What you eat matters for after-meal hunger
Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 12:56 am
My thought for the day on being hungry too soon after meals: What you eat matters, not just how much and when. This is especially true for people who are sensitive to sugar because they've become somewhat insulin-resistant.
That's a very important lesson I learned while on the South Beach Diet (which I think is a great plan for losing. The problem for me is there's not enough guidance on how to maintain afterwards.) I felt great on South Beach. After awhile, I could tell which foods had problematic ingredients in them: not necessarily because they tasted too sweet, but because I would get very hungry an hour or two after eating them.
To give you one example, I discovered the salad dressing that comes with one of my favorite Panera salads triggered significant hunger for me a couple of hours after. Once I requested balsamic dressing instead, I didn't have the same problem.
If you are becoming ravenous between meals, yes, it's possible you didn't eat enough. I'm still trying to figure out how to have meals somewhere between eating too little and being hungry too soon, and eating too much and feeling overstuffed. But amount may not be the only issue. It's possible you need more complex carbohydrates, fats, and/or protein to help you have a feeling of being sated between meals. But it's also possible that there's some sort of ingredient that's a trigger for you, and having less of it could help stabilize appetite.
There's no single list of problem foods or ingredients that works for everyone. But if you pay attention to how you feel after you eat various types of foods, you may be able to come up with a personalized list yourself, for you, that helps you lessen hunger between meals.
That's a very important lesson I learned while on the South Beach Diet (which I think is a great plan for losing. The problem for me is there's not enough guidance on how to maintain afterwards.) I felt great on South Beach. After awhile, I could tell which foods had problematic ingredients in them: not necessarily because they tasted too sweet, but because I would get very hungry an hour or two after eating them.
To give you one example, I discovered the salad dressing that comes with one of my favorite Panera salads triggered significant hunger for me a couple of hours after. Once I requested balsamic dressing instead, I didn't have the same problem.
If you are becoming ravenous between meals, yes, it's possible you didn't eat enough. I'm still trying to figure out how to have meals somewhere between eating too little and being hungry too soon, and eating too much and feeling overstuffed. But amount may not be the only issue. It's possible you need more complex carbohydrates, fats, and/or protein to help you have a feeling of being sated between meals. But it's also possible that there's some sort of ingredient that's a trigger for you, and having less of it could help stabilize appetite.
There's no single list of problem foods or ingredients that works for everyone. But if you pay attention to how you feel after you eat various types of foods, you may be able to come up with a personalized list yourself, for you, that helps you lessen hunger between meals.