How to Stop…

Being hungry all the time

Before we get to the nuts and bolts of how to stop being hungry all the time, I want to talk a little bit about what hunger is.

Hunger is the way our bodies tell us that we need to ingest more energy. The systems underlying this process are incredibly complex — too complex to describe in a 4-minute read, and it’s not necessary for you to understand every electrochemical signal going on in your body, behind the scenes, to take away a practical understanding of the topic.

An important note here is that just like your conscious mind can anticipate events (“the party Friday night should be fun,” or “the boss wants to see me, could be trouble!”), so can your subconscious mind — the part that controls things like body temperature and hunger. You will see the importance of this little factoid later in the article.

Why Do We Eat?

We eat in order to take nutrients into our bodies. These nutrients then are used to either build and maintain the various structures in our bodies (cells, organs, tissue, bone) or to provide each cell in our bodies with the fuel it needs to generate the energy we need to continue living.

How Your Body Powers Itself

Your body needs a certain amount of glucose in the blood, and it can use glucose as an energy source for living. If you have too little, you go into a coma and could die. If you have too much, it starts to damage nerves, small blood vessels and kidney tissue. When you have too much glucose in your blood, your body works to store that glucose in a few different ways.

1. It makes the glucose available to your cells for energy — your cells can store a small amount of glucose for use later.

2. It makes it into glycogen . Glycogen is a dense form of glucose that can be stored in the muscles and in the liver. This glycogen can later be converted back into glucose for use in your cells for energy.

3. Makes it into fat — if the body has no more capacity to store glucose or glycogen, the liver turns the excess glucose into fat. Some of that fat gets stored in the liver itself, while the rest gets stored in our fat cells — i.e., gets turned into body fat. Ideally, this body fat will get used when your body needs energy but you have run out of extra glucose/glycogen (i.e., you only have that bare minimum your body needs all the time). In that sense, body fat is like a backup battery for your mobile phone — it’s there when you need more power but don’t have an electric outlet to use.

The whole energy management system is largely controlled by two hormones: insulin and glucagon. Insulin does the storage work — allowing glucose and glycogen into cells for short-term storage and work, and also storing fat in fat cells for use when glucose/glycogen supplies run low. Glucagon controls the conversion of fat back into glucose/glycogen and another form of potential energy we’ll discuss later.

If the body is working to spec, here’s what happens during the day: You eat a typical meal as suggested by the Food Pyramid — which is a meal containing a lot of carbohydrates, which gets broken down into glucose. Some of that energy is used while you eat; some is stored in the cells as glucose or glycogen; some get stored as fat.

The glucose/glycogen storage holds enough energy for a couple of hours. When that source of energy is gone, your body taps the fat you stored from that meal. Remember, the fat stored isn’t necessarily fat you ate. Your liver will convert glucose into fat if the blood has too much glucose in it. But the liver can also convert fat into glucose. So when your glucose/glycogen storage is empty, your liver will start converting fat back into glucose and/or glycogen, as needed.

Your liver can also convert body fat into something called ketone bodies. Most of the cells in your body — including your brain cells (which accounts for as much as 25% of your daily energy expenditure) — can also use ketone bodies for fuel. This is something many doctors and nutritionists don’t know.

If you are the type of person who typically doesn’t feel the need to snack between meals, your energy management system is probably working to spec — exactly like it has been described above.

If That’s How Our Bodies Work, Why Am I Hungry All the Time?

Not everyone’s energy management system works to spec. Here’s what typically happens to many people who eat a high-carb diet (like the Food Pyramid recommends):

Like the example above, you eat your high-carb meal. You fill your cells with glucose or glycogen and the rest gets stored as fat. But after years of high-carb meals you need more and more insulin to do its job of ridding the blood of all the glucose you just ate (most of it in the form of carbohydrates like bread, pasta, rice, etc.). The more insulin needed to handle the glucose in your system, the longer it lingers in the blood at high levels. When insulin levels in the blood are high, glucagon is prevented from doing its job of converting fat into usable energy (either glucose/glycogen or ketone bodies). As a result, the energy that insulin stores away for you to use a couple of hours after you eat is no longer available for use.

As a result, you get hungry. As another result, you get fatter — because that potential energy stored as body fat is not available for your body to use as long as the level of insulin in your blood is too high.

So if I Skip the Snack I’ll Use My Fat for Energy?

Not so fast. Remember the little factoid in the third paragraph of this article? Your body likes routines. If it is used to using glucose for energy, it will try to make you eat more glucose — grain-based snacks, sugary drinks, etc. — before it goes through the effort to use fat for fuel. If you try to fight the urge for a snack, your body fights back, right? You get a headache, you can’t concentrate, you get “hangry.” This is your body saying, “I need energy and I’m used to using glucose for energy — so get me some of that!”

What’s the Solution?

The solution is to re-train your body to use fat for fuel. It’s not all that hard to do but it does take some time and commitment — because your body is going to kick and scream at first. Once it re-learns how to use fat for energy, however, you will experience some wonderful benefits.

Getting your body to use body fat for energy is called becoming fat adapted. Here’s how I became fat adapted:

First, I cut my intake of carbohydrates from about 300 grams per day (which is typical if you eat as recommended by the Food Pyramid) down to about 20 grams per day. Instead I ate a lot of fatty meat. You obviously need to make up your carb calories with protein and fat, but is doesn’t need to be just from meat. Just remember, vegetables and fruit contain a lot of carbs — although there are ways of preparing them that lower their effective carb levels.

Initially, my body did not like this move! I liked eating the fatty meat, but my body did react — I would often feel a bit light-headed and I’d crave carbs. My book (see below) explains a lot of the details I’m going to skip here on how I overcame these push-backs from my body. I’ll just say here that it took about 2 weeks to overcome the cravings, stop feeling light-headed and to start seeing an obvious benefit.

The obvious benefit of becoming fat adapted is, as you can probably easily imagine, weight loss. Once you are fat-adapted, you are working closer to spec and you can start using body fat for energy once your glucose-based fuel is gone. This is achieved, in part, because when you eat less carbohydrate, you need less insulin to remove the excess from the blood — there is less insulin in your blood, it lingers for a shorter amount of time, and glucagon can get to work getting your fat used for fuel.

Isn’t Going from 300 Grams per Day to 20 Grams Dangerous?

No. It is true that our body needs glucose. But we don’t need to eat it — our liver can make all we need from fat — either the fat we eat or the fat we have stored in our body. Once I became fat adapted pounds melted away. Think about it. When you are fat-adapted, it’s not that your body needs less energy — it just doesn’t need you to eat every time it needs more energy. In effect, your body learns to eat your own fat for energy — like it evolved to do over millions of years. So yeah, between meals I am having a snack — a snack of my own body fat.

The Sad Truth

The sad truth about the information in this article is that it has been known for decades — some of the information has been known for over a century. Yet even today, many doctors and nutritionists don’t know that carbohydrate is a non-essential nutrient for humans (meaning we don’t have to eat any). Many will claim that a low-carb diet is unsafe. I cover all these issues in my book — and also in some of my other articles available on Medium.

All images licensed from freepik.com

I wrote a book about nutrition, metabolism and weight management where I cover topics like this in more depth — but not so much that you need an advanced degree to understand it! See my profile page for more details, if you are interested. It’s available on Amazon.