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Showing posts with the label Hunger

Physical Hunger vs. "Mouth" Hunger

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Hunger is insolent, and will be fed. --Homer How can you tell the difference between "mouth" hunger and body hunger? Sometimes it's difficult to tell, especially if one has been overeating for years: all hunger seems the same. However, you can train your body to differentiate between the two types of hunger. The first place to start is the Hunger and Fullness chart. Note that mouth hunger is not based on the need for body fuel, but a yearning for specific foods and/or food groups, usually fat and carbohydrates. Body hunger is based on a need for fuel. Read more here.

The Pleasure Principle

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Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it. --Thomas Jefferson Sorry to disappoint, but this post has nothing to do with anything racy, unless you consider eating a racy topic. Harvey Rapp, in our interview last week, said something interesting about taste: that for him the first bite of a meal is always extremely enjoyable but then becomes less so with each subsequent bite. The pleasure principle at work. Enjoying our meals makes perfect evolutionary sense; if we suddenly hated eating (like we hate getting shots, even though they are usually good for us), we would avoid eating whenever possible, and our species would die out, for we would happily starve ourselves to death. It seems that naturally thin people have a near-perfect equilibrium with their hunger/satiety cues, and they think nothing about it. Lucky them. For the rest of us, something has gone haywire in the way we interact with food; for some of us, it may be genetic (e

Thought for the Day--May 11, 2011: Don't Go to Bed Hungry

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No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office. --George Bernard Shaw Okay, okay, so the above quote is a bit snarky, but I couldn't find a quote that directly addresses this particular issue, probably because one of the so-called iron-clad diet commandments is widely-accepted: Thou shalt not eat at least 3 hours before bedtime. This is absolutely ludicrous; not only are such "rules" ridiculous, but they are often the very dictums that send us to the fridge after midnight. These days, I don't go to bed hungry because I eat when I get hungry. From my past history, I know that my hungriest times are between 7:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m. Sound familiar? A tendency toward mindless nighttime eating seems be one of the main nemeses of overweight people. So why fight it? Why not learn to work with your own biology and use it to your advantage?

Memoir Madness: Driven to Involuntary Commitment