Hunger

This is an extract from the "Health and Weight" program.

It is believed that excess weight is the result of overeating. To be more precise, an overweight person spends less energy than they get from food. With age, the same diet leads to weight gain. If you want to lose weight, you need to eat less or move more.

Overweight people are not very pleased to hear that, because most of us believe that the body itself regulates when we should eat and when we shouldn't. Giving up overeating, snacks and late dinners is difficult. Still, I assure you that this is a mistake. How often do you think about food between a hearty lunch and an early dinner? Not that often, although your stomach becomes empty an hour and a half after a meal.

The manifestations of hunger are clear to us. The body signals that it is ready to eat. At that moment, your mouth begins to water, gastric juice is secreted in your stomach, your stomach becomes active (you have an empty feeling in it), bile is produced (your stomach starts rumbling), and all your thoughts are directed towards food.

Therefore, hunger is a bodily response necessary for successful digestion. It is pointless and harmful if there's no meal. In other words, the feeling of hunger means false expectations.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov convincingly showed how nutritional behavior (readiness to eat on cue) can be formed in dogs. Pair food with a signal several times. Then give the signal alone. Simple as that!

From birth, regular eating "according to the clock" creates a strong reflex for mealtime. This reflex has led to the general conviction that it's harmful to miss lunch and dangerous to fast. That's canine logic. Unlike animals, people are able to control their acquired reflexes. This is something we can learn, and here's why.

A desire for food leads to the presence of acid in the empty stomach. This condition can allow the Helicobacter pylori bacteria to thrive, which leads to gastritis or even an ulcer. If the gallbladder isn't emptied, it causes nausea and weakness, stones can form in stagnant bile, and the gallbladder can become infected. Fooled in its expectations, the intestine is prone to constipation. Insulin released at the wrong time may cause hypoglycemia, a state of half-consciousness.

If you don't eat on time (according to your reflex), gastric juice will erode your stomach. As a result, you'll have an unhealthy complexion, foul breath, constant tongue plaque, and teeth affected by decay.

If you eat whenever you want (according to your reflex), you will inevitably put on weight.

There's no logic in the reasoning that we have to eat strictly according to a fixed schedule, because there were no three meals a day in the course of our evolution. Our bodies are suited for going without food for a long time and for storing energy as fat and using it later when food is scarce.

Conclusion. Feeling hungry is normal, but it's useful only before a meal and harmful if there's no food. Will you tolerate it or learn how to manage it?

Practice. If you feel hungry, and do not intend to eat, perform this exercise: stand straight, spread your shoulders; put your palms on your stomach, one on top of the other, and exhale; when inhaling, pull your stomach in as much as you can, helping it with your hands, and hold your breath for 3-4 seconds; exhale and relax. Repeat the exercise 10 times. After 1-2 minutes, you'll stop feeling hunger.

This exercise always works if your stomach is empty. It's effective when standing, sitting, or even walking.

How does it help? You can safely skip meals without harming your stomach. Also, when fasting, from the first minute you'll be free from hunger, you'll have a clean tongue, you won't have bad breath or stomach discomfort after the food pause, you won't need a "restorative diet".

If you have a stomach ulcer or gastritis, the exercise will help you get rid of them.

How does it work? When inhaling, the diaphragm pushes the stomach down. At the same time, the retracted belly holds it back. The acidic contents of the stomach are transferred to the intestine and neutralized.

Appetite. The sense of satiety is commonly believed to come from the stretching of the stomach walls, filled with food, and thus a large stomach requires more food. It's wrong. Our experience suggests that satiety occurs when all gastric juice is bound by food. If there's a small amount of it, satiety comes quickly, and if there's a lot, it's the other way around. To get rid of the habit of overeating, perform the breathing exercise several times before the meal. You'll see that satiety will come faster and your feeling of satiety will last longer.

Since the basis of nutritional "bad habits" is formed by a lifelong stereotype, it's easiest to change it after a food pause. During the first few days after fasting, you can change your eating schedule (the number of meals per day), the composition of your diet (vegetable- or animal-based, sweet or salty, spicy or bland), as well as your usual portion sizes, so you can develop a new eating pattern, more appropriate for your lifestyle.