How to Manage Nagging Hunger

Wouldn’t it be nice to not be thinking of food all day? Wouldn’t it be nice to not feel such urgent hunger all the time?  This would make life better because we could easily maintain a healthy weight and not feel so uncomfortable all the time.  Being hungry is not a pleasant feeling and it makes it so hard or almost impossible to eat less snacky things throughout the day.  You could have all the best intentions of sticking to a healthy eating plan but your appetite will always win in the end.

So besides eating snacky things all day, what can we do about hunger?  Well, the magic KEY to hunger is a hormone called insulin. When insulin is turned on and goes into action, it affects how hungry we feel.  But how? Well, we will talk about two ways insulin affects hunger.

Now, insulin has many jobs but there are two we will spotlight today.  The first job insulin has is to help sugar leave the blood and put it into muscles to save for energy later.  But, what happens when sugar leaves the blood?  Your blood sugar gets too low and it makes you feel hungry, shaky, and not like yourself!  The technical word for this is hypoglycemia and it makes you feel really miserably hungry!

The second job insulin has is to tell your body not to break down fat for energy right now.  But why would insulin want our body to stop burning fat?  Well, because insulin wants our bodies to use the sugar we just ate first! You could just release the fat you have on your body to prevent that uncomfortable hunger but if you have even a small amount of insulin around, your fat cells hold onto their fat (aka energy) and they won’t release it! Remember, one of insulin’s jobs is to tell your body to stop using fat for energy.

So now that we know the main ways that insulin affects our hunger, let’s learn what triggers excess insulin.  The main food that triggers insulin is carbohydrates because they easily turn to sugar in our blood.  When we eat a lot of excess carbs, excess insulin is released into the blood. This excess insulin then turns on our appetite.

So, insulin is like a special key that helps your body use the sugar from the food you eat. But when we eat too many carbs, too much insulin is released and it lowers the sugar in our blood really fast and really low causing nagging hunger and shakiness.  This makes it almost impossible to not feel hungry and snacky all day!

A much better way to experience life (and easily maintain a healthy weight) is to feel hunger less often, satisfy that hunger with a nice nourishing meal, and have energy and time to do fun things in your day.  In other words, we stop thinking about food all day because we are not hungry and we have more bandwidth to do the things we love!

To recap, one of the easiest ways to stop feeling hungry and snacky all day is to eat less carbs (and eat more protein and fat) so that insulin won’t be triggered too much and we can use our fat for energy. We tend to think carbs give us energy but it turns out they only make us hungry and tired but by focusing on protein and fat and eating less carbs, hunger doesn’t have to run our lives anymore. Hooray!