Hunger vs. Appetite

This is such a great rule to live by. Not only is this important while you’re following the Fat Loss 4 Idiots diet, but this is a rule that can (and should) carry on throughout your entire life. Portion sizes are huge these days – we all know this. But something inside of us won’t let us say no to super-sized portions. How much steak (or soup or salad, honestly) do we need to feel satisfied? Not much. Next time you are hungry, eat a handful of raw vegetables or a handful of almonds. Twenty minutes later, are you still hungry? If the answer is yes, stop and think about it: is this hunger (sharp, gnawing pains and rumbling) or appetite (the desire to urge, without discomfort or pain)? See, a lot of us eat because we have American appetites. Eating has truly become a way of life. We eat because we are upset, stressed, bored, happy, heck we even eat for fun or with friends and family on special occasions. One of the hardest, but most significant, changes you can make to ensure fat loss and weight maintenance is to be able to tune out appetite, and learn to eat to stop hunger.

Eat Until Satisfied…

The residents of the Japanese island of Okinawa have a saying: “Eat until 80% full”. While we as Americans might not find the percentage so easy to work with (a saying like “Stop before you are full” might have worked better), the underlying principle remains: don’t eat too much, and when you are no longer hungry, stop eating! The fact that the Okinawans use this phrase is interesting, because the residents of this island are four times as likely as Americans to live more than 100 years. Granted, we are trying to lose fat here, not live 100 years, but isn’t that amazing? To think that eating less might make us live longer is an incredible prospect. To tie those two thoughts together, it is worthwhile to point out that there are countless studies, both animal and human, which make a case for low-calorie diets as a method of increasing longevity, and within these studies, those subjects eating fewer calories had significantly less fat than those whose calories were not restricted. The short and sweet of it all is that if we can learn to eat enough to satisfy hunger (and no more), than there is a distinct possibility we could live longer and leaner.

…Not Until Stuffed

There are some more reasons to cut ourselves off before we reach that feeling of being stuffed. Obviously, if we limit our intake, we limit our calories, and that in turn helps us burn fat, which is a good thing. But habitually cutting our meals short can help us stay lean in the long run, through a different mechanism. That feeling of being “stuffed” is not normal. It is, in fact, because you are actually stuffed, which is a very bad thing. When you eat so much that you feel stuffed, you have stretched out the walls of your stomach. Like all muscles, the stomach is very elastic. The more it stretches out, the weaker its elasticity becomes, and the harder it is to return to its normal size. The more the stomach is stretched, the larger its “normal”, or resting size becomes. By stuffing ourselves, we are actually forcing our stomachs to grow. Not only are we eating more food and taking in more calories, we are making it harder to become satisfied! The “stretch” mechanism is also a means of monitoring satisfaction, and as the stomach becomes bigger (and it takes more to fill it), it will take more food just to feel satisfied. And a vicious, dangerous cycle is set into motion. Therefore, it stands to reason that we should eat only until we have stopped our hunger. This will help us live leaner, live longer, and prevent us from stretching out our stomachs.