Learn To Identify These 4 Types of Hunger to Prevent Overeating

All hunger is not created equal. If you feel like you are hungry than you should be, or that your inability to manage your hunger is sabotaging your healthy eating goals, the first step is to figure out which type of hunger you're struggling with so you can put the right strategies in place to get a reign on it. All right, so there are four different types that I'm going to go through. The first one is homeostatic. That's normal hunger. Now let's talk about how you can get a rain on this if you feel like you are hungry than you should be. So the first thing is you want to eat by the plate. Now my mantra is protein first. The reason being is protein is super satiating. Have you ever noticed when you ate a big steak or a lot of turkey, you're like, I feel full. Yes. That's because protein takes longer to digest and it's also more thermic too. So bonus points for that. That means it needs more calories to break it down. And it also helps with blood sugar balance and that help with hunger as well. But here's the thing, when you put protein with fiber, it's like the one, two punch for helping with hunger. Because protein plus fiber slows down stomach emptying and that helps you feel fuller longer. So clean protein sources are grass fed and finished beef, game, lamb, pastured chicken and pork, wild seeds, seafood and fish. And if you're not dairy intolerant, whey and Greek style yogurt. If you can handle eggs, if you're not intolerant to them, pastured eggs. And by the way, how do you find that out? You do the virgin diet. That'll help you figure out which foods work for you and which foods don't. And if you have leaky gut and food intolerance. And some of the vegan sources would be like a pea. Protein powder and of course collagen can help here too. It's not a complete protein, but it can help. So those are the protein sources you're going to want to eat. 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of body weight divided in your three meals throughout the day. At least 30 grams at a meal. So 30 to 50 grams at a meal. 100 grams is kind of your bare minimum for the day. Divide it into those three meals and make sure you get at least 30 grams. So that's the first part. Now building the plate again. The next part is fiber. That's going to come from non starchy vegetables, fruit and a little bit of what I call slow, low Carbs, things like lentils, wild rice, winter squashes, potatoes, little bits of those. Now you want to strive for getting minimally 35 grams of fiber a day. I want you up though. I'd really love to see you at 50 grams or higher because again, it's that fiber and protein together that keeps ghrelin, the hunger, hunger hormone, suppressed. You'll feel fuller, longer, you won't be hungry. Now next up is fat. And so you're building your plate with that clean protein with the non starchy vegetables with a little bit of slow, low carbs, maybe some berries. And then you're going to get some healthy fats. Maybe you put some extra virgin olive oil on your salad, maybe you had some fat in your wild salmon. But why fat is important is fat does a little release of some neuropeptides in your gut that tell your brain that you are full. This is what you're seeing when you hear about some of these drugs like ozembic and semaglutide types of drugs. Wegovy, mounjaro, they are working in the gut, peptides helping them. Those peptides tell your brain you're full. So fat can do that as well. All right, the other important thing here are fluids. Now, water on its own. And here's the thing, we have a really good appetite, right? Like that's generally overactive. And nothing on the thirst. By the time you're thirsty, you're way past that point. So you want to make sure that you are drinking a lot of water. Basically, you want to drink at least half your weight in ounces a day. And that can be water, that can be green tea, it can be some black coffee earlier in the day, sparkling water. You want to make sure it all counts, by the way, but you want to make sure you're getting that fluid in. Not only does drinking water boost your metabolism transiently, so if you drink water for about the next 30 minutes, you got about a 30% rise in your metabolism. But being well hydrated is critical for your body composition. It turns out that even mild dehydration raises stress hormones and that it also causes your body to convert glucose into fructose and store it as fat. That is wild and crazy. But we know that fiber plus fluid also can help you feel fuller longer. So when you eat by the plate, that protein, fat and fiber trifecta for good blood sugar balance, for good stuff, satiety, and then you add the water, add the fluid, that's going to help with your appetite as well. That can help A ton. Now, to ensure that you're doing this correctly, I highly recommend tracking your macros because we tend to underestimate what we're eating. And so you might think that you're eating a little bit, but the reality is you're probably eating more than you think. So let's make sure you're eating enough of the right things and not too much of of other things that could cause issues. So macro tracking can be great. The app I really love is one called the Carbon App. You can find it on the App Store. I find it super easy to use. So that's the first part, and that's probably not the one that's creating the havoc for you, but I want to make sure that that one's not the issue. And that's such a quick fix by just again, eating by the plate and making sure you're doing the protein, fat and fiber. The next one is a whole different story, and that is hormonal eating, and that is that stress eating. If you're a cycling female, that's that PMS eating. And here's what happens when you've got stress eating. So if you're under stress, stress can then lower serotonin and dopamine. So when your serotonin goes low, your body goes, oh, I want sugar, I want carbs. So that you can trigger the release that the creation of serotonin, it will also make you hungrier. It'll drop your dopamine, which in turn will make you hungrier as well, and seek rewards. So when your serotonin and dopamine go low, it's going to make you crave sugar, it's going to make you crave eating and craving food, rewards. The other thing that it does is stress can make your gut leaky. And what happens when your gut gets leaky is our gut, our small intestine, is these tight junctions. And stress loosens the tight junctions. And right below the tight junctions, that one layer is your immune system. Now, when you're stressed, your stomach acid tends to get lower. You don't break up your food as well as you could. You're not digesting it as well as you could. And then it gets the small intestine. Now you've got those tight junctions loosened. Food particles go down, hit your immune system. Your immune system goes, what on earth is this doing here? And it launches an immune attack against them. It creates these antibodies to grab a hold of the antigens from the protein and they go out as immune complexes and they start to wreak havoc and they create inflammation, they create joint pain, they create headaches. But one of the things they start to do, too, is create the cravings for the very foods that are hurting you, because those antibodies start hanging around asking for more. So here's what's really interesting with this. A couple of years ago, I started going to Dr. Joe Dispenza retreats. And about six months in, I noticed that my weight had dropped like five pounds. Now, I hadn't changed anything. I keep things very, very similar all the time. Same exercise, same sleep, same diet. Only thing that I'd done is started to meditate, basically sitting with my eyes closed for 30 to 45 minutes and I lose five pounds. Now, I knew how this had happened, but still, it's very intriguing that you're moving less and losing more, right? And it was a good shift in body composition. I didn't lose muscle. And I was telling Dr. Joe about this at a dinner. And Dr. Joe always says, you know, when you meditate, you want to become no one nowhere, no thing. And when I told him this, he goes, yeah, that's the no thing diet. But it just shows you how when you are doing things that help with stress, what they can do for your body. Because again, what's going to happen is it's going to help heal your leaky gut. It's going to help get you out of a catabolic state. You can't build muscle if you're in a catabolic state, by the way, if you're under stress, you are going to start breaking down muscle. You're going to start liberating blood sugar so you can or sugar out of your muscles so you can now run from tiger. So it puts you in a very catabolic state. And it also makes you start to crave sugar, right? So it's hard for you to build muscle. You're craving more sugar. So if you are under stress, which the best way to tell if you're under stress is to do something called an adrenal salivary index test. At the very least, though, what you can do is track your hrv. That's your heart rate variability. And the more variable, the better. And so you just start to track it every day and you'll start to see, oh, when I don't get a good night's sleep, what happens to my hrv? Oh, you know, when I, like, looked at email late at night when I was stressed out about this. And so start to manage, start to monitor that. Because again, what you measure, monitor, you can improve and start to look at the things that can help adaptogens. I have a specific supplement I'll talk about in a moment that can help here. Meditation is a huge one. Now I will tell you that I look at managing stress as if I was taking my nervous system system to the gym. And so, and I think that's an important way to think about it because you might go, I meditated and nothing happened. And I will tell you I meditated for six months before I started to really notice an impact. And the way I framed this so that I would do this is I thought, you know, I wouldn't go to the gym and all of a sudden think, oh, I should be in shape. I lifted weights for a week. So I gave myself six months to really start to see a shift from meditation. And that's about what it took. So I say that because if you're starting meditation, breathwork, sound healing, give yourself some time and find the thing that works the best for you and then look at some of the things that you can incorporate into your daily life. I look now and I go, what can I incorporate in every single day that helps my nervous system? So Wednesday morning as I go do a sound healing and a yoga class. At night, I either go do a walk after dinner with my husband where we chat, or I do a sauna. I'll do hot baths with Epsom salts before I do high intensity interval training, which sounds like it's stressful, but the reality is it actually helps your sympathetic nervous system learn how to handle stress better. So find those things that work for you. I also wake up every single morning and I meditate. So find the things that work for you. But think about what you need to do for your nervous system. If you are finding that you are that stress eater, we need to swap the eating for something else. And I always say if you're stress eating because it usually happens at night, right, Swap it for a hot bath. Because it's hard to to stress eat when you're in the bathtub right now. A couple supplements can help here. Vitamin C is a huge one because vitamin C is the biggest vitamin used by the adrenal glands. Gets depleted very easily. So vitamin C is definitely one you're going to want to look at. I use my product called Sparkling C with quercetin. Tastes like Tang if you remember that. If you. I am dating myself, but it's great to throw in sparkling water. Another one you can use is something called take 10 stress support. What it's got in there is something called GABA. Now, GABA is our major calming neurotransmitter. And when you have this optimized, it can help your mood. It can help you have a better stress response as well. It also has something called glycine. Now glycine is a very interesting amino acid because it is known for its calming and it's really relaxing properties. And then it also includes some B vitamins, which B vitamins tend to get depleted under stress as well. So it's got B3, B5, and B6. And B3 and B6 are specifically important because they are important for synthesizing neurotransmitters and other compounds that help with balanced moods and help you respond to stress better. And then pantothenic acid, which is B5, is super important for supporting the adrenal glands. And of course, the adrenal glands have to be working well for your body to handle stress well. Right? Okay, so that was hormonal. Now let's talk about habitual. Okay, so let me explain what habitual is first, because I still remember this one so clear. And then we'll talk about what you do, which is replace it with something oppositional to that. So when I was on the ultimate weight loss challenges on Dr. Phil, we had one guy who every day he would get up and he would drive to work down what they called fast food alley. Like literally this road had all these fast food restaurants either side. And every day he would stop at one of them and get breakfast. Now, you know he's not getting a healthy breakfast at the fast food restaurant, let's be honest. And. But the temptation, the pull was too strong. Every day he would drive by there and he couldn't not stop. So what we had him do was take an alternate route that didn't have any of that there. Yeah, he had to drive a little farther out of the way, but he did not beeline for that, any of those restaurants. And I think of this and I think of my dogs. So every day, my dogs at 4, they started about 4:30 because they get fed at 5pm and. And they just start messing around, bugging my husband, pestering us until it gets to be about five. They work themselves up into a frenzy. I don't know how they know it, but they totally know it every single day. And then, you know, I'm thinking of one that might be closer to home for you, is maybe every morning you leave work and you go over and get a coffee. And you know how those coffee shops are set up, they're perfect for creating these habitual routines because you're in line and what do you see in line? You see all of those muffins and breakfast sandwiches and everything else. So just you now started this routine where you get your morning coffee and your muffin. And so the easy way to break that routine, by the way, is just order ahead so that you bypass the line and you get your coffee. And now you don't have a muffin. So again, how do you deal with that? If you've got this habitual training, in the first couple days, you're going to be like upset because, you know, nature hates a vacuum. That's why what I want you to do is replace it with something else, not food. Right, Replace it with something else so you don't go, oh. Or figure out another activity so it doesn't even put you into that situation. Literally, it takes a couple days to break this one. Okay, the final one, Hedonic hunger. Oh my gosh, have the food companies really done a number on us with these ultra processed foods? Holy smokes. These ultra processed foods are engineered so that you can't stop eating them. And so here is my whole thing, and this is my mantra is keep the enemy out of the house. Like, be nice to yourself. Now, ultra processed foods are just obvious ones. And these can be ones that even have good healthy ingredients. But you get into it and you can't stop eating it. That's a problem. Because you know what, Too much healthy food, it's unhealthy. So I say, if it's a trigger food, it's a problem for you. Case in point, I was just talking to a client the other day and I said. So he said, oh, I had a little, a little emotional eating situation in the evening. I'm like, oh, well, tell me about that, you know, because again, I'm looking for what type of hunger was it? Was it hedonic? Was it, was it hormonal? Was it habitual? Was it homeostatic? Right? And so you tell me as you hear this. So he said, yeah, I was in the refrigerator. Not like in it. Like he didn't crawl in it, but he had the door open in the refrigerator and he had salted crunchy almond butter and a spoon. Clearly hedonic. Now, I could relate to this because I myself have done that. In fact, I do not have crunchy salted almond butter in my house because I will get do the same darn thing. And so learn your trigger foods. Because even if it's something that could be considered healthy, I Mean crunchy salted almond butter. A tablespoon's healthy, A jar not so healthy. So figure it out. But I will tell you that the big culprit for these things are these ultra processed foods. So beware of the foods that say gluten free or keto or whatever, because a lot of those things have been processed so that you just have a little bit and you go, ooh, I really want more. Now if you are someone that has a sweet tooth and this is something that you've been challenged with for a long, long time, I'm going to recommend reading my book, the Sugar Impact Diet, where the book was based on a trial where I took 900 people who were like, I cannot quit sugar. I'm like, I bet we can. And I took them through how to retrain their taste buds to want sour and savory and umami, right? So that's super important. And the other key thing is remember, like, you know how you hear in the grocery store go through, don't go down the middle of the grocery store. And it is so true. Like, you look at, like, look at all those foods in there. They are just set up so that you will want more and more and more. I still remember the 100 calorie snack packs from SnackWells and laughing because no one ate one of the 100 calorie snack packs. You kept eating those things because you're like, oh, they're fat free, right? So notice if you're eating something and you want, oh, I want more of that. I want more of that. I want more of that. And again, I wrote the Sugar Impact Diet to really help you retrain your taste buds again to appreciate the natural sweetness of things. Now realize constant cravings are just one of the big signs that you're dealing with a sugar addiction. And now that you know how much you could be sneaking into your food, you're going to want to hear the rest of the telltale signs so you can stabilize your blood sugar, normalize that hunger, and stop inadvertently stalling your progress towards your goals. So check out the next video where I teach you how to get a handle on that sugar. It can be done.