Chronically high blood sugar can completely suppress the appetite, leaving you feeling full on an empty stomach. When the BG is too high, it tricks the brain into believing you have just had a meal even if you last ate several hours ago. If someone is feeling completely sated I would suggest a spot BG measurement.
I recall reading a semi-sensible diet and exercise book 15-ish years ago.
Along with eating consciously and slowly, one of the guy’s big tenets was to stop eating while still distinctly not full. Then wait 20 minutes. He called that “The Miracle 20©” (yes with the ©; he had a lot of catchphrases he was trying to popularize and then license). Anyhow, if after the Miracle 20© you were still hungry, feel free to eat more.
It works. It works great.
Another of his tenets was to budget your day’s eating to include a snack after dinner. You’re going to eat it anyway, so better to plan for it than have it be your calorie budget buster every day.
The guy was a bit of a wacko, but Miracle 20© is real.
Not a medical diagnosis, but if an otherwise healthy person eats so much one actually pukes I would judge that one has overeaten.
If you are talking about me, I don’t have a normal stomach, which is why it happens. But it very rarely happens now-- it happened pretty frequently after surgery, before I learned to eyeball what I could eat, but that was a long time ago.
I had in mind not you, but a meal I had once where I ate so much (yes I did order the non-wafer-thin piece of chocolate cake on top of everything) I felt badly nauseous. Not in a good way, more like I should make an excuse to go the the restroom so I could pray to the porcelain god way. A shot of schnapps magically helped a little.
It is not good for “anyone”. It is probably good for most people, but a not insignificant number of people, me included, have to pay attention to getting enough calories, rather than worrying about potential overweight. If I stop eating before I’m full I start losing weight, without noticing I’m starving myself.
FWIW, something I determined about myself long ago when I was first on my own as an adult. I was (mostly) always hungry. This was surely due to having an energetic young adult male metabolism, and a paupers budget. Whereas when I was younger and living with my parents, I wasn’t always hungry - duh, I had someone else paying for food. But in terms of sensation, when I was a youngster I would eat to “top off the tank”. Sure, I was “hungry”, because it was time to eat. Whereas as an adult I was hungry because I was “empty”.
Another dynamic I observed in myself - if I ate a large meal, I would be more hungry over the next day. I concluded that in eating a large meal I had literally stretched out my stomach capacity, resulting in more pronounced hunger signals. It wanted to be filled back up, at this greater capacity. I can’t help thinking that some people fall into this trap, constantly gorging and stretching their stomach out, followed by great hunger and feeling the need to eat a lot to get sated. Whereas, after goring, if one consciously eats smaller meals, their stomach will shrink/snap back to a more normal size, and they will not have the same hunger signals. Some diets recommend eating smaller portions more often throughout the day, which comports with my theory.
Anywho, somewhat tangential to the OP topic, but my dos centavos.
Yeah, that’s actually a good idea. Cook a nice meal, but eat a fairly small portion of it. If you’re still genuinely hungry after enough time for the food to settle, you can make a slice of toast or something.
You need the “meal” because you want cooked food that tastes good - we’re humans, so we don’t just want the nutrition we derive from food, we want cooked meals that feel like real food. But maybe we don’t need as much of it as we think.
I’ve discovered that with my reactive hypoglycemia, many middle-of-the-night awakenings happen when my blood sugar is below 70. That isn’t a terribly low number for me, but I assume it has been going down for a while.
I now plan a bedtime snack that has something like unsweetened PB on whole wheat bread, or cheese & ww crackers, or a small salad with a scoop of 4% milkfat cottage cheese on it.
Basically, fiber, complex carbs, protein & fat, but no refined sugar, or foods with a lot of natural sugar.
Probably depends a lot on other factors. I’ve been on two-week backpacking trips in the mountains during which I ate as much as I wanted, but lost weight by the end of the trip.
I have also had huge meals after which, though crammed full all right, I was not in the least bit queasy. And periods where I was exercising a lot but not experiencing much of an increased appetite. There are always “factors” at work, and the real sign something may be going wrong is actually gaining or losing weight or other changes in your health that indicate a change from homeostasis.