Weight Loss and Insatiable Hunger
From my last blog post you now know that your inability to lose weight arises from the way your will power is wired in your brain. You are not weak willed. The unique wiring of your will power together with the stressors of modern life leave you distracted and vulnerable to unhealthy food choices. Here I will talk about the second reason why you are not losing weight : Insatiable hunger.
Hunger in its true sense is a basic human drive to ensure our survival. For the most part of human history, food was scarce and we had to eat whatever we could find and whenever we could get it. Often we were forced to go for long stretches of time without food. Our bodies adapted quickly to food shortages by lowering our basal metabolic rates (the minimum number of calories that our bodies need for basic functions for survival like breathing, circulation, cardiac functions, cell production etc) and slowing down our functioning to make do with less (The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,68(3), 599. Dillon,A.G.,Jacquet,J.(1998). In the total absence of food, the body can run on stored glucose for up to three days. The liver then starts to break down the body’s fat stores and muscle tissue so that we can keep going.(Disease Models & mechanisms,6(1),236-251.doi:10.1242/dmm.010009). This explains why attempts to burn more calories through strenuous exercise or extreme calorie deficit diets result in reduced resting metabolic rate. (American Journal of Physiology:Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology,303(6),571-579.doi:10.1152/ajpregu.00141.2012). What all this means is that the body is skilled at adapting to survival until food can be found again.
What the body is not built to adapt to however, is a non stop deluge of calories. And our modern food systems and patterns of eating do precisely that! Our bodies are constantly bombarded with a surfeit of heavily processed and refined foods. The standard western diet for instance consists of almost 60% of processed foods. Think of a bacon, egg and cheese breakfast sandwich downed with a tall latte for breakfast or muffins, croissants and donuts available around the clock.! These poor food choices make our brains vulnerable to damage and lead to what is known as insatiable hunger.
What is meant by insatiable hunger is that we don’t eat because we are hungry but because we THINK that we need more food. Most of us can relate to eating dessert at the end of a large meal in a restaurant or eating a snack at the movies. We are definitely not hungry and we know that, but somehow our brains have shut down that thought.
This hunger differs from real hunger in two ways. Firstly, this hunger is unusual because it is accompanied by a strong sense of being sedentary. Our modern ways of eating are very often done alongside other sedentary activities like eating while watching television, while checking emails, or while reading a book. Not to forget eating at the movies and eating in cars. And these foods are normally just snacks, not even main meals.
Evolutionarily, this was not so. Eating was a biological trigger for us to get moving. After a meal, our ancestors were normally on the go, either having to forage and hunt for food or build a shelter. The fuel from food ensured their survival and the calories from the food they ate was successfully expended. In modern times, this is not so. More food simply results in more sluggish behavior.
Secondly, eating doesn’t seem to satiate modern hunger. We may be stuffed and even uncomfortable with all that food but we will often wait for a short time for the discomfort to pass and then go back to eating again. We are not tuned to our hunger cues any longer. One of the reasons why this is happening is because of the increased calorie density of today’s foods. Historically, our foods were whole and unrefined, not what I would call CRAP (Completely Refined And Processed). The stomach could tell the brain how much food was taken based on how stretched the stomach felt. Now we can eat and drink more than half of our daily calorie intake, in one meal yet barely fill our stomach.
Many people also fail to keep to proper meal times. There is no time of day when it is unacceptable to eat and every time of day has become acceptable for food. And socializing is not centering around activities any longer and has mainly become about food and alcohol. That too restaurant food which is always hyper palatable with its excessive salt, sugar and oil content.
But what has gone so wrong with our modern wiring that we are unable to resist food, hard as we might try? What has happened is that we have stopped responding to a hormone called leptin in our bodies. Leptin’s job is to tell the brain that it is time to stop eating and start moving again. People are becoming leptin resistant (Nature Neuroscience, 8(5), 566-570.doi: 10.1038/nn1454). And the key hormone which is blocking leptin in the brain is insulin. Scientists have known that obesity was tied to excess circulating insulin in the blood and this excess insulin blocks the function of leptin. And this blockage happens in the worst part of the brain, the brain stem. This is that part of the brain which is in charge of our involuntary actions like breathing, swallowing, blood pressure, heart functions, etc. When this part of the brain is not getting the hormonal cue that we are full and have taken sufficient food it convinces us that we are starving. This is what happens to people who are overweight and have leptin resistance. So they carry on eating because the signalling in their brain has gone awry. And do they eat natural whole foods.? Of course not! They will reach for those foods which are processed and highly addictive which had caused them to be overweight in the first place. and which keep their insulin levels perpetually elevated.
In my next blog post, I shall talk about the other driver that’s preventing you from losing weight: uncontrollable cravings.
In the meantime, if you feel stuck like a hamster on a wheel and would like to radically change how you feel and look by incorporating simple lifestyle changes, reach out to me on www.rimabhealth.com.
