Isn’t this the most basic of all beliefs about food? If you’ve
read magazine articles or medical literature that discuss the difficulty people
face losing large amounts of weight and keeping it off, the subject of hunger almost
always comes up. And how many advertisements have you seen for the latest and
greatest diet breakthrough telling you how, on their plan, you can lose weight
without feeling hungry? It’s a given that if a person on a diet is hungry, then
the diet will probably fail.
Of course, hunger is not as simple as it seems. When I was
losing weight five years ago, my nutritionist said I needed to learn to
distinguish hunger from other sensations. For example, if it was nine in the
evening and I had a sudden craving for, oh say, massive quantities of crackers
and cheese, she told me to use a technique called “HALT.” HALT is an acronym
for “Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired.” In other words, was I really hungry, or was
something else at play? This was pretty useful advice, but it begs the
essential question: what should I do if I am truly hungry?
One of the reasons that programs like the Atkins Diet or the
South Beach Diet are so popular is that they deal directly with hunger. These
types of diets recommend a low-carb approach to eating and it’s been empirically
confirmed that low-carb equals less hunger. I can attest to this from personal
experience. The diet that I followed to lose 100 pounds was a low-carb
variation on South Beach and I was not hungry very often while I was on it. So
is that the answer? I suppose it could be, if your plan is to never eat another
high-carb food again. I’ve found that’s pretty hard to do in practice, in this
bread and pasta-crazed world we live in.
But still, my question has not been answered. If I’m hungry,
does that mean I should eat? To put it another way, is being hungry a bad
thing?
As is true for most serious questions, the answer is: it
depends. If you’re so hungry that your physical survival is in doubt, I’d say yes,
being hungry is a bad thing. If you’re so hungry that you feel dizzy and faint,
then again, yes, being hungry is a bad thing. If it’s three in the afternoon
and, knowing you will go out for “Italian Night” at your favorite diner in a
few hours, you feel a slight rumbling in your stomach, is being hungry really a
problem?
For some reason, we treat hunger differently than other
physical sensations. How many of you have had the experience of feeling a
little tired, but you stayed up anyway to see the end of the movie? Have you
ever had an ache or a pain somewhere, but went out dancing anyway? We often have
no difficulty ignoring all kinds of minor discomforts, but when it’s hunger,
all bets (and bacon bits) are off. One little rumbling in the belly is a call
to immediate action.
It’s puzzling to me, in a country where as many as 17
million children go to bed on an empty stomach, that the rest of us are so
squeamish about the occasional minor hunger pang. I’ve actually found the
experience of being slightly hungry to be liberating. I’m not glorifying an eating
disorder, just suggesting that allowing yourself to coexist with mild hunger
from time to time can be an invigorating thing.
So, what should you do if you’re hungry? You tell me.
I try to remember something I heard someone say once about this situation for the average person. They said, "We don't know hunger. We know appetite." That distinction says a lot.
ReplyDeleteAnother great post, Sandy.
Ben
That's an interesting quote. It reminds me of something I read in Debra Sapp-Yarwood's blog about "eat urges" as opposed to actual hunger. Thanks for being such a devoted follower!
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