Understanding Hunger and Losing Weight

Thoughts of losing weight and hunger go hand in hand . No one wants to feel "deprived". But understanding how hunger works can give you useful tools to lose weight.

Hunger and Losing Weight Video

What Happens When We Get Hungry?

People are scared of hunger.

We live in this fear of not the be hungry.

But what really happens when we get hungry?

When the body gets hungry, our body begins to use its fat deposits as a fuel source. So being hungry is not necessarily a bad thing.

Tune into Your Hunger with the Hunger Scale

What I recommend is to tune into your hunger and really understand why you are eating.

Think about hunger with having a scale from 0 to 10 with 10 being I'm totally full and stuffed, 0 being I'm perfectly fine and -10 as I'm absolutely ravenous. 

You want to be eating from -2 to 2. You're not waiting until you are totally ravenous and equally not eating until you are totally stuffed.

You want to eat until you are no longer hungry - until you are satiated. 

Questions To Ask Yourself Before You Eat

Another thing that you should do is think about why you want to eat before you actually eat. Ask yourself, "Am I hungry because I'm genuinely hungry?" or "Am I doing a form of emotional eating?"

Do You Feel Hungry After a Big Meal?

If you are eating a lot of carbohydrates and sugar, you can build up resistance to them.

For example, if you eat a big meal and shortly after that you feel hungry again, then there's something wrong. You should feel full up after a meal and that meal should keep you going for a couple of hours.

Three meals are day are perfectly sustainable if you are used to it but lots of people feel that they need snacks in between. And that is fine as long as you are having those snacks when you are actually hungry rather than because you are bored.

Our Daily Hunger Rhythm

Our body also gets used to the Circadian rhythm. If you have your breakfast every single day at 7 o'clock, your body will be hungry at 7 o'clock. You can change the Circadian rhythm if you want to.

Author Bio

Dr Orlena is a health coach. She helps busy mums go from "I can't lose weight" to feeling fit and fabulous. Find out more about her here.