Ep 139: GREATEST HITS - How I Did it, Part 2 - Over Hunger

Jun 19

06/20/24 | 17:53 | Episode 139

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Do you ever feel like you can eat and eat and never really feel satisfied, and find it hard to stop because the food tastes so good? Or you’re just looking for that feeling of satisfaction and can’t seem to find it?

I used to be like that, too. Spoonfuls of pasta, mac n cheese, bread and butter, cheese and crackers… there was no off switch until I was overstuffed. I could pick at food and eat and eat for days, never really feeling satisfied.

I couldn’t figure out why I was insatiable– always had been– until I learned about a concept called over hunger which is exactly what I’m talking about on the show today.

Overhunger is the result of your body’s biochemical reaction to WHAT you’re eating on a regular basis. It’s the actual biochemistry that occurs after eating certain foods.

When we eat, our bodies respond by releasing a cocktail of hormones that do their job to convert your food for immediate fuel, store what you don’t need right now for later use, and also send out reward signals to encourage you to repeat this action of eating in the future so you don’t starve to death. These hormones also tell you when to start eating and when to stop. This is good stuff! This is what our body is DESIGNED to do.

But what happens in our modern world when we eff with our food production so much (hello heavily processed foods!!) it throws our bodies out of whack, messing with our hunger and satiety signals AND increasing our hunger drive overall. This is exactly what I experienced for pretty much my whole life, until I figured out how to undo it.

When we eat any food, our pancreas releases a hormone called insulin.

Insulin is sometimes called the storage hormone, and it’s job is to use the glucose that you just got from whatever food you ate, for energy. Any excess glucose/energy gets moved into storage for future use (aka fat).

What’s important to understand about insulin is that it not only stores fuel for later use in the form of fat, but it also increases our hunger drive, which means that the more insulin your body is producing, the hungrier you’ll be.

This matters because processed foods, which I think of as concentrated foods (explain), give us a concentrated insulin response, so to speak. Meaning, when we eat concentrated, processed foods, our bodies produce even more insulin. This, in turn, keeps us hungry.

The hungrier you are, the more you’ll eat– particularly, the more you’ll eat of the processed foods, perpetuating the cycle of hunger!

This is over hunger and this is exactly what I had been experiencing for pretty much my whole life. Essentially, processed foods cause hormonal dysregulation in my body– and luckily that problem can be solved.

So what was the solution?

The solution was to reduce my consumption of processed foods so that my body could naturally regulate itself back to its natural state.

Eliminating over-hunger does not mean eliminating processed foods completely. But how much you eat in order to get the RESULT of eliminating over-hunger is going to be different for everyone.

In my 90 Days to Food Freedom program I teach a four-step method rooted in neuroscience and psychology that walks them through the process of figuring this out in a way that feels GOOD.

When you reduce your hunger to its natural state you can live at your natural weight.

The way you will know if you’ve reduced enough is that you will be less hungry around the clock.

But here’s a word of caution: If you find yourself using willpower and discipline (both of which suck) I promise you you’re doing it wrong. You’re falling into the diet mentality trap and I guarantee you you won’t stick with it. It will be painful.

When my clients reduce processed foods they are usually floored at how infrequently they feel hunger.

If you are ready for a personalized approach to figuring out how you, too, can reduce your hunger levels to natural states like I did, head over to liapinelli.com and book a coffee chat with me so we can see if my 90 Days to Food Freedom is right for you.

In this episode we talked about how processed foods cause hormonal dysregulation in our bodies, resulting in over-hunger. We also discussed that reducing processed foods is the answer to reducing hunger, and that everyone’s threshold for that will be different.