The Causes of Hunger

Does the following scenario sound familiar to you:

It’s late in the afternoon and you’re feeling a little tired, a little bored, and you decide you’re hungry. You find a convenience store and buy a candy bar, saying to yourself, “I’m really hungry. This will do it.”

How about this one: You are at a restaurant and you had planned to order a simple salad. Your friend orders a cheese and sausage pizza. You say, “Hey, what if we share that? I’m pretty hungry.”

Weight controllers have to battle their bodies’ desire for food quite often. Weight controllers have excessive numbers of fat cells and various hormones that make them hungrier more often, and in response to various cues from the environment, much more so than people who never had weight problems. Successful weight control, however, requires learning how to manage that hunger effectively. That management requires understanding that you don’t have to feed yourself high fat high calorie food just because you have a desire to eat. You can do many other things instead of eating and if you do eat, almost any food will quiet your hunger, not just destructive (high fat, high calorie) foods.

Let’s review some of the many causes of hunger that affect weight controllers. Understanding these many contributors to hunger may help you see that you cannot simply give in to all of them. You have to manage your hunger to succeed and remind yourself that the experience of hunger doesn’t justify self-destructive behavior.

Hunger can be defined in many ways. Let’s agree that hunger is a desire for food. The following factors influence the amount or intensity of hunger. As you review them, you can decide whether or not you wish to be a slave to these feelings, biological forces, and situations. If not, then don’t allow yourself to talk yourself into using hunger as an excuse to eat the wrong things.

• Biology (e.g., fat cells, hyperinsulimia, blood glucose levels)
• Emotions (e.g., stress, anger, frustration, boredom, etc.
• Time of day & usual routines
• Sugar consumption
• Protein consumption
• Fat consumption
• Presence of foods, particularly highly appealing and attractive food
• Talking about food
• Thinking about food
• Consummatory behavior by others (e.g., parties)
• Consumption of alcohol, marijuana, and other recreational drugs
• Exercise and lack of exercise
• Negative cognitions (e.g., “I’ve blown it already today.”)
• Variety/blandness of diet
• Stimuli that are associate with eating (e.g., in the car, TV)
• Tiredness
• Fiber
• Volume of food