Contents

Overview

Theory: Hunger mechanisms

Application: Recommendations

Reading time: 23 min. (Audio version here)

1. Hunger

Managing hunger is the key to a successful diet and becoming incredibly lean.

Let me repeat that. THE KEY.

        Appetite control is not a sexy topic, and often overlooked. At its core, it is the only thing standing between you and your nutritional targets. Getting a handle on hunger will close the gap between your target intake and your actual intake - evermore necessary in today's obesogenic environment.

 Walk into any newsagent, and you will notice that they have handpicked the cheapest, most calorie dense and hyperpalatable foods, all displayed in nice colourful packaging. How kind of them.

        The obesity crisis is a complex function of environmental, genetic, socioeconomic and psychological predispositions - all of which ultimately disrupt satiety cues - causing individuals to eat a calorie excess.

Hunger is an unconscious drive. Willpower and gritting your teeth can only take you so far. We aren’t samurais.

Otherwise telling people to ’eat less, move more’ would have solved the obesity crisis years ago. Instead, our appetite buttons are being pushed, shifting the balance towards overeating and weight gain.

Forced underfeeding causes a cascade of physiological responses, such as depressed basal metabolic rate (BMR), increased appetite, and reduced non exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT), causing a return to the original, if not a higher, bodyweight. In the US, 40% of Americans are dieting at any given time, yet 68.8% are overweight or obese.

Food producers have worked hard to short-circuit our satiety mechanisms to keep us fat and hungry:

"100 years ago the average person needed to exert an incredible amount of effort to reach 300 lbs, but now that food science and the drug industry have mastered the correct signaling process for unlimited fat mass, we longer need to pay a nickel to see the fat man or woman at the carnival. Sit in front of Walmart and watch as 300-plus pounders stream by in herds.” - Kiefer

We already have the odds stacked against us. Factor in that if you’re reading this, you’re looking to get silly-lean, where the hunger demons really start to creep out. We need a little more than the typical weightwatchers ‘eat from a smaller plate’ advice.

This article is the ultimate guide to stacking the odds back in your favour, quashing hunger and drifting into single digit bodyfat.

2. Mechanisms

As much as the fitness industry loves to polarise and offer a binary cause for everything (e.g. 'carbs are the devil', 'insulin causes fat gain', etc. etc.), appetite control is unfortunately pretty complex.

There are a number of overlapping mechanisms, which influence hunger and satiety. I have categorised these as follows:

- Mechanical factors

- Hormonal factors

- Food choices and quirks

- Behavioural factors

2.1 Mechanical factors

2.1.1 Volume:

Gastric mechanoreceptors (stretch receptors) respond hormonally to the physical volume of food in your gut by inducing sharper ghrelin suppression, increased rate of fat metabolism, and making you subjectively feel fuller for longer. Higher volume food substitutions are confirmed to aid long-term weight loss in subjects.

'Ingested food evokes satiety in the GI tract primarily by two effects, i.e. by mechanical stimulation and by the release of peptides through the chemical effects of food (Cummings and Overduin 2007). However, pure mechanical stimulation, such as gastric distention, is insufficient to terminate ingestion, but contributes to satiety when acting in concert with pregastric and postgastric stimuli (Ritter 2004) ... many of the intestinal peptides also inhibit gastric emptying, thus enhancing gastric mechanoreceptor stimulation, too."

They also take up room in your stomach, stimulating mechanoreceptors.

2.1.2 Sensory

Food volume is closely related to sensory cues for the calorie density of food,