Nutrition and Weight Loss Ideas

Are You Really Hungry — Or — Do You Just Think You Are?

When you are focusing on your wellness, health and fitness program it is vital that you are eating in such a way that you will be able to know which is which — is it hunger or is it just a craving for something.

Obviously, if one of your goals is to lose weight, you have to resist cravings while you do respond to true hunger.

What is Hunger?

If it gets to be four or five hours since you had your last meal, and you begin to feel a need to eat, that’s probably hunger. This feeling of real hunger will occur when your body experiences a normal and gradual drop in blood sugar. That will happen after you have digested your most recent meal. Your blood sugar will reach a point where it will signal your brain that it’s time to eat.

Okay, so what are Cravings?

If you have a “need to eat” only an hour or two after you last ate, that is usually a craving. Cravings are caused by exaggerated spikes and dips in blood sugar. These exaggerated “ups and downs” in sugar levels will usually happen when you have eaten some sort of highly processed carbohydrates. These are food items like white bread, white potatoes, cakes, cookies, white rice, enriched flour, white pasta, pizza, etc. Any food item that has a high amount of sugar will also fall into this category.

What happens is that these foods are digested so quickly that they cause an almost immediate rise in blood sugar levels followed by a rapid dip in those levels as soon as the food is digested.

It’s that sudden drop in blood sugar level that tricks your body into thinking it’s hungry. When you eat highly processed foods you will actually make yourself feel hungry and want to eat more. And, not too far down the road, you start to gain weight because the highly processed foods force your body to store the excess insulin as fat — and it’s generally deposited around the stomach area.

One example that I see often is when children are fed that old standby, macaroni and cheese, made with white pasta, milk, butter and some sort of processed cheese product. You can watch them devour considerable quantities of this. About an hour later, they are back saying they’re hungry.

(One of these days I will get into an article about a major pet peeve of mine, and that is the way we feed our children!)

If you will eat (and feed your children) good carbohydrates and good fats such as lean protein, whole grains, fresh fruits, and fresh vegetables, you will not only lose weight, but if you stay with this — and stay away from sugar and other highly processed foods — you will actually lose those cravings that used to plague you — right along with the weight loss.

Have a great day. I’ll be back tomorrow with some more wellness, health and fitness thoughts for you.

Shanti,

Ron
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