Habits and Hunger

[NoelFigart]

I sometimes teach Microsoft applications through a local company. When I do, they always take me to lunch. Lunch is between 12:00 and 1:00 when I do this. When I'm working at home, I tend to eat breakfast a bit later in the morning and hold off on lunch until around 1:00.

So, since I had lunch early, I started getting hungry earlier than I ordinarily would coming on to dinnertime. I decided just as an exercise in habit, I'd tolerate the hunger until it was dinnertime with the agreement that I'd eat the meal early rather than snack.

I wound up getting distracted and managed to eat at my normal dinner time, but it got me to thinking about how we really do have a weird relationship with, let's face it, mild hunger.

I mean, when you think about it, hunger before a meal is appropriate. It means you need some food. If you make it so you're never hungry, you can hardly ever know when you need food. If you're pretty hungry before a meal No-Sing, it means you're doing it right! If you're not, you probably overate on your last meal.

[connorcream]

If you're pretty hungry before a meal No-Sing, it means you're doing it right! If you're not, you probably overate on your last meal.

That is my benchmark as well. And, drum roll please, I actual like being hungry before eating. Who knew? I need to find some time to write down all of these wonderful changes.

[alanajuliana]

I get hungry half way through the afternoon, and I just have to grit my teeth and bear it. I'm hoping that with time and determination I can re-train my body into not getting hungry at that time of day 3-4 pm-ish. I eat dinner after 6:30 so that I don't have to go to bed too terribly hungry, but I'm always a bit hungry when I go to bed.

This is very hard, and I sometimes wonder if I'll be able to keep it up long term. I hope I can. Just being honest, here.

I'm only in my second week. All the N days have been green so far.

Any advice for reducing hunger? Could eating too much at a meal trigger more hunger????

[blueskighs]

"Hunger is the best seasoning"

This is very hard, and I sometimes wonder if I'll be able to keep it up long term. I hope I can. Just being honest, here.

Oh, it will definitely get easier ... because apparently our appetites CAN be retrained ... we just need to have the will and perseverance to do it. Two weeks is a great amount of time, but as you keep going, I think YOU will be posting about the amazing changes you are experiencing!

Blueskighs

[Kathleen]

Here is something I wrote on September 18:

I had breakfast at 6:30 AM this morning, and now it is nearing 10. I leave in about 1/2 hour to go volunteer at the school. I was just in the kitchen, and those nectarines and grapes are calling my name. I have trained myself to eat at the first sign of hunger. Well, what I found with my Hunger Satisfaction Diet is that my stomach actually would growl when I came into the presence of food. I thought that hunger growls were strictly an internal physical change and could not be impacted by external events, but I learned differently! Ever have a child run into a parking lot? The heart beats faster even though you aren't moving. It turns out, I learned, that stomach noises are responsive to the environment just like heartbeats are.

How about today?

I routinely eat breakfast at 6:30 AM and don't get home for lunch until 2 PM. I don't even think about food. It's incredible! It's not that I am any less hungry. It's that I don't know. I'm simply not tuned into hunger unless it is mealtime. Why? I think it's because I'm not eating no matter how hungry I feel, and eventually it just doesn't matter.

Kathleen

PS. The Hunger Satisfaction Diet was that I could only eat after my stomach growled. I was VERY tuned into hunger.

[Savita]

I have found that the best way to reduce the feeling of hunger between meals is to drink a glass of water...or maybe two. I've been brought up in a tropical country and still live in one so it's pretty normal for me to reach for water whenever the tummy growls. Water has the added advantage of being non-sweet and filling so to me it's a guilt-less way of maintaining NoS.

Savita

[NoelFigart]

I get hungry half way through the afternoon, and I just have to grit my teeth and bear it. I'm hoping that with time and determination I can re-train my body into not getting hungry at that time of day 3-4 pm-ish. I eat dinner after 6:30 so that I don't have to go to bed too terribly hungry, but I'm always a bit hungry when I go to bed.

You may not be eating a large ENOUGH meal. QUITE hungry an hour before dinner is one thing. Feeling that way three hours before isn't the point.

If you're going to bed hungry (physically hungry and not just food habituated), you also might not be eating enough dinner. If a cup of tea doesn't take care of it, you're probably not.

I do experiments from time to time to make sure I'm not fooling myself with plate size and will count calories for a day, using measuring implements and everything (No-one eyeballs to that level of exactness well unless they've actually USED measuring implements for their food for several years). For dinner last night, I had a cup of rice mixed with a cup of beans, an orange and 8 oz. milk. I was satisfied until bedtime. I'm hungry now (it's almost 5) but won't eat until later because I don't want to have breakfast too early and throw off my day. This early, coffee takes care of it.

[wosnes]

I've read that the problem isn't only how much or how often we eat, but what we eat. The Western Diet is notoriously unhealthy; it contains a lot of food that doesn't meet our needs for nutrition: overly refined and processed foods, trans fats in addition to lots of chemical additives of one sort or another. The more nutrient dense the food is, the less likely you are to feel hunger.

...as you start to meet the body’s nutrient needs, it desires less food. This mean we’re not going to crave food as much or want to eat as often.

Another is that when you eat foods that have toxic properties or that aren’t healthy for you, they create addictive withdrawal symptoms once you stop eating them. Since those addictive withdrawal symptoms are relieved by frequent eating, they drive people to eat more frequently than is necessary. For example, if you stop drinking coffee you get headaches. You can get rid of the headaches by breaking the caffeine habit or by drinking more coffee. Likewise, when you eat a diet that contains processed foods and trans fats, lots of saturated fats and lots of salt, you're diet is relatively toxic and when you stop eating for a few hours, you start to feel lousy. Feeling weak, achy, abdominal spasms, and headachy, are not how one feels true hunger. True hunger is felt in the throat, not the stomach. So the point is, in order to stop the addictive drives and perverted cravings that lead to compromised health and the obesity epidemic we have, we must restore nutritional excellence. This puts people back in touch with the amount of calories they actually need. Dieting doesn’t work because you are always fighting your addictive sensations.

A number of us here have found that as the quality of our food goes up, the need to eat more frequently seems to go down -- without experiencing much hunger in between meals.

About six years ago when Dr. Fuhrman's book Eat to Live was published, I tried his six-week program. It includes a lot of low-calorie but nutritionally dense foods -- and no snacking or sweets (except fruit). I'll have to say that I was never hungry, but I wasn't satisfied. The lack of satisfaction that was more between my ears than in my stomach.

After that I started reading about various traditional diets around the world. The two things that they all had in common was much smaller amounts of refined and processed foods, if there were any, and absence of chemicals in foods. Nearly all farming in other areas has always been "organic." As the Western diet traveled around the globe, so did obesity, heart disease, diabetes and various cancers.

[whisper2701]

I find what WOSNES said to be what really helps me with my hunger. Eating healthy high fiber foods (vegetables, whole grains, healthy proteins) sustain me much longer than processed foods. Also, I'm starting to drink tea with a little stevia during the morning or afternoon when I'm feeling a little hungry.

I know when I first started the No S Diet I thought I wouldn't be able to get from Lunch to Dinner without eating - then I realized that the desire to eat something between these meals was more of a habit then a real need for food.

I also really like what BLUESKIGHS said about "Hunger is the best seasoning", I find this to be so true I really enjoy my food so much more when I'm hungry. The more I snacked the more my taste buds seemed to just go numb.

Linda

[Blithe Morning]

The other night I was ravenous at bed time. I went to bed and couldn't sleep because I was so hungry. I mentally reviewed everything I ate that day and it was mostly carbs. I got up and had a protein powder drink (I don't much care for water). Did the trick.