good source of protein, fiber, and fat with each meal. More specifically, eat those before eating any carbs or sugar. These components slow down the digestion of food, so the glucose from the meal gets delivered more evenly and gradually throughout the day rather than in one big spike.
When you include adequate protein, fat, and fiber in the meal, you’ll trigger most of the necessary hormonal satiety cues. You'll suppress ghrelin levels, while stimulating fullness hormone like CCK, PYY, and GLP-1 within 20 to 30 minutes of eating. These different hormones are your body’s way of measuring the meal to decide if it got the nutrients it wanted or if it still needs to be hungry.
Eating only balanced meals will help properly dismiss your feelings of hunger and not have it return immediately. It is important to check all these requirements in the same meal:
- A high amount of protein
- Some healthy fats
- A good amount of fiber
- Minimal sugar and carbs
Avoiding Bad Habits That Disrupt Hunger
In addition to the actual food and amount of nutrients in them, how you eat is also significant. You’re not just a simple machine that converts a day’s food into a simple calorie count. There are a lot of nuances to the eating process that can be optimized.
Don’t eat too quickly
It can take 20-30 minutes for these fullness signals to be created and reach your brain. Until then, you could eat an almost unlimited amount without your body’s built in hunger systems regulating the meal. Take your time when eating, chew your food thoroughly, and pause between bites to savor the taste and flavor of your food.
Add an extra 5 chews to your food before swallowing, or try eating with your non-dominant hand to slow you down if you are going too fast. The more time you spend chewing, the more time you give your brain to receive all the necessary satiety signals.
You shouldn’t need some calorie counting app to tell you how much is the correct amount to eat. If you eat slowly and mostly whole foods, your body will do the tracking and measurement for you, and tell you to stop very clearly when you’ve had the right amount.
What if you don’t have 20 minutes for a meal? Then you could just skip it, and eat a healthy balanced meal when you have time. Counterintuitively, just eating some sugar or an imbalanced meal in a rush can result in having less energy or an unhealthy glucose drop rather than satisfying your hunger and nutrition requirements.
Don’t eat while multitasking
Allow yourself to focus completely on your food to increase meal satisfaction and feel satiated with less food. When you eat mindlessly, distracted in front of a TV, phone, or computer, you are likely to override your fullness signals and eat more than your body wants.
Set aside time in your day for eating so you can focus on the flavors and textures of your food. Enjoy your meal at mealtimes. It might sound elementary, but it works!
In the Gyroscope app, there is a mindful eating meditation that you can listen to while eating to help you be extremely focused and present, enjoying all the flavors and textures of a meal.
Avoid overly processed foods
Eating too many processed foods like soda, chips, pastries, or desserts can make you more hungry. When foods are processed, they are stripped of their filling nutrients like fiber and protein, so you don’t produce important chemicals like Peptide YY to feel satisfied and stop eating.
Even worse, they are generally full of sugar and refined grains which will cause an uncontrolled glucose spike, resulting in low blood sugar and high hunger within an hour. If your response to feeling hungry is eating a cookie or candy bar or similarly imbalanced meal, this process can repeat over and over in an infinite loop of hunger and low productivity.
The metabolic coach in Gyroscope X will warn you when a meal is heavily processed and missing important nutrients, or likely to disrupt your productivity with a drop in your glucose supply.
Avoid chronic stress
Habits unrelated to eating can also contribute to hunger. For instance, being constantly stressed increases hormones like cortisol which increases appetite and cravings.
Reducing stress in your life and engaging in stress-relieving techniques can play a big role in decreasing the cravings you feel throughout the day. There is no quick fix, but properly managing your sleep, and practicing all the ways to improve your stress from the Labs can help to manage these. Frequent exercise can also help, and should be thought of as a stress reduction tool (to eat more healthily) rather than as a calorie cancellation tool.
Avoid low sleep scores
Similarly, being low on sleep also alters your hormone levels to increase appetite. Being short on sleep stimulates an increase of ghrelin and a decrease in leptin, resulting in increased hunger.
Taking control of your hunger
We now know just eating more food isn’t necessarily going to fix your hunger. The quality and composition of the meals is key. Now that you understand how your body switches between hunger and satiety, you can be in full control of how you feel.
Slowing down and being more mindful when eating is an easy first step. Remember to improve your meal quality by prioritizing protein, fat, and fiber-rich foods to help you feel more satisfied throughout the day. Just as important as the foods you should eat, are the foods you should avoid if you want to overcome constant hunger. Processed or high-sugar foods contribute a lot of empty calories while ultimately making your hunger worse and resulting in nutritional deficiencies.
You can practice these strategies offline, or log all your food in Gyroscope for additional metrics and accountability.
More than just avoiding hunger, implementing these strategies can help you to achieve other long-term benefits of mindful, healthy eating — easier fat loss, reduced risk of disease, feeling more energized and productive through the day, and even saving money on food. Being in control of and fully understanding your hunger will help you get back in control of your schedule and moods, and can be a catalyst to enjoying a healthier life.
Once you’ve optimized your meals, stabilized your blood sugar and are no longer feeling constantly hungry, you will be ready to continue to the next chapter in the academy: Food Timing!