by Tom Venuto
You typically hear the well-intentioned advice, “eat only when you’re hungry.” but if you eat each time you feel the smallest twinge of hunger, regardless of whether your calorie needs for the day have already been met or not, you will continuously be taking one step forward and one step back. A little bit of hunger on a fat loss program is normal and in some cases simply needs to be tolerated. Your body’s natural reaction to calorie deprivation is to increase hunger and it’s not just because your stomach isn’t full; it is far much more complicated than that. A lot of it has to finish with hormones secreted by your fat cells (leptin) and by your stomach and gastrointestinal tract (Ghrelin, CCK, Neuropeptide YY and others).
These hormones interact with your central nervous system (brain/hypothalamus) in a way you could describe as turning up the appetite dial a notch. Calories go down, appetite goes up, you go searching for food!
Hunger: yet another reason why slow and stable wins in the end
This is why, with my fat loss Camiseta Selección de fútbol de Inglaterra Camiseta Feyenoord program, burn The Fat, Feed The muscle I don’t promote quick fixes that depend on extreme calorie cuts. Your body’s hunger reactions react on an purchase of magnitude relative to the degree of restriction you put it through. I encourage a patient, gradual method to fat loss. A conservative calorie deficit implies slower weight loss, but less hunger, less chance of bingeing and less chance of relapse.
If you’ve been tempted to use a very low calorie “rapid weight loss program,” offered it’s sufficient in nutrients and does not recommend anything harmful or unhealthy, that’s certainly your prerogative. However, there is no way to completely avoid the hunger when you’re on very low calorie diets. If you’re the type of person prone to hunger, cravings, emotional eating or bingeing, extreme diets are the worst thing you could do.
Some people have the willpower and dietary restraint to grin and bear the hunger and so they manage to lose weight much more quickly. but in the end, hunger, cravings and “missing favorite foods” gets the best of practically everyone, and post-diet overeating and bingeing puts the weight back on.
It’s a verified fact: research from Oxford university and the national Weight control Registry says that 80-95% of people who diet the conventional way acquire back all the weight they lost. Unmanaged hunger is one of the reasons why.
That’s why you need techniques to deal with hunger and control your appetite.
Since we are handling both a physical and mental challenge, your techniques need to be both mental and physical. even the most powerful appetite suppressants won’t help you if you have no mental strength. and even if you have the strongest willpower in the world, it won’t last you forever in the face of hormonal hunger.
No post-diet binge for you? Yeah, that’s what they ALL say. Your intentions are good… but everyone is susceptible. many people who do before and after transformations start pigging out the second the “after” photo is taken.
I’ve seen national champion bodybuilders (who ought to know better), gorge themselves the night after a competition as if it were the last meal they would ever get. An old pal of mine gained 30 pounds above his onstage weight after a week-long binge-fest on doughnuts and pizza.
In this article, we’re going to focus mostly on the physical strategies, but let me give you two quick mental reframes that will make everything else you do work better.
Psychological techniques for dealing with hunger
Cognitive psychologist Judith Beck gave some of the simplest, but many effective guidance I have ever heard on this matter. She said: “hunger is not an emergency.”
What a terrific concept. It’s true. We are so conditioned to leap into action and get food when we feel the smallest hunger, but the truth is, we may not need to eat at all. nothing bad will happen if you don’t eat when you feel hungry, assuming you’re following all the common sense techniques of a good nutrition plan for fat loss. but good things will happen… like seeing your abs! and building a very strong “discipline muscle” (which will carry over to other areas of your life).
In a similar train of thought, I like to say, “hunger is the feeling of fat cells shrinking.”
With that said, you ought to NOT feel starving or ravenous. If you do, there may be some nutrition issues you need to address and you need some physical techniques to curb hunger as much as possible. It doesn’t matter if you have the discipline of an Olympian and the willpower of a monk, you can’t resist the temptations of the modern world surrounded by food and eating cues when you are in constant and severe hunger. Food becomes the only thing you can think about.
Fortunately there are natural ways to control hunger when it’s getting difficult to bear. here are 10 of the best:
10 techniques To deal with Hunger
1. eat a lean protein with every meal. Lean protein foods suppress appetite better than any other macronutrient. A study from the university of Washington school of medicine in Seattle found that swapping out a small amount of carbs and putting lean protein in its place (increasing from 15% protein to 30% protein) improved weight loss by enhancing leptin sensitivity and decreasing appetite. By the way, casein protein, which is available as a protein powder supplement, is a slow-released protein. A study at Maastricht university in the Netherlands reported that having casein protein makes you feel fuller.
2. eat a substantial breakfast and eat small frequent meals throughout the day. Skipping breakfast correlates very highly with late day hunger and even binging. people who eat breakfast are far less likely to experience night eating syndrome, a clinically recognized eating disorder. If you eat something, at least a snack roughly every 3 or 4 hours – (4 to 6 meals, or snacks/mini meals per day), it curbs hunger very efficiently for many people, as long as you choose the best foods in the best combinations.
3. avoid very low fat diets. Don’t cut all the fat out of your diet. Nonfat diets typically increase hunger. Physiologically speaking, dietary fats don’t curb hunger as well as lean protein. However, they do slow down gastric emptying and help even out blood sugar levels by offering a mixed meal that is not all carbs. Dietary fat also offers psychological satiety and satisfaction, as it adds flavor and texture to a food or meal.
4. eat 14 grams of fiber per 1000 calories of caloric intake. Fiber is satiating and offers bulk to your meals without large amounts of calories. think veggies first, fruits second, and high fiber whole grains and legumes and root veggies third. objective for roughly 25-35 grams a day. A recent study from the university of Kentucky offered a customized recommendation: 14 grams per 1000 calories per day energy expenditure. For a female at 2000 calories, that would be 28 grams fiber per day. For a male at 2700 calories per day, that would be 38 grams of fiber per day.
5. drink a lot of water or find a non-caloric beverage to drink when you feel hungry. Water isn’t necessarily a strong appetite suppressant, but it does fill up your stomach and satisfy a psychological need to consume something. I know some folks who use sparkling water as they say the carbonation makes them fuller, at least temporarily. If you dislike synthetic sweeteners, much more and much more non-caloric drinks are being made with the natural sweetener stevia and or sugar alcohols which are very low in calories. given that regular soda and dessert coffees are two of the largest sources of excess calories leading to obesity, a non-caloric drink as a substitution for calorie-containing drinks has value to the fat loss seeker. Tea is also a terrific choice as is coffee in moderation (sans the cream and sugar).
6. try out food substitutions – especially carbs – to see what makes you feel fuller. Some foods make you feel much fuller than others. For example, many people say that oatmeal gets them incredibly full, while a boxed cereal like wheat flakes leaves them hungry. There are some typically accepted guidelines here (refined sugars and processed carbs being major culprits), but ultimately, it’s an individual thing. You need to experiment. A journal will help. eat a food or meal, and then take note of hunger and how you feel right away afterwards and for the three hour period afterwards. This type of food/hunger journal will reveal a lot to you.
7. use calorie/carb cycling or refeed days and allow yourself totally free meals. It’s a lot simpler to stick to a program if you have planned totally free meals and refeeds. lets expect that nothing else helps; you are always hungry with the calories reduced. Well, who says you always have to stay in a calorie deficit 100% of the time? It’s actually a built-in feature of the burn The Fat, Feed The muscle program to give yourself totally free meals that will satisfy your cravings and to give yourself refeed days where you eat more. even if you do feel hungry, you can tolerate it because you know a higher calorie day is on the way. If you get a craving for a particular food, you can hold out because you know you’re allowed to eat it… just not quite yet. It’s a real psychological relief knowing you won’t be on low calories forever and that no food is completely ‘forbidden’
8. Training. as opposed to the nonsense that some anti-exercise pundits keep spewing out, the majority of research says exercise does not increase appetite and may even decrease it. What numerous people also don’t realize is that exercise helps psychologically to improve compliance to a diet. When you exercise you tend to eat better to stay consistent with your lifestyle (morning exercise in particular, sets a healthy tone for the day). There are some exceptions though. For example, cold water swimming is known to increase hunger. and some people are simply compensators who eat much more after any kind of exercise because they feel like they earned the extra food if they worked out, but they end up putting back all or much more of the calories they burned. Their bad. Not a reason to avoid training.
9. SLEEP! get your zzzzz’s. research from the university of Chicago and the university of Wisconsin has conclusively proven that sleep deprivation increases hunger hormones and leads to much more inadvertent snacking during the day. DON’T IGNORE! This is a bigger culprit than you might think.
10. keep alcohol to a minimum. research has consistently found that alcohol can distort your body’s perception of hunger, satiety and fullness. If drinking stimulates additional eating, or adds additional calories that aren’t compensated for, and that leads to positive energy balance, then you get fat. men ought to be on guard much more than women. The correlation between drinking alcohol and body fat acquire is stronger in men in practically all of the studies. It seems that women might be better at compensating for alcohol calories than men. In other words, men tend to drink and eat, while women tend to drink instead of eating.
But What about Appetite Suppressants?
The phamaceutical or supplement indsutres might just come up with an appetite suppressant someday that could be useful, but weight loss drugs do NOT have a good track record and there’s nothing on the supplement market now that’s really worth shouting about. and let me ask you a question:
How numerous of the techniques in this list of 10 have you actually implemented? just a few? One? NONE? Well check this out: my techniques are all natural, they are all free, and they all work. but how numerous people do you know who won’t eat much more nutritious foods, they avoid working out like it were the plague, fail to get enough sleep and refuse to decrease their alcohol intake, but they DO want a magic pill to take?
How To eat much more and burn More
One of the most interesting things I’ve discovered is that while it’s not reasonable to think that everyone will be totally free of hunger during a calorie deficit (especially during the final stages of a fat loss program), numerous people who follow my burn The Fat, Feed The muscle program nutrition techniques find that they are actually eating much more than they were before and they rarely feel any hunger they can’t handle…
It’s not uncommon whatsoever for my clients to say they are full all the time, and can’t even eat all the food I recommend to them, even as their body fat keeps going down.
How is this possible? because when you switch from appetite-stimulating processed foods and refined calorie-dense sugars to all-natural, low-calorie-density, high-protein, high-fiber “clean eating”, it’s amazing how much food volume you can eat and still feel satisfied. It’s all about managing calorie density, and these types of food swaps are the basis for my entire eating program.
For much more information go to www.burnthefat.com
—————————————————————————About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, personal trainer, gym owner, freelance writer and author ofBurn the Fat, Feed The Muscle: Fat Burning secrets of the World’s best Bodybuilders and fitness Models. Tom has writtenover 140 articles and has been featured in Iron man Magazine, natural Bodybuilding, Muscular Development,Muscle-Zine, exercise for men and Men’s Exercise. Tom is the Fat Loss expert for Global-Fitness.com and the nutrition editor for Femalemuscle.com and his articles are featured frequently Camiseta Selección de fútbol de Catar on literally dozens of other websites.
