What Affects Hunger, Cravings, and Satiety?

What’s the truth about eating fat and feeling full? 

When your body is “running low on fuel” and it needs you to eat, your brain receives a message that means that you feel hungry. But sometimes we find ourselves eating when we aren’t really hungry! How does that work, and how can you tell the difference? Or, what if you ate a meal, and then before the next meal, you find yourself feeling hungry again? What should you do? This article gives you these answers and more. 

What Is Satiety?

Satiety is the message that your body sends to your brain, telling you that you’ve eaten enough food to fulfill your fuel needs and can stop eating now. We interpret that as a slightly full “I’m not hungry anymore” feeling, though it is easy to overlook. 

Foods with high satiety keep you feeling full longer. Fats are one of those foods because they promote fat-burning and ketosis. Protein can also provide great satiety. But what should you do if the hunger comes back too soon?

There are several possible causes for a lack of sufficient satiety:

• Eating too many carbohydrates Review the breakdown of your 30 grams of carbohydrates per day and compare it to what you’ve been eating. Did you get your 15 grams of non-starchy vegetables? How about 5 more grams from an ounce of nuts, 5 from cheese or full-fat dairy, and the last five from hidden carbs? 
• ‍Eating enough protein Are you sure you ate enough protein? Consider weighing your portions for a couple of days to make sure that you are.
• ‍Protein at each meal Did you divide your daily protein between your meals?
• ‍Added fat Did you add fat to any lean protein sources?

Remember that carbohydrates affect your blood sugar more than protein or fat, so staying within your 30 gram/day limit of carbohydrates is very important. 

Are You Experiencing True Hunger?

How can you tell the difference between feeling hungry and just wanting to eat something for other reasons than your body needing the fuel? Let’s take a look at this. 

• Biology Hunger is a biological urge, and it’s fairly persistent. If you wait a few minutes and distract yourself by doing something else, are you still hungry afterward? If you are, you may be feeling biologically hungry. 
• ‍Stress If you feel like eating and realize that you just had a stressful conversation with someone right before you started thinking about food, you may not be hungry but only stressed. 
• ‍Circumstances You may find yourself thinking about food and wanting to eat because of what time it is or where you are. Eating can be cued by situations, such as being out with friends or stopping to pay for your fuel at a service station. 
• ‍Blood sugar Unstable blood sugar, which often happens if you eat too many carbs, can put you on an up/down cycle of blood sugar changes that can drive cravings. This is also not real hunger. 
• ‍Carbs Eating carbohydrates beyond your personal threshold can cause insulin spikes too, which can also drive the urge to eat. 
• ‍Cravings Sometimes you might feel like you need to eat a very specific food, and it may be something you shouldn’t eat. Are you really hungry or just craving something? Try thinking about, or focusing on, eating an approved food. Do you still feel hungry, or did that make it “fizzle out?” If the impulse stopped, you weren’t hungry and were just having a craving. 
• ‍Still hungry? If the feeling doesn’t subside and you still feel like eating, choose a Revero-approved fatty snack. If you’re not sure what to choose, message your coach for advice. You could also eat some Revero-approved food instead of a snack and see how that works. If you’re not sure what to do, message your coach. 

When you feel hungry and you’re not sure why, check your blood sugar and make a note in your journal about the event and the levels. Perhaps your blood sugar is low, and you may need to eat something. 

Other factors that can drive changes in blood sugar are:

• Feeling emotional or remembering something emotional
• Changes in your sleep pattern
• Medication changes

Remember to always double-check your macronutrients if you’re unsure of why you feel like eating more than you think you should. 

Hormones can also cause changes in appetite, resulting in more urges to eat, but they’re not the only other variable. Here are some more factors that can make you want to eat:

• Not spreading out your protein enough
• Not adding enough fat to portions
• Changing your carbohydrate intake

Fat-Adapted or Keto-Adapted?

Being fat-adapted and keto-adapted are not the same thing, though they are frequently confused. When you’re fat-adapted, you have lowered your carbohydrate intake and increased your fat intake sufficiently to make your body burn fat for fuel. It can use the fatty acids from fat digestion for energy, and even your brain can use fatty acids for a limited portion of its fuel needs. 

Being keto-adapted means that your body is “taking it to the next level” and converting the fats into ketone bodies, which the body and the brain can use even more readily for fuel. Your brain, for example, can use ketones for up to 70% of its fuel needs. 

Strategies

• Exercise can change how you perceive hunger, as well as whether you’re in ketosis or not. In general, your ketone levels may drop after exercise because you’ve burned some of them for fuel. Within an hour after exercise, those ketone levels should come back up as your liver replaces them. This means that testing your ketones right after exercise or testing them an hour after exercise is evaluating two different situations. 
• ‍Timing of Eating You can adjust the time that you eat your dinner if you find that you’re hungry before you fall asleep. While you shouldn’t eat just before bedtime, it’s okay to eat 30-60 minutes later if you consistently find yourself truly hungry before you fall asleep. 
• ‍Wait and then decide Remember that satiety sometimes takes a few minutes—up to twenty minutes in some cases. If you’re not sure if you’re full, it’s okay to pause for a few minutes and see if your body wants you to keep eating or not. Sometimes giving the satiety message a minute to materialize makes it more perceptible. 
• ‍Stress and emotions It’s important to not ignore underlying reasons for cravings or emotional hunger. If there is something that you’re persistently stressed about, work at resolving it or accepting it, and you can remove this influence from your hunger cues. 
• ‍Be nice to yourself Lastly, remember to be kind and patient with yourself. You’re learning a new way of eating and a new way of interpreting your body’s hunger and satiety cues. It may take some time to build and get comfortable with this skill set, but it is well worth it!

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