I just saw someone assert that it’s normal and healthy to always feel just a little bit hungry, because if you aren’t, you’re overeating.
This was a new concept to me. Is there anything whatsoever to this? (I ask as I feel hungry.)
I’ve heard the same thing. Not that I agree.
I’ve never heard that before, and now that I have I’ll ignore it. I think it’s an over simplification of something more complex.
My theory is that you shouldn’t eat so much at any meal that you’re not hungry at the next meal. So, for example, if I go to an Indian buffet for lunch, if I’m not hungry at dinner time, I ate too much at lunch.
The way I heard it was that there is a lag before your brain signals satiety, so if you eat quickly, only stopping when you feel full, then you will feel over-full afterwards. And so one should eat slowly to give the signal time to propagate.
That’s what I heard, at any rate.
I’ve heard this as well. The best example is being hungry for breakfast. If you wake up and you’re not hungry, you ate too much dinner, and your sleeping body was idle during digestion. I don’t know whether there’s hard science behind it but I’ve found it to be a useful rule of thumb: use your morning hungriness to calibrate your dinner intake.
In recent years, with studies of longevity in different cultures, things such as Hara hachi bun me - Wikipedia, the idea of only eating until 80% full, particularly amongst Okinawanans, have received a bit of coverage.
Biochemist Clive McCay, a professor at Cornell University in the 1930s, reported that significant calorie restriction prolonged life in laboratory animals.[7][8] Authors Bradley and Craig Wilcox and Makoto Suzuki believe that hara hachi bun me may act as a form of calorie restriction, thus extending practitioners’ life expectancy. They believe hara hachi bun me assists in keeping the average Okinawan’s BMI low, and this is thought to be due to the delay in the stomach stretch receptors that help signal satiety. The result of not practising hara hachi bun me is a constant stretching of the stomach which in turn increases the amount of food needed to feel full.[2]
A long time ago, I read that being kept a little cold and hungry extends the life of lab animals (probably rats; I don’t remember). If it applies to humans, who wants to do that? It’s the kind of thing poor people work hard to escape, especially to spare their children from the same experience.
Nonetheless, about hunger, I’d say it depends on age. After about 50, packing your guts with food seems unnecessary and more likely to result in discomfort or worse.
Or it just makes life SEEM longer.
Yes, I’ve heard this too.
This is true. I put enough food on a plate at mealtime to get an adequate meal-- I eyeball, I don’t measure. If I feel like I want more, I wait 10 minutes. Very nearly always, I’ve changed my mind about wanting more.
Also, FWIW, I don’t “clean my plate” if I don’t want to. It took a long time to get my mother’s voice out of my head telling me to. She was a kid during war rationing, though, so I really don’t blame her for having that attitude.
I’ve lost 43 pounds since COVID season and found exercise to be rather easy and portion control to be difficult. Part of it involved training myself not to clean everything on my plate especially when I got takeout. I just felt like I had to eat the food otherwise it was going to waste. In my very unscientific process, if I eat a meal and can immediately go for a 5 mile walk then I didn’t eat too much.
To answer the OP: To be sated is to be satisfied. If I’m sated it means I’m no longer hungry but I’m not necessary full either. I could stuff more food into my face until I was full, miserable, and no longer satisfied.
I’ve found that takeout meals are often generous enough for two meals. So I usually put half or more of the takeout in another container, to go into the refrigerator for tomorrow’s meal.
The satiety-lag is certainly a real thing that people should take into consideration if they feel the need to work on their dietary habits, but people have wildly different satiety responses to the same amount of food, so even if the subject title was correct for humans on average it would be inaccurate for a whole lot of people.
Personally I have to eat until I’m stuffed, or I lose weight. I’m out on the edge of the bell curve, but there are a lot of people for whom “eat until I feel completely full” is just the right amount.
My issue would be figuring out what “a little bit hungry” even means. Does it mean “don’t eat until the point you feel bloated”? Sure, I do that most of the time. Does it mean eat from the point where you feel like your starving to the point that you just feel like you could eat? That point doesn’t seem to exist for me. Either I’m starving and keep feeling like I’m starving, or I eat enough to actually feel full. I do sometimes just feel a bit hungry, but it’s not a step between starving and full.
I also note that there’s a lot more than the amount of food that is relevant here. There are times when I don’t eat and don’t feel hungry at all, to the point that I can even get woozy or at least emotional without realizing the issue. And there are times when I eat and eat and still feel hungry. There are times where I eat a small meal and get bloated, and can’t eat anymore. There are times when I have to kinda force myself to eat because I’m not feeling good.
The idea that your body actually gives you any signal about how much food you need seems contrary to my experience. I’ve read people here talking about how, for them, the number of calories they eat seems to correlate with how hungry they feel. To me, that idea seemed completely foreign. If anything, my trick is to try for less calorie dense foods so I still feel full. (What sucks is that too much fiber irritates my stomach now.)
I think a lot of us are out of whack with being able to listen to our body signals.
I have lost almost 72 lbs this last year, and I did it by boring old counting calories. I don’t trust my body signals yet, though I will say that I think they are better than they were.
In answer to the OP, I eat what my calorie allowance is. If I feel like I just have to have more, I wait to see if that’s true, If it is, I will try to make a healthy choice. But I do allow myself to have “junk” at times, I just make sure it fits in my calorie budget.
Satiety is an individualized response so you need to determine that for yourself. If you eat towards a certain level of fullness and you’re gaining weight, then aim to stop at a slightly earlier point. If you eat towards a point of fullness and you’re losing weight, then you can afford to eat til you’re a bit more full.
Part of it is learning just what your body is telling you which is where calorie counting can help. If you’re logging exactly what you eat and how full it makes you feel, you can spot trends in the relationship and, eg: what foods you can eat a lot of and not trigger a fullness response which are foods you need to be more careful with and what foods reliably trigger satiety which are foods you can be a bit more relaxed around.
At the end of the day, pretty much every human reaches homeostatic set points which is strong evidence that your body is responding in a contextual way to the number of calories it thinks it needs and how many it has currently had. The relationship might not be clear to you on a perceptual level but your body is not having enough days in a row where you don’t feel hungry that you would die if you just let your body do its thing.
I’ve been debating whether I wanted to wade into this, because I don’t want to be misunderstood.
But here goes.
I had surgery on my stomach many years ago, where part of it was removed. It wasn’t weight loss surgery. It was because I had a Helicobacter pylori infection when I was around 12 (probably picked it up when I was 10, in the Soviet Union, but became symptomatic at 12). No one knew then that the symptoms I was experiencing were caused by an infection. I was given several acid-reducing medications, and told to reduce stress.
The infection was probably cleared up when I was on a dual, long-term antibiotic for a really persistent bladder infection.
Anyway, I had a follow-up upper endoscopy in my 30s after a new GP was shocked that I wasn’t having them regularly after the one when I was 12 showed massive tissue changes.
So, I had so many polyps, they just decided to remove some areas of tissue instead of trying to snip all the polyps, and I had a strange (but not uncommon for my situation) tissue change where intestinal tissue invades the stomach.
OK. So that’s clear.
They didn’t, and this is important, remove the fundus, which is the really stretchy part of the stomach, and they remove that in people having weight loss surgery.
Still, I get full faster than most people.
I also get full after I’ve eaten if i sit for a few minutes, which had to do with the shape of my stomach, but according to my doctor, it could happen to anyone who ate somewhat quickly, or ate a lot of fiber.
I have learned to eyeball pretty well what I can eat, but also to stop before I feel full, after I have been eating for a certain amount of time, and then wait five minutes. About 1/2 the time, I’ll feel fuller and fuller as the five minutes pass, and I know I’ve eaten enough.
I have also learned from experience that if I overeat, I can be in a lot of pain, and sometimes throw up. That’s no fun whatsoever.
But apparently this can happen to anyone-- not on the same scale-- not with actual pain, or upchucking, but sitting for a few minutes, and waiting to see if you feel full after a while if a good thing for anyone to do.
Since the thread has just been bumped, I don’t see how you can diagnose “overeating” in a single meal. I often gorge myself to complete excess during some meals, but then like a snake I won’t eat for 24 hours. Overall my weekly calorie count is pretty reasonable, especially as I’ve gotten older and had to start actually paying attention, but people can watch me eat a single meal and get mad that I’m able to “stay so thin.”
Eating too much at the Indian buffet is not a problem, because if you’re not hungry by dinnertime you can just skip dinner.
Early satiety i.e. feeling full before eating a “normal-sized” meal can be due to a variety of causes, including such things as reflux disease and slow gastric emptying (such as can be seen in diabetes).
So no, feeling completely full doesn’t necessarily signify overeating.