Hunger is mediated by a bunch of hormones and you can test for some of those, but there is no test for the feeling of hunger. As a comparison, it is famously very hard for doctors to understand pain; it is also difficult for patients to communicate about pain.
The feeling of hunger is not comparable between people. Hunger is driven by multiple sensations (blood sugar, stomach stretch, hormone levels) and by cognitive behaviors (it's lunchtime, it's a feast day) and psychological conditioning (advertising). People have relationships with, and expectations about food. The response to hunger is learned. It is driven by culture - for instance it is 'manly' to eat a large steak and loaded baked potato where I'm from; many times the smaller cuts of steak have either a woman's name or some feminine aspect.
Scientists use Occam's Razor to find the most probable cause for some effect, and people in general want to find something simple to blame. I think the obesity epidemic has many causes, and it is particularly hard to understand because researchers have only lately begun to take hunger seriously. It is easy to say "Diet and Exercise" but losing body fat means that you must continuously make choices that decrease your comfort in some way - eating fewer highly rewarding foods, maintaining a state of hunger, increasing activity level. Those choices are difficult, and they are different for everyone.
I believe there are many consequences of the difficulty in measuring and tracking hunger. I think that many people (including doctors and researchers and HN users) want to be able to change one thing or add one drug and suddenly solve the obesity epidemic. I think it makes it hard for doctors to talk to patients. It makes it hard for people to understand what their body is doing.
> losing body fat means that you must continuously make choices that decrease your comfort in some way - eating fewer highly rewarding foods, maintaining a state of hunger, increasing activity level
Not necessarily! I've successfully lost a lot of body fat (~50 pounds over the last 18 months) by deliberately changing my diet to eat more foods (that I like) that are lower in energy density than what I was eating before -- fruits and veggies, lean meats, etc. I do end up eating fewer stereotypically highly rewarding foods, but that's because I'm already full of other highly rewarding-to-me foods and don't feel like having a treat or a huge fast food meal or whatever. And I'm certainly not tolerating frequent hunger!
I lost weight during the pandemic by just trying to make sure I was hungry by the next meal time.
By that I mean, I would eat breakfast and then see how hungry I was at lunchtime. If I wasn’t very hungry for lunch, then I would still eat lunch, but I tried eating less at breakfast the next day. Same with lunch-to-dinner.
Over time my meal portion sizes came down, but I was not looking directly at that, I was just paying attention to the feeling of hunger.
What I realized was that I would eat a big breakfast and then a big lunch just because it was lunchtime. So I was overeating; basically taking in more calories than my body needed. It was a combination of habit and not thinking about what I was feeling. I realized that I should feel pretty hungry before a meal, but I wasn’t letting that happen.
I totally agree with you that hunger is subjective and hard to measure outside of our own perception. I’m not sure I could have or would have done this based on someone else’s coaching. It’s hard to calibrate my personal feeling of “hungry enough” based on what another person says. And it takes motivation, which has to come from within.
I think, as a society, we're having trouble grappling with the implications of the hormonal changes that happen due to fat set points increasing over time. It seems to make it nearly impossible for some people to lose weight over a long run of time. Whatever they lose, their body will try very hard, apparently for the rest of their lives, to put it back on.
But what I think we're having trouble in understanding what this means is that it doesn't mean obesity as a social problem can't be solved. It might mean some amount of people who are already obese will never be able to sustainably change that fact, but it's not like people are being born with naturally higher fat set points. That is a hormonal change that happens when you become obese and stay that way for a long time. Interventions that focus on younger people who have not yet become obese can still work. But this is contrary and different to how the entire obesity industrial complex works. It is focused on treating overweight and obese people, not on preventing new people from ever getting that way in the first place. Even with children, we focus the interventions on trying to help fat kids lose weight. We should probably expect that to work at least a little bit better than trying to intervene in adults, but even better still is to work with the kids who aren't obese, which at an early enough age is all of them, and figure out how to keep them that way.
> losing body fat means that you must continuously make choices that decrease your comfort in some way - eating fewer highly rewarding foods, maintaining a state of hunger, increasing activity level
It is interesting to see "increasing activity level" as being a decrease in comfort. But I suppose that's because "comfort" here isn't defined absolutely. I also am not sure that "comfort" is an attribute that should be optimized for in disregard for all others.
If this statement is read as "anything that does not have 100% positive feedback is undesirable" then I think it would be very challenging to make any improvements in a person's life.
But then I also don't think that "comfort" is necessarily an ideal target to optimize. I think a more holistic measure such as "satisfaction" is a more productive target. We can find "satisfaction" in things that are not 100% pleasant but which in turn result in greater happiness or feelings of contentment than doing only those things that have positive feedback.
This measure of "comfortable" also does not seem to account for the secondary effects of "comfortable" choices. E.g., if we eat only "highly rewarding foods" and become obese we see discomfort in other parts of life (loss of mobility, health issues, difficulty performing mundane physical tasks, etc)
About 15 years ago I adopted an informal low-carb diet: I started by skipping instant breakfast for breakfast and ended by adopting the Carl’s Jr. lettuce-wrapped burgers for lunch.
The goal was to change my cholesterol (it worked), not lose weight, and I ate however much I wanted.
But at the same time I lost 30 pounds over about three months. I didn’t even notice the change for the first month. I wasn’t fat to start, and by the end I was startlingly thin. Anecdotal, obviously.
I feel like anybody, including scientists, that speaks about hunger when it relates to being overweight, has never been overweight, or is lying to themselves.
We don’t eat because we’re hungry, we eat because we’re bored.
People in developed countries have become too accustomed to comfort. We need be accept a certain level of discomfort and pain. Embrace the suck.
And most people with high BMIs didn't get that way eating steak and baked potatoes. In fact, if you live entirely on that diet it's quite difficult to get fat.
> The feeling of hunger is not comparable between people.
I wish this were the baseline understanding everyone shared! Even as one person, as my mental health has been differently treated over time, I've been shocked at how different the subjective experience of hunger at various calorie deficits has been.
There's a really interesting study they did with pigs.
They fed pigs four different diets that had the same amount of calories, but varying ratios of n3/n6 fats.
The pigs with high n6/n3 ratio ended up much fatter and less muscular than the pigs eating a 1-1 ratio diet. It's a very neat demonstration that "all that matters is calories" is not true; your metabolism, and thus how you use the calories, is influenced by the kinds of calories you are eating.
Well, at least if you are a pig. But it seems likely the same holds true in humans, though AFAIK no one has yet tried to do a similar controlled trial in humans.
But there's lots of assocational evidence that lines up in the same direction -- e.g., in America we've been getting fatter pretty much in-lock step with increasing consumption of n6 fats & there is a correlation between body-fat composition (which itself follows fat composition from the diet) and obesity.
So, in the light of the above, my #1 weight loss tip is: eat fewer n6 fats. (In practice, this means avoiding most prepared processed foodes and being extremely selective if eating out (since restaurants tend to go crazy using vegetable oil as a cooking fat, which is super high in n6 fats).)
So my diet is usually very strict. I will mostly only eat salmon, mackerel, oysters and mussels, and a lot of berries with some breads and rice. No plant oils at all and very low carb, but not no carb.
I only resorted to this diet because I had a series of metabolic disorders in my self and in my family and I also know my genetics. I have the changes to FADS1, FADS2, and CPT1A which make me much more sensitive to Omega 6 fats that most European Caucasians. See it turns out I have more Sami blood in me than I thought and so I am in reality more Inuit when it comes to what I need from my diet.
I most certainly feel most satiated and loose weight even when eating the same amount of calories when I am following this diet. I was a low fat vegan for five years in an attempt to correct my cholesterol, and I was a good vegan too, no junk food. But all it did was lower my HDL and barely reduce by LDL. (I was diagnosed with mild hyperlipidemia). After seeing my geteicss and changing my diet, my HDL rose over 35 for the first time in my life. Now it stays steady at between 50 and 55
Now I am only more sensitive to these fats. Meaning that anyone, even with non-Inuit genetics, will succumb to the higher levels of Omega 6 that course through the modern food industry if they over do it.
Very interesting! I've been reading up on nutrition recently and saw articles talking about this ratio, but they were focused on inflammation, not on body composition or hunger.
tmjdev wrote:
> If it was the ratio being studied, could you instead increase your n3 fat consumption?
Some articles suggest exactly that: "To improve the ratio of omega-3 fats to omega-6 fats, eat more omega-3s, not fewer omega-6s." [1]
If you're looking for sources other than fish, consider chia. Two tablespoons of chia give 4.3 g of omega-3 fat, as well as 10 g of fiber for no net carbs. [2] Don't eat chia seeds dry; [3, 4] mix into 1.25 cups of water and leave them for at least 30 minutes. I also combine with oats. (I used to eat 0.5 cups of oats every morning. When trying to lower carbs, I went down to 0.25 cups of oats and the chia. The omega-3 fat was a nice surprise.)
On the other hand, minimizing processed and restaurant foods is probably a good idea in general. And of course if your goal is to lose weight, removing something from your diet makes more intuitive sense than adding something.
Seems to line up with my experience, am always burning up (until I turn on the AC and freeze)
Especially at night though I have to to jack the temperature down or I won't sleep. Also less hungry aligns pretty well.
Unfortunately when I get hungry, it's normally "a little hungry) at akward spread out intervals. I probably feel most hungry after midnight but never eat then because well, I have to sleep soon.
I've tried to put on weight before, but I could never stomach massive calories dense meals, without horrific nausea and discomfort.
Same for me. Even as Ive tried to gain weight, my weight barely budged. 150-155 for at least the last 10 years. I have obese (300lb+) friends and they insist they don’t eat that much more than me. Except they do. We go out to eat, we stop eating after about 5-10 min. I’m full and done. They burp a couple times, then proceed to keep eating, smothering everything in Mayo and bbq sauce. Then they get insane desserts. And maybe 3-4 sodas in one meal on top of that. I do feel bad for them though, since it looks like that’s really what it takes to satiate their hunger. I could not physically eat that much even if I wanted to though.
Another strange thing about my body (if anyone cares, curious if anyone else has the same thing) is that I don’t burp, ever. I think the air I swallow while eating forms a bubble in my stomach that makes me feel full sooner and prevents overeating.
Interesting. I stay thin because I'm always watching what I eat and keep a mental note of how many calories I've had that day. If I'm trying to lose a few pounds I have to actually record my calories so I know when to stop eating.
I can eat pretty much non-stop. I could eat a large pizza myself, and 30 minutes later eat another.
The grass is always greener. Some people wish they could eat as much as me so they could gain some weight. I wish I couldn't eat so much so I didn't have to spend so much mental energy on ensuring I don't over-eat.
If you run hotter, wouldn't you feel less hot? Since your normal temperature would be that much higher than the ambient temperature. At least, when I have a fever I feel cold, even though I'm hot.
I lost 75kg over 3 years, then put exactly 75kg back on over the 4 years after that.
While losing weight, and keeping it off (for about 6 months), I was hungry all the time, every day. I hoped that my body would eventually "get used" to the new standard, but in the end (not conciously), I gave up -- it was too mentally tiring to be hungry whenever I was awake.
I'm sure lots of it was a combination of physical and psycological -- I could eat lots of raw vegetables and not want to eat another carrot -- that wouldn't stop me eating something fatty/sugary.
Your description of always feeling hungry after keeping it off is rather worrying to me, since I’m getting close to my target weight after a 1 year+ journey of diet and exercise.
I do remember reading before that the fat cells that get created when you gain weight never really go away, they just “deflate”. So after you lose weight, you are more likely to gain the weight back than someone who is at the same weight now but who has never been bigger than that.
I also recall seeing a study that your body sends you extra hunger pangs to gain the weight that you lost back, because it assumes that losing weight means you’re in fight-or-flight mode, so it wants to make sure you survive. That’s why a weight loss drug where an extra 300-400 calories per day were excreted via urine did not show significant results.
I couldn’t find the exact study for the second part. So I’ll just leave a general reference from Northwestern alluding to the same results.
When I lost 13kg I had the same problem, I put it all back on immediately - I had an insatiable hunger after losing the weight. I ended up losing it all over again 6ish months later but this time I was able to keep it off because I didn’t have the hunger. The only difference was I lost it doing keto for the last month and I ate way healthier.
You don't say what your diet was, but "lots of raw vegetables" is not a formula for a sated appetite. Sure, if you eat enough of them you will eventually feel "full" for a while in a bloated sort of way, but fatty foods such as meat, eggs, and nuts will stop the "hungry" feeling without stuffing yourself. Or so it is for me.
Did you ever try fasting for an extended period of time during any of that? I've never gone more than ~48 hours but from what I've watched and read, people seem to stop feeling hungry after say four or five days. I wonder if that could maybe act as a sort of hard reset for the constant feeling of hunger you experienced.
It's possible you're conflating hunger/satiety with craving. If you couldn't eat another carrot, you're not hungry. Sugar (and anticipation of) gives you a dopamine boost, and we tend to crave when we have low circulating levels. Sugar consumption also increases levels of ghrelin (i.e. it makes you hungrier), and cravings.
Notwithstanding that there's more to a healthy diet than vegetables. According to research, high protein intake can improve satiety on a caloric deficit. Some level of fat intake goes a ways too; some vitamins are fat-soluble. Potato is the most satiating vegetable there is, gram per gram.
It's not well understood how nutrient deficiency influences hunger, but it's possible your diet didn't hit nutrient targets.
I have the same problem with raw vegetables, but there's different types of food, some food stops your hunger for like 30-60 minutes (e.g. ice cream) whereas other food can last for several hours, both having the same amount of calories. The "trick" is in my case to find food that satisfies my brain and makes me full for many hours, then eat such food in 95% of times.
I lost 25kg and kept it off for 10+ years, I think the key was that I kept exercising even after relaxing my diet. Solid 3-4 hours a week kept me less hungry for whatever reason. As soon as I dropped the exercise, because, well, life happened - the weight started creeping up, diet restrictions and IF didn't bulge it.
This is a common pattern and one of the reasons that crash diets don't work in the long run.
I've struggled with the same issue as you and started really digging into the science of food and nutrition because I've had enough of yo-yo'ing.
Fat storage is regulated by various hormones. The most significant are insulin, cortisol, testosterone, estrogen and hormone-sensitive lipase. Hunger is caused by the release of the hormone gherelin.
The way to lose weight and keep it off permanently is to make permanent lifestyle changes that hack these hormones.
The first part is to drastically lower the production of hormones that trigger fat storage. Insulin seems to be by far the most significant. The best way to drastically lower insulin is to not eat, but the next best thing you can do (because not eating isn't really all that practical for most people) is to severely restrict carbohydrates. This means all carbohydrates, including those from fruits and vegetables. You mentioned lots of vegetables, including carrots - well, carrots are an extremely high-carbohydrate vegetable, they're almost like eating sugar. They'll give you an insulin boost and you'll feel hungry again very shortly after eating them. We've been duped by being told that "fruits and vegetables are good for us." The reality is way more complicated than that.
Cortisol is the stress hormone. While I don't buy claims that exercise results in weight loss (because I used to jog for an hour every single day, never ate junk food and was on a "well balanced" diet recommended by all the leading authorities and was still obese and couldn't lose weight) but exercise is great at reducing stress, and so it can help with weight loss ... just not as much as diet. Other ways to keep cortisol low are to make sure you're getting enough sleep and obviously reduce stressors in your life.
Testosterone and estrogen can also be regulated somewhat by exercise, as well as nutrition.
As for gherelin, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that gherlin is released by your fat cells when they start to deplete. It's your body's way of saying "I'm using stored energy, we better find some more." But the good news is that it seems to be temporary and insulin seems to be a factor here too.
When you eat, your body releases insulin to moderate the influx of new blood sugar. Your fat cells get a boost of new fat storage and the release of gherelin is suppressed. But as soon as your blood sugar levels come down and those fat cells start to empty rather than fill you get a new release of gherelin which makes you want to eat so you rinse and repeat. And people who get into a cycle of weight gain become resistant to both insulin and gherelin ... so your pancreas and your fat cells keep releasing more and more just to produce the same effect and a vicious cycle ensues and this is how people become morbidly obese.
So by drastically reducing your insulin levels by cutting carbs, intermittent fasting and filling up healthy fats ("unhealthy fats" like poly-unsaturated fatty acids; PUFAs have their own health problems associated with them) you cut off the production fat-storing hormones and you limit hunger hormone. Then you can restrict calories and not torture yourself. This doesn't mean that you won't ever feel hungry, gherelin production won't stop ... but it will lower and become temporary. You'll find yourself feeling hungry at certain points in the day but it goes away after a few minutes without eating anything.
Long term, once you've cut the weight, you can go back to eating more calories, but by changing your diet to consume very few carbs and to eat less in general (typically by eating once or twice per day) you keep insulin levels very low. The result is that you get the energy your body requires but it's using it rather than storing it as fat and you're not feeling hungry all the time. And you're much more likely to make a change permanently if it's comfortable and not torturing you.
The study was underweight bmi vs healthy bmi. Nothing about overweight bmi, which I would assume is the trifecta of overeating, little activity, and slower metabolism. At least that is my personal experience in going from overweight to healthy bmi.
Really not surprising that people that eat less have lower bmi and higher metabolism than people that eat more with a slower metabolism but who are more active.
I know a girl who weighs about 100 lbs soaking wet. Very slim, elfish type. She also has very hot hands and she says that after eating a big meal, she feels super hot. I asked her if it was measurable and it actually was, she can go to almost 38 degrees Celsius while completely healthy.
My weight was a consistent 150 pounds since I was 14 years old. I joked to myself I was a robot since it was incredibly consistent for decades.
I would often go entire days without eating. My family says as a kid or teen I would always cover my food with a napkin to hide what I had not eaten. Even as an adult I would rarely eat a fast food combo there would be half the burger and fries left over. I ate what I need even pop and chips but I ate a bit and when I wasn't hungry I stopped.
In my mid 40s I felt lethargic bad and my face was puffy. Stranger still I was gaining weight and eating more than I ever did. I'd eat when I wasn't hungry which was a bizarre feeling. At the worst I was 190lbs the heaviest in my life. I was not a coffee or tea drinker but I got into energy drinks they made me feel normal.
I went to the doctor and found out it was my thyroid I had hypothyroidism (under active). My Dad had it and now I did rare for men hypothyroidism more common in middle-aged women. My first synthroid pill felt like I'd drank ten energy drinks my skin was warm I felt clear of thought. But now it's stabilized and I think I'm on the downward slide again.
If anyone has been on synthroid and it stops working for you, check with your doctor about switching to natural desiccated thyroid, made a big difference for me. Also see if avoiding goitrogenic foods works for you (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruciferous_vegetables); keeping a food diary for a few months proved to me how impactful they are for me, YMMV.
"people with low BMI" seems like it refers to a large group of healthy people, but it actually refers to folks who are underweight.
In China, that's like 1 in 10 people. In the USA it's closer to 1 in 50. I wonder what kind of genetics and behavior you have to have to be underweight in the USA.
Something I think that contributes a lot to how much weight you hold naturally is how insulin sensitive you are. The more insulin sensitive you are the less weight you'll put on and there's a huge range between optimal insulin sensitivity, average, and diabetic.
I also suspect (although I'm not an expert) the reason some people find it easier to lose weight while doing OMAD or keto isn't just because they're eating less, but because they're far more insulin sensitive and two of the best ways to increase insulin sensitivity is to fast or to eat less carbs.
Another reason I believe this to be the case is because as I've aged I've noticed my friends are holding more weight despite little change their diets or physical activity. I'm sure some of this is related to a slowdown in their resting metabolic rate, but I also suspect it's got something to do with the fact that as people age they become less insulin sensitive on average -- especially if they don't eat well or eat too often. This is probably why as a kid you can eat a tub of icecream without putting on any weight, but as adult you would. It's not just that kids have higher metabolisms, but that they're more insulin sensitive and less likely to be diabetic or pre-diabetic.
A question to ask here is why are people with low BMI's are less hungry? Could that be because they're metabolic healthier and their bodies are therefore better able to enter ketosis during periods without food? From personal experience with fasting and low carb diets I've experienced how significant it is when the body adjusts to burning fat as a primary fuel source. Although, you still feel hungry you don't feel like you need food. Similarly, you know when someone isn't metabolically adapted when they go too long without food because they become irritable and physically feel week.
Although our physiology is adaptable and we don't see daily or weekly wild weight swings with a few hundred calories up or down from maintenance, over weeks and months, 4-800 kcals of average daily surplus have very noticeable effects.
And those are differences that can be had by working 2 days from office instead of 5 and getting into the habit of eating a cookie in the morning, while previously we just grabbed a black coffee and that was it.
It is very easy to get into the "plus calories" territory. At the start of the pandemic, after a few weeks of working from home, many of my colleagues were 5-8 pounds heavier than they were before. And those pounds were not of muscle tissue.
I thought this is a pretty common knowledge for anyone who has actually looked that the reasons why Keto works. Although in general, people also do tend to eat fewer calories on those types of diets also because they reach satiety more quickly with denser/higher fat foods.
But a lot of the doctors that are well known in the keto world (and yes, be very careful and try to verify anything you hear when it comes from someone who has "specialized" in something like keto) is that it has a ton to do with the insulin sensitivity.
You can't easily discount culture and habit, nor can you easily account for it in studies. Cross-country comparisons are often surprising, but even then they blur within-country heterogeneity (is $country fatter on average/mode, or does it have a looooooong tail on account of a slightly higher rate of rare genetics?)
The article says the low BMI people ate "12% less food" (presumably that's measured in calories), though it may not be fully true that they're "less hungry". There's a very common tendency to assume that the satiety response is based on how many calories you eat, but perhaps unless you're actually starving, it mostly isn't! Primarily, you feel sated when your stomach is or has recently been full of food, but that's based more on the mechanical stretch of the food on the walls of your stomach than anything else (cf. laparoscopic bands and gastric bypass being incredibly effective at causing morbidly obese people to lose weight -- they're literally just making the stomach effectively smaller).
There's certainly some truth to "running hotter" as well, at least in some of those subjects, but I'll bet that many of them are habitually eating a less energy-dense diet than heavier people, rather than feeling less hungry for any more innate reason. Dietary energy density has been investigated in lots of experimental and observational studies and found to do an overall very good job of predicting current BMI, long-term weight loss, and in metabolic ward experiments, ad libitum caloric intake.
That is interesting ja. "generally(red-hearing word when speaking about science)" men I see don't get as cold as females in 'general' (PC/Wokeness be dammed - we talking about proper bro-science here) even though it's not unusual for females to carry more fat (waiting for internet gods to smite me), which is associated with with better heat isolation.
With that in mind, I've noticed I am unusually immune to cold, like my fellow country folks will usually ask me if I know its winter (or some smart comment like that) cause I will be in shorts + t-shirts + sandals most of winter (South African Winters on average about (-2 To 8 Celsius)
For anyone noticing this pattern of fashion (short+ sandals) yes I"m a white-male-Afrikaans-South-African. In winter when it's really really cold (Ragnarok levels) we will consider wearing socks with said sandals :)
PS. As a interesting side note. I did do a 23andMe test and nothing out of the ordinary. Yes my ancestors are from Europe 91.2% I'm French-German decent.
Does this breakdown when you gain weight? Like when I was 20 I weighed 180lbs of solid muscle and was always like a furnace. Then I slipped a disk and now at 28 I'm lucky if I hover around 240 (I've actually been back lifting for the last 2.5 months and feel pretty good) but I definitely feel like I run colder in general now that I'm overweight.
My family has Sami heritage, we run cold. My average body temp is 96.8 degrees. We also have trouble with hyperlipidemia, obesity, and early heart disease.
So the genetics of all of this will be interesting. I have managed to avoid my family curse by eating pretty much only fish and game meat, like a Sami. And I do not eat much. It was the only diet that would raise my HDL.
To be fully honest - I can relate to this. During my college years, I ate a full-size burger, potato fries, and soda every day for lunch for ~2 years. I never got fat and retained a healthy BMI, never crossing 200lbs despite being a 6'2" male - even though I almost never exercised and spent almost all day sitting working in the Math Lab. I did skip breakfast regularly so maybe that had something to do with it. My family on seeing the portion size (particularly the potato fries - think 3x a McDonalds large fries) thought it must be my brain consuming those calories or something.
I've been consistently underweight for the last 20 years of my life (BMI 17.9) and this describes my experience. I tend to be on the warm side, am not particularly active, generally have two or three meals a day and experience no urge to snack. Now that I'm getting towards 40 my "setpoint" weight seems to be creeping up and I may soon cross the line to be consistently on the low-end of "normal." I am still deciding how much energy (if any) I want to devote to keeping where I am now.
I wish the "running hot" part was true for me. I feel cold so easily, to the point that I had to get myself checked out this year since my toes would go numb at the slightest chill.
The hunger thing rings true, though. I often just forget to eat and end up eating one meal a day or maybe a meal and a snack. Then again, on other days I might snack through the whole day. It seems to balance out though; after a day of frequent eating usually come a couple of those totally-forgetting-to-eat days.
I have currently exactly 20.0 BMI (1-3kg under what I consider my optimal weight), I don't really think I'm less hungry, more like I have better self control, obviously if I ate everything I like all the time I could easily gain 10 or more kg (I'm right now 11 kg away from my record weight), but my approach is when I reach certain weight I start limiting my intake to not go over and stay on my optimal target range.
Also you can get used to feel hunger, I think most of the people in developed countries eat so much and so often they don't even experience feeling of hunger.
Plus if you get used to smaller portions it's also easier to fill your shrunk stomach with smaller portions, it's about what your body is used to, it's all about self control.
When I started to travel around Asia I weighted 88kg (my max), after year of traveling, lot of walking/hiking when I found new job in China I had 68kg when I liked like skeleton from concentration camp, now I am on my optimal weight exactly in middle between.
[+] [-] csours|3 years ago|reply
The feeling of hunger is not comparable between people. Hunger is driven by multiple sensations (blood sugar, stomach stretch, hormone levels) and by cognitive behaviors (it's lunchtime, it's a feast day) and psychological conditioning (advertising). People have relationships with, and expectations about food. The response to hunger is learned. It is driven by culture - for instance it is 'manly' to eat a large steak and loaded baked potato where I'm from; many times the smaller cuts of steak have either a woman's name or some feminine aspect.
Scientists use Occam's Razor to find the most probable cause for some effect, and people in general want to find something simple to blame. I think the obesity epidemic has many causes, and it is particularly hard to understand because researchers have only lately begun to take hunger seriously. It is easy to say "Diet and Exercise" but losing body fat means that you must continuously make choices that decrease your comfort in some way - eating fewer highly rewarding foods, maintaining a state of hunger, increasing activity level. Those choices are difficult, and they are different for everyone.
I believe there are many consequences of the difficulty in measuring and tracking hunger. I think that many people (including doctors and researchers and HN users) want to be able to change one thing or add one drug and suddenly solve the obesity epidemic. I think it makes it hard for doctors to talk to patients. It makes it hard for people to understand what their body is doing.
[+] [-] convexfunction|3 years ago|reply
Not necessarily! I've successfully lost a lot of body fat (~50 pounds over the last 18 months) by deliberately changing my diet to eat more foods (that I like) that are lower in energy density than what I was eating before -- fruits and veggies, lean meats, etc. I do end up eating fewer stereotypically highly rewarding foods, but that's because I'm already full of other highly rewarding-to-me foods and don't feel like having a treat or a huge fast food meal or whatever. And I'm certainly not tolerating frequent hunger!
[+] [-] snowwrestler|3 years ago|reply
By that I mean, I would eat breakfast and then see how hungry I was at lunchtime. If I wasn’t very hungry for lunch, then I would still eat lunch, but I tried eating less at breakfast the next day. Same with lunch-to-dinner.
Over time my meal portion sizes came down, but I was not looking directly at that, I was just paying attention to the feeling of hunger.
What I realized was that I would eat a big breakfast and then a big lunch just because it was lunchtime. So I was overeating; basically taking in more calories than my body needed. It was a combination of habit and not thinking about what I was feeling. I realized that I should feel pretty hungry before a meal, but I wasn’t letting that happen.
I totally agree with you that hunger is subjective and hard to measure outside of our own perception. I’m not sure I could have or would have done this based on someone else’s coaching. It’s hard to calibrate my personal feeling of “hungry enough” based on what another person says. And it takes motivation, which has to come from within.
[+] [-] nonameiguess|3 years ago|reply
But what I think we're having trouble in understanding what this means is that it doesn't mean obesity as a social problem can't be solved. It might mean some amount of people who are already obese will never be able to sustainably change that fact, but it's not like people are being born with naturally higher fat set points. That is a hormonal change that happens when you become obese and stay that way for a long time. Interventions that focus on younger people who have not yet become obese can still work. But this is contrary and different to how the entire obesity industrial complex works. It is focused on treating overweight and obese people, not on preventing new people from ever getting that way in the first place. Even with children, we focus the interventions on trying to help fat kids lose weight. We should probably expect that to work at least a little bit better than trying to intervene in adults, but even better still is to work with the kids who aren't obese, which at an early enough age is all of them, and figure out how to keep them that way.
[+] [-] frotak|3 years ago|reply
It is interesting to see "increasing activity level" as being a decrease in comfort. But I suppose that's because "comfort" here isn't defined absolutely. I also am not sure that "comfort" is an attribute that should be optimized for in disregard for all others.
If this statement is read as "anything that does not have 100% positive feedback is undesirable" then I think it would be very challenging to make any improvements in a person's life.
But then I also don't think that "comfort" is necessarily an ideal target to optimize. I think a more holistic measure such as "satisfaction" is a more productive target. We can find "satisfaction" in things that are not 100% pleasant but which in turn result in greater happiness or feelings of contentment than doing only those things that have positive feedback.
This measure of "comfortable" also does not seem to account for the secondary effects of "comfortable" choices. E.g., if we eat only "highly rewarding foods" and become obese we see discomfort in other parts of life (loss of mobility, health issues, difficulty performing mundane physical tasks, etc)
[+] [-] gcanyon|3 years ago|reply
The goal was to change my cholesterol (it worked), not lose weight, and I ate however much I wanted.
But at the same time I lost 30 pounds over about three months. I didn’t even notice the change for the first month. I wasn’t fat to start, and by the end I was startlingly thin. Anecdotal, obviously.
[+] [-] iLoveOncall|3 years ago|reply
We don’t eat because we’re hungry, we eat because we’re bored.
[+] [-] nradov|3 years ago|reply
And most people with high BMIs didn't get that way eating steak and baked potatoes. In fact, if you live entirely on that diet it's quite difficult to get fat.
[+] [-] kixiQu|3 years ago|reply
I wish this were the baseline understanding everyone shared! Even as one person, as my mental health has been differently treated over time, I've been shocked at how different the subjective experience of hunger at various calorie deficits has been.
[+] [-] dilap|3 years ago|reply
They fed pigs four different diets that had the same amount of calories, but varying ratios of n3/n6 fats.
The pigs with high n6/n3 ratio ended up much fatter and less muscular than the pigs eating a 1-1 ratio diet. It's a very neat demonstration that "all that matters is calories" is not true; your metabolism, and thus how you use the calories, is influenced by the kinds of calories you are eating.
Well, at least if you are a pig. But it seems likely the same holds true in humans, though AFAIK no one has yet tried to do a similar controlled trial in humans.
But there's lots of assocational evidence that lines up in the same direction -- e.g., in America we've been getting fatter pretty much in-lock step with increasing consumption of n6 fats & there is a correlation between body-fat composition (which itself follows fat composition from the diet) and obesity.
So, in the light of the above, my #1 weight loss tip is: eat fewer n6 fats. (In practice, this means avoiding most prepared processed foodes and being extremely selective if eating out (since restaurants tend to go crazy using vegetable oil as a cooking fat, which is super high in n6 fats).)
The pigs study:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
[+] [-] FollowingTheDao|3 years ago|reply
So my diet is usually very strict. I will mostly only eat salmon, mackerel, oysters and mussels, and a lot of berries with some breads and rice. No plant oils at all and very low carb, but not no carb.
I only resorted to this diet because I had a series of metabolic disorders in my self and in my family and I also know my genetics. I have the changes to FADS1, FADS2, and CPT1A which make me much more sensitive to Omega 6 fats that most European Caucasians. See it turns out I have more Sami blood in me than I thought and so I am in reality more Inuit when it comes to what I need from my diet.
I most certainly feel most satiated and loose weight even when eating the same amount of calories when I am following this diet. I was a low fat vegan for five years in an attempt to correct my cholesterol, and I was a good vegan too, no junk food. But all it did was lower my HDL and barely reduce by LDL. (I was diagnosed with mild hyperlipidemia). After seeing my geteicss and changing my diet, my HDL rose over 35 for the first time in my life. Now it stays steady at between 50 and 55
Now I am only more sensitive to these fats. Meaning that anyone, even with non-Inuit genetics, will succumb to the higher levels of Omega 6 that course through the modern food industry if they over do it.
[+] [-] scottlamb|3 years ago|reply
tmjdev wrote:
> If it was the ratio being studied, could you instead increase your n3 fat consumption?
Some articles suggest exactly that: "To improve the ratio of omega-3 fats to omega-6 fats, eat more omega-3s, not fewer omega-6s." [1]
If you're looking for sources other than fish, consider chia. Two tablespoons of chia give 4.3 g of omega-3 fat, as well as 10 g of fiber for no net carbs. [2] Don't eat chia seeds dry; [3, 4] mix into 1.25 cups of water and leave them for at least 30 minutes. I also combine with oats. (I used to eat 0.5 cups of oats every morning. When trying to lower carbs, I went down to 0.25 cups of oats and the chia. The omega-3 fat was a nice surprise.)
On the other hand, minimizing processed and restaurant foods is probably a good idea in general. And of course if your goal is to lose weight, removing something from your diet makes more intuitive sense than adding something.
[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/no-need-to...
[2] https://cronometer.com/printfood.html?name=Bob%27s%2BRed%2BM...
[3] https://www.wbur.org/news/2014/10/24/chia-seed-alert-superfo...
[4] https://draxe.com/nutrition/how-to-eat-chia-seeds/
[+] [-] the_only_law|3 years ago|reply
Especially at night though I have to to jack the temperature down or I won't sleep. Also less hungry aligns pretty well.
Unfortunately when I get hungry, it's normally "a little hungry) at akward spread out intervals. I probably feel most hungry after midnight but never eat then because well, I have to sleep soon.
I've tried to put on weight before, but I could never stomach massive calories dense meals, without horrific nausea and discomfort.
[+] [-] jliptzin|3 years ago|reply
Another strange thing about my body (if anyone cares, curious if anyone else has the same thing) is that I don’t burp, ever. I think the air I swallow while eating forms a bubble in my stomach that makes me feel full sooner and prevents overeating.
[+] [-] windowsrookie|3 years ago|reply
I can eat pretty much non-stop. I could eat a large pizza myself, and 30 minutes later eat another.
The grass is always greener. Some people wish they could eat as much as me so they could gain some weight. I wish I couldn't eat so much so I didn't have to spend so much mental energy on ensuring I don't over-eat.
[+] [-] sleepydog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pakdef|3 years ago|reply
I can't gain weight but I also love the heat... I don't have the A/C on right now and it's 84F inside.
[+] [-] CJefferson|3 years ago|reply
I lost 75kg over 3 years, then put exactly 75kg back on over the 4 years after that.
While losing weight, and keeping it off (for about 6 months), I was hungry all the time, every day. I hoped that my body would eventually "get used" to the new standard, but in the end (not conciously), I gave up -- it was too mentally tiring to be hungry whenever I was awake.
I'm sure lots of it was a combination of physical and psycological -- I could eat lots of raw vegetables and not want to eat another carrot -- that wouldn't stop me eating something fatty/sugary.
[+] [-] bxji|3 years ago|reply
I do remember reading before that the fat cells that get created when you gain weight never really go away, they just “deflate”. So after you lose weight, you are more likely to gain the weight back than someone who is at the same weight now but who has never been bigger than that.
I also recall seeing a study that your body sends you extra hunger pangs to gain the weight that you lost back, because it assumes that losing weight means you’re in fight-or-flight mode, so it wants to make sure you survive. That’s why a weight loss drug where an extra 300-400 calories per day were excreted via urine did not show significant results.
I couldn’t find the exact study for the second part. So I’ll just leave a general reference from Northwestern alluding to the same results.
1. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/your-fat-cells-never...
2. https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/how-your-body-fig...
[+] [-] ripply|3 years ago|reply
I also run very hot and have a normal BMI now.
[+] [-] SoftTalker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacamera|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slothtrop|3 years ago|reply
Notwithstanding that there's more to a healthy diet than vegetables. According to research, high protein intake can improve satiety on a caloric deficit. Some level of fat intake goes a ways too; some vitamins are fat-soluble. Potato is the most satiating vegetable there is, gram per gram.
It's not well understood how nutrient deficiency influences hunger, but it's possible your diet didn't hit nutrient targets.
[+] [-] hutrdvnj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FullStackAda|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gspencley|3 years ago|reply
I've struggled with the same issue as you and started really digging into the science of food and nutrition because I've had enough of yo-yo'ing.
Fat storage is regulated by various hormones. The most significant are insulin, cortisol, testosterone, estrogen and hormone-sensitive lipase. Hunger is caused by the release of the hormone gherelin.
The way to lose weight and keep it off permanently is to make permanent lifestyle changes that hack these hormones.
The first part is to drastically lower the production of hormones that trigger fat storage. Insulin seems to be by far the most significant. The best way to drastically lower insulin is to not eat, but the next best thing you can do (because not eating isn't really all that practical for most people) is to severely restrict carbohydrates. This means all carbohydrates, including those from fruits and vegetables. You mentioned lots of vegetables, including carrots - well, carrots are an extremely high-carbohydrate vegetable, they're almost like eating sugar. They'll give you an insulin boost and you'll feel hungry again very shortly after eating them. We've been duped by being told that "fruits and vegetables are good for us." The reality is way more complicated than that.
Cortisol is the stress hormone. While I don't buy claims that exercise results in weight loss (because I used to jog for an hour every single day, never ate junk food and was on a "well balanced" diet recommended by all the leading authorities and was still obese and couldn't lose weight) but exercise is great at reducing stress, and so it can help with weight loss ... just not as much as diet. Other ways to keep cortisol low are to make sure you're getting enough sleep and obviously reduce stressors in your life.
Testosterone and estrogen can also be regulated somewhat by exercise, as well as nutrition.
As for gherelin, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that gherlin is released by your fat cells when they start to deplete. It's your body's way of saying "I'm using stored energy, we better find some more." But the good news is that it seems to be temporary and insulin seems to be a factor here too.
When you eat, your body releases insulin to moderate the influx of new blood sugar. Your fat cells get a boost of new fat storage and the release of gherelin is suppressed. But as soon as your blood sugar levels come down and those fat cells start to empty rather than fill you get a new release of gherelin which makes you want to eat so you rinse and repeat. And people who get into a cycle of weight gain become resistant to both insulin and gherelin ... so your pancreas and your fat cells keep releasing more and more just to produce the same effect and a vicious cycle ensues and this is how people become morbidly obese.
So by drastically reducing your insulin levels by cutting carbs, intermittent fasting and filling up healthy fats ("unhealthy fats" like poly-unsaturated fatty acids; PUFAs have their own health problems associated with them) you cut off the production fat-storing hormones and you limit hunger hormone. Then you can restrict calories and not torture yourself. This doesn't mean that you won't ever feel hungry, gherelin production won't stop ... but it will lower and become temporary. You'll find yourself feeling hungry at certain points in the day but it goes away after a few minutes without eating anything.
Long term, once you've cut the weight, you can go back to eating more calories, but by changing your diet to consume very few carbs and to eat less in general (typically by eating once or twice per day) you keep insulin levels very low. The result is that you get the energy your body requires but it's using it rather than storing it as fat and you're not feeling hungry all the time. And you're much more likely to make a change permanently if it's comfortable and not torturing you.
[+] [-] stonemetal12|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sudden_dystopia|3 years ago|reply
Really not surprising that people that eat less have lower bmi and higher metabolism than people that eat more with a slower metabolism but who are more active.
[+] [-] inglor_cz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dghughes|3 years ago|reply
I would often go entire days without eating. My family says as a kid or teen I would always cover my food with a napkin to hide what I had not eaten. Even as an adult I would rarely eat a fast food combo there would be half the burger and fries left over. I ate what I need even pop and chips but I ate a bit and when I wasn't hungry I stopped.
In my mid 40s I felt lethargic bad and my face was puffy. Stranger still I was gaining weight and eating more than I ever did. I'd eat when I wasn't hungry which was a bizarre feeling. At the worst I was 190lbs the heaviest in my life. I was not a coffee or tea drinker but I got into energy drinks they made me feel normal.
I went to the doctor and found out it was my thyroid I had hypothyroidism (under active). My Dad had it and now I did rare for men hypothyroidism more common in middle-aged women. My first synthroid pill felt like I'd drank ten energy drinks my skin was warm I felt clear of thought. But now it's stabilized and I think I'm on the downward slide again.
[+] [-] bradser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] winrid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aantix|3 years ago|reply
And their results, crush anything before them.
Once the price point of these medications come down, you're going to see a massive movement towards these solutions for long term weight loss.
It's clear that motivation, accountability, peer pressure simply aren't enough for long term success in keeping weight off.
By long term success, I mean decades of keeping the weight off.
The abysmal dieting numbers prove this.
The Neuroscience of Obesity | Peter Attia, M.D. & Stephan Guyenet, Ph.D.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G3iLbQCIHI&t=7646s
[+] [-] marifjeren|3 years ago|reply
In China, that's like 1 in 10 people. In the USA it's closer to 1 in 50. I wonder what kind of genetics and behavior you have to have to be underweight in the USA.
[+] [-] kypro|3 years ago|reply
I also suspect (although I'm not an expert) the reason some people find it easier to lose weight while doing OMAD or keto isn't just because they're eating less, but because they're far more insulin sensitive and two of the best ways to increase insulin sensitivity is to fast or to eat less carbs.
Another reason I believe this to be the case is because as I've aged I've noticed my friends are holding more weight despite little change their diets or physical activity. I'm sure some of this is related to a slowdown in their resting metabolic rate, but I also suspect it's got something to do with the fact that as people age they become less insulin sensitive on average -- especially if they don't eat well or eat too often. This is probably why as a kid you can eat a tub of icecream without putting on any weight, but as adult you would. It's not just that kids have higher metabolisms, but that they're more insulin sensitive and less likely to be diabetic or pre-diabetic.
A question to ask here is why are people with low BMI's are less hungry? Could that be because they're metabolic healthier and their bodies are therefore better able to enter ketosis during periods without food? From personal experience with fasting and low carb diets I've experienced how significant it is when the body adjusts to burning fat as a primary fuel source. Although, you still feel hungry you don't feel like you need food. Similarly, you know when someone isn't metabolically adapted when they go too long without food because they become irritable and physically feel week.
[+] [-] borroka|3 years ago|reply
Although our physiology is adaptable and we don't see daily or weekly wild weight swings with a few hundred calories up or down from maintenance, over weeks and months, 4-800 kcals of average daily surplus have very noticeable effects.
And those are differences that can be had by working 2 days from office instead of 5 and getting into the habit of eating a cookie in the morning, while previously we just grabbed a black coffee and that was it.
It is very easy to get into the "plus calories" territory. At the start of the pandemic, after a few weeks of working from home, many of my colleagues were 5-8 pounds heavier than they were before. And those pounds were not of muscle tissue.
[+] [-] LocalPCGuy|3 years ago|reply
But a lot of the doctors that are well known in the keto world (and yes, be very careful and try to verify anything you hear when it comes from someone who has "specialized" in something like keto) is that it has a ton to do with the insulin sensitivity.
[+] [-] prionassembly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conradev|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_labeled_water#Mechanism...
It's like plugging yourself into a power meter, except for cellular respiration
[+] [-] convexfunction|3 years ago|reply
There's certainly some truth to "running hotter" as well, at least in some of those subjects, but I'll bet that many of them are habitually eating a less energy-dense diet than heavier people, rather than feeling less hungry for any more innate reason. Dietary energy density has been investigated in lots of experimental and observational studies and found to do an overall very good job of predicting current BMI, long-term weight loss, and in metabolic ward experiments, ad libitum caloric intake.
[+] [-] rawoke083600|3 years ago|reply
That is interesting ja. "generally(red-hearing word when speaking about science)" men I see don't get as cold as females in 'general' (PC/Wokeness be dammed - we talking about proper bro-science here) even though it's not unusual for females to carry more fat (waiting for internet gods to smite me), which is associated with with better heat isolation.
With that in mind, I've noticed I am unusually immune to cold, like my fellow country folks will usually ask me if I know its winter (or some smart comment like that) cause I will be in shorts + t-shirts + sandals most of winter (South African Winters on average about (-2 To 8 Celsius)
For anyone noticing this pattern of fashion (short+ sandals) yes I"m a white-male-Afrikaans-South-African. In winter when it's really really cold (Ragnarok levels) we will consider wearing socks with said sandals :)
PS. As a interesting side note. I did do a 23andMe test and nothing out of the ordinary. Yes my ancestors are from Europe 91.2% I'm French-German decent.
[+] [-] ianbutler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FollowingTheDao|3 years ago|reply
So the genetics of all of this will be interesting. I have managed to avoid my family curse by eating pretty much only fish and game meat, like a Sami. And I do not eat much. It was the only diet that would raise my HDL.
[+] [-] gjsman-1000|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeturnum|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drakonka|3 years ago|reply
The hunger thing rings true, though. I often just forget to eat and end up eating one meal a day or maybe a meal and a snack. Then again, on other days I might snack through the whole day. It seems to balance out though; after a day of frequent eating usually come a couple of those totally-forgetting-to-eat days.
[+] [-] Markoff|3 years ago|reply
Also you can get used to feel hunger, I think most of the people in developed countries eat so much and so often they don't even experience feeling of hunger.
Plus if you get used to smaller portions it's also easier to fill your shrunk stomach with smaller portions, it's about what your body is used to, it's all about self control.
When I started to travel around Asia I weighted 88kg (my max), after year of traveling, lot of walking/hiking when I found new job in China I had 68kg when I liked like skeleton from concentration camp, now I am on my optimal weight exactly in middle between.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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