Snacking Is Making Us Hungry

The dietary advise to eat low-fat, calorie reduced food 6 or 7 times per day has us hungry.

The hormones that let you know when you are full respond primarily to protein and dietary fat.

The stomach also contains stretch receptors, that when stretched beyond its capacity, lets us know we are full.

By cutting out the fat, we don’t activate the satiety hormones.

Protein is often eaten along with fat, so again, the satiety hormones are not being triggered.

This causes us to get hungry again only a few hours after we have eaten.

In response to the hunger and the inability to wait until the next meal, we eat a snack.

Many quick snack foods tend to be made of carbohydrates, which when consumed, cause our blood sugar levels to surge.

The quick rise in our blood sugar levels signal the pancreas to produce a flood of insulin.

Insulin is a storage hormone—it tells your body to store food energy as body fat, or sugar (glycogen in the liver).

However, the surge of insulin caused by the carbohydrate-rich snack foods redirects most of the food energy to be stored as body fat instead of stored glycogen in the liver.

Dr. Jason Fung, author of The Obesity Code, explains, “This (lack of stored glycogen) leaves relatively little food energy for metabolism. Your muscles, liver, and brain are still crying out for glucose for energy. So you get hungry despite the fact that you’ve just eaten.”

Additionally, many of the processed foods made with refined flour have had all or most of the fiber removed, so these foods do not take up enough space to activate the stomach’s stretch receptors.

Low-fat snacks have had most of the fat and protein removed, so the two macronutrients responsible for activating the satiety signals are absent.

With that, we feel hungry throughout the day and eat snacks to satisfy our hunger, but ultimately never feel full.

When we eat often, we place ourselves into a hungry state, and we teach our bodies to become “sugar burners” instead of “fat burners.”

The brain is one of the main organs that depends on our natural fat burning system to create ketones for energy.

The brain works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week creating and controlling thoughts, movement, breathing, heartbeat, senses, and sleeping so it requires a constant supply of fuel.

Dr. Catherine Shanahan explains in her book, The Fatburn Fix, “When you can’t burn body fat efficiently, your requirement for sugar goes up and can exceed your body’s ability to store and deliver sugar, so your cells don’t get enough.” 

Additionally Dr. Catherine Shanahan explains, “When your brain is abnormally sugar-dependent, this distorts your relationship with food, creating unhealthy cravings and contributing to emotional eating.  If your sugar-addicted brain senses blood sugar levels declining, you’re going to be desperate for energy.  You’re going to be looking for foods that are high in sugar and carbohydrates and not nutritious, whole foods.”

Snacking becomes a habit and something we do mindlessly, and as a result, many of us lose touch with how often we’re snacking.

It is important to bring to consciousness how much we are snacking or mindlessly eating in order to repair our metabolism and hunger signals.

To reduce hunger and clear up our hunger signals, we need to shift from being “sugar burners” to using our stored body fat for fuel (fat adapted).

Food is not supposed to sustain your energy, but instead, body fat is.

Body fat has 2 jobs.

It builds fat out of food you recently ingested, or it releases fat into your bloodstream so that your cells have a chance to burn it.

You gain weight when your body is building more fat than it is burning, and you lose weight when your body fat is releasing more than it’s building.

How do we make this shift?

The goal is to keep insulin as low as possible so your body can easily burn body fat.

Insulin rises every time we eat converting the liver from fat burning to fat-building.

Insulin drops when we aren’t eating shifting the liver from fat building to fat burning.

Insulin is artificially raised when we eat flour and sugar.

The first step towards becoming fat adapted is to eliminate snacking.

Snacking is consuming anything with calories outside of a planned meal like breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Often, we are completely unaware of how much we are snacking and “grazing” on food throughout the day.

An effective way to bring to consciousness how much we’re snacking and eating every day is to keep a daily food journal.

The food journal does not have to be fancy unless a pretty journal book motivates you to write in it daily.

In the food journal, include:

• Everything you ate and drank over the past 24 hours.

• Note why you chose to eat when you did—what were you thinking and feeling at that time.

• Note how you felt physically throughout the day.

Habit awareness is key in order to make change.

Eliminating the unhealthy hunger we experience as a result of eating too often will send us on the path of fixing our metabolism.

Dr. Shanahan summarizes, “When you fix your metabolism, it’s almost like getting a brain transplant; your extra energy will transform you into that person who is fit, lean, and in control of their choices.”