When Good Hunger Turns Baaaaaaad!
Thought I’d do a little post about false hunger as it commonly comes up with my students taking the Sugar it’s not me… It’s YOU e-course. A modern, or Western, way of eating has – over time – trained us to eat food for the way it makes us feel, instead of what we really need it for. That being sustainable energy, cell renewal, brain function, fat burning and muscle repair. Pretty basic but that’s what food is for.
Processed food, sugar, additives, too many grains, fruit juices, pastries and excess carbohydrates make us feel good – GREAT even! But its not real. It’s a chemical reaction in your brain that should not be happening. Its like an addiction.
Over time, eating these refined carbohydrates, fatty meats and sugary foods affects you – badly. It starts to lead you down the road of insulin resistance. But what does that even mean? I know you’ve heard the term many times before so I’ll try to explain how insulin resistance can cause a false hunger.
Insulin is released as a signal for your body to suck up all of that lovely energy floating around in your blood with a view to sending it off to your various cells. This process should happen over a number of hours. When all the energy is used up, you get hungry again as a signal that you need to replenish your energy stores. That’s cool – time to eat again! It should be an ongoing process. True hunger should happen at regular times – around 3 to 4 hours after you’ve eaten a main meal. If your body is healthy and utilising energy properly from food, natural whole foods will seem very appealing to you – this is your body saying “heck yeah, that makes me feel good! eat more!”
False hunger can be identified when it happens at irregular times, links in to when you’re tired, happens shortly after you’ve eaten and comes with cravings for sweet or high carb foods – these are danger signals and need to be rectified.
If your diet consists of nutrient/fibre poor foods, sugars, processed fats and refined carbohydrates then your hunger signals will begin to fail. These foods make your body release far too much insulin, in one big surge – causing all of the energy in your blood to be sucked up too quickly. Darn, no energy left – cue hunger and probably cue weight gain too. What happens to the all that energy you just asked for if you don’t use it up or burn it off? Yep, it gets stored as fat, usually around your middle because of the pressure your pancreas is under. It’s your pancreas which releases insulin. This process sets of a massively inflammatory environment in your body too, which leads onto other related illnesses like diabetes, arthritis, autoimmune disease and even cancer.
Over time, your pancreas is going to become pretty pooped as it’s being constantly over worked. Not only that, but you become resistant to the insulin being secreted – this means that no matter how much insulin you release, your body doesn’t suck up the energy from your blood. So you eat more, but the energy never gets used – even though you’re eating a lot, you’re always hungry because you aren’t converting that food to energy properly. So lots of food input, not enough energy uptake. Of course its a lot more in-depth than that but those are the basics.
Luckily this process can be reversed. For those suffering with initial sugar cravings then it can be done in about 2 weeks. For those suffering with diagnosed insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes then of course it will take longer as the condition has progressed. But in the grand scheme of things you could be well in a relatively short period of time through a really quite simple dietary and lifestyle change.
If you’d like to talk to me further about reversing insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes or any other health condition please message me for a chat. Always happy to help x http://www.tonichealacademy.com
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