March Newsletter: Hunger & Appetite

Hunger and Appetite: Aren’t those synonyms?

We all know about the concept of “Freshman 15,” so let me share my experience with you.

I have had a steady body weight through my adult life, but the first year of college brought a lot of stress. Most of it was good and exciting, but of course there was the academic course load, and holding yourself to a very high academic standard is tough for anyone.

Living in the dorm with a bunch of other 18 year olds was both exciting and frustrating, and we were all required to be on the meal plan that included meals at the cafeteria. There was an urban legend going around the dorm that the cafeteria staff secretly sprayed extra starch on the salad bar lettuce so that girls didn’t become anorexic. I‘m pretty sure that was false.

I never really liked it as much as home cooking, but there were just always so many choices. Dessert was available every day. That wasn’t normal to me. In my household, dessert was an infrequent treat, so I probably went overboard, eating things mostly because the choices were there and it was exciting for me.

I was physically active. I took some early morning kickboxing classes, plus I was still trying to keep up my high school habit of running in the morning. I distinctly remember waking up regularly at about 6am and being SO. DARN. HUNGRY. Really, so hungry that it was my hunger waking me up, not my alarm. I couldn’t even think of sleeping in when my stomach growled that much in the early morning.

I also recall having frequent digestive issues at that time, which I never really figured out at the time. You know – issues of the stinky, embarrassing variety. Not good for anyone’s social life. I felt that my diet was “off” in some way, but I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.

Bottom line – I gained 10 pounds during my first year of college. How did that happen?

For years, this has puzzled me; even as I got my bachelor’s degree in nutrition, and went on to start my career in fitness.

It has taken me many years to come to terms with the fact that I, like any other human may do at some point, had mistaken my appetite for hunger.

Appetite, hunger, satiety… will this be on the test?

We all like to think that we can’t be fooled. Once we have seen how a magic trick works… we won’t be taken in. That is for other people, the ones who are ignorant. But not me – I am too smart to be fooled. Famous last words.

The thing is – once you think you know it all, you stop looking at everything else around you with open curiosity. The sad truth is that people who think they are too smart to be fooled are exactly the ones who get fooled.

For decades, the officially accepted dogma in nutrition and weight loss (and the way I was taught in my college nutrition courses) was that all you had to do was expend more calories than you take in. Simple as that – your body is a math equation. Aerobics were the superior form of exercise for weight loss because it burns the greater percent of calories from fat. Oh, and definitely a low fat diet was the way to go, since obviously eating fat will make you fat. A healthy individual should be able to self-regulate food intake based on hunger, but if you have trouble with that, then tough, you just need to count calories.

So scientists had it figured out, and government health agencies disseminated the information to the public. Low fat diets and steady-state aerobic exercise reigned supreme throughout the 20^th century, and America continued to get fatter by the year.

We started with this equation for energy balance:

Calories in = calories out

Now, the equation looks more like this:

Calories in + stress + inadequate sleep + inattentive eating habits out of proportion to real hunger cues + addictive nature of processed foods = Calories out (consists of: resting metabolic rate + all movement and exercise, which is affected by sedentary lifestyle, movement patterns, and metabolic adaptation to aerobic exercise)

It turns out that there are several factors on the “calories in” side of the equation that complicate things by affecting your hormones or your psychological state. It also turns out that appetite doesn’t always match up with hunger.

Appetite is a psychological desire for food, and as such it will be affected by your past experience with food, as well as your current mental state. Hunger is your body’s physical need for food.

Theoretically, hunger should drive appetite, but in real life it doesn’t always work out nice and clean like that. Likewise, the satisfaction of physical hunger should give a satisfaction of appetite, but once again satiety doesn’t always work out that way.

There’s a saying that reflects this mismatch between hunger and appetite. Have you ever said that someone’s eyes were bigger than their stomach? Have you ever said it about yourself? The phrase is usually in the context of dishing yourself up more food than you can eat, and being left with a lot of wasted food – a common phenomenon at buffets and potlucks. A similar phrase is biting off more than you can chew – and these are just the American English phrases. Each language and culture has their own phrases for similar situations. After all, eating and culture are deeply intertwined, and appetite is universal.

So what happens if you override your physical signals telling you to put the brakes on eating, and just keep going back and back again for more because you simply have to try everything? The immediate effects are typically painful, usually involving heartburn and other digestive upset, and the long term effects are an increase in girth. The more often you do it, the more your friends and family come to regard you as a member of the “clean plate club.” They start to anticipate your reaction and offer or leave you food.

Are you someone who always eats the leftovers from your kids’ dinner plates? It is a common thing, and I have heard it from members of this gym. When you finish your kids’ leftovers on a regular basis, appetite gives way to habit. If you are in this situation frequently, you may not have the appetite to finish the other’s plate, but habit and culture can be strong driving forces. I know many people who struggle with their weight because someone else in the family (child or spouse) has eyes bigger than their stomach, but the composure to stop eating when satisfied. The other person (who hates wasting food – which I completely understand and relate to) is left to most likely become the human garbage disposal for the other person’s sampled fare.

We all have times that we succumb to such feelings, even more so at parties, holidays, or other celebrations. The first step in getting things under control is to acknowledge that you are human, and therefore your desires can get the better of you sometimes. I find that the more thoroughly I accept the ebb and flow of my desires, the easier is the whole process of self-regulating food intake.

The second step is to slow down your eating. Chew more, take smaller bites. Ask yourself if you are really still hungry. Sometimes this can be hard question to answer for yourself, so I have found that an even better way to go about it is to ask yourself if you are still enjoying your food as much as when you started eating. If you are still not sure, just put your meal on pause for a few minutes. You can always resume if you later decide you are still hungry.

The third step is to never punish yourself, no matter what dietary “transgressions” you experience. As soon as you mentally chastise yourself, a different part of your brain will most likely feel upset at the restriction, and then proceed to drive you further off your plan to complete dietary abandon. When your meal is that emotionally charged, it is next to impossible to discern the signs of satiety from your body.

In the paraphrased words of best-selling author and gym owner Rachel Cosgrove, “if you had a flat tire, would you stop and fix that one tire, or would you just slash the other three?” Of course you wouldn’t slash your tires, so quit derailing your nutrition goals.

It takes time to get to know your body well enough to keep your appetite in line with your hunger. It can be particularly difficult to anticipate your changing hunger levels when you start doing more metabolically demanding workouts, such as we do in our classes. It is natural that working out will stimulate your appetite, but when you are trying to trim your waistline, it doesn’t do you good to overcompensate in terms of diet. So remember, when in doubt, slow down. It also helps to keep a food/exercise journal so you can see the trends of how different types of exercise affect your hunger the following day.