Eating not hungry
10 Reasons You Eat When You're Not Hungry
Reviewed by David Zelman, MD on February 21, 2023
Long-term stress floods your body with cortisol, a hormone that plays a part in your fight or flight system. In order to refuel your body after a stressful encounter, cortisol makes you want to eat more. If stress is a near-constant state for you, those cortisol levels stay up and keep you reaching for the snacks.
When you don’t get enough rest, your levels of ghrelin (a hormone that makes you want to eat) go up. Meanwhile, your levels of leptin (a hormone that decreases hunger and the desire to eat) go down. These two hormones control feelings of hunger. The result: You feel hungry even if your body doesn’t need food.
Eating is a handy outlet for the extra energy that comes with feeling edgy. Not only does it give you something to do, it also distracts you from whatever’s making you nervous. Or you might manage your stress by not eating at all. This can slow your system down because your body thinks it’s starving.
When you finally do eat, you’re more likely to overdo it.
Anxiety has a strong link with eating disorders. Binge eating can be a way to help manage your worries and stress. Other things, from genes, depression, and mood disorders to trauma, addiction, or abuse can make you more likely to binge as a way to manage your emotions.
Not all emotional eating happens when you’re feeling down. It’s easy to get caught up in the fun of a social event and ignore the signs that you’re no longer hungry, or to feel an obligation to go along with the group.
Booze lowers your inhibitions, and that includes good judgment about when and how much to eat. It also makes you more likely to eat less healthy things, like foods full of fats and sugar. Studies show that drinking affects the part of your brain that monitors self-control, making it much harder to resist a tasty snack.
Sometimes all it takes is the power of suggestion to make you want to snack. Studies show advertising with food in it makes it more likely that you’ll grab whatever food you have on hand and chow down.
Eating when you aren’t hungry can cause weight gain and other health issues like blood sugar problems. This unhealthy cycle won’t end unless you become aware of your cues and find other ways to respond to them.
Real hunger hits you slowly, and it can be easy to postpone. You’re also more likely to feel satisfied from many options. Emotional or mindless eating comes on quickly and makes you crave specific foods. You may also respond to food availability and eat because the food is there. This makes you more likely to overeat -- and feel guilty afterward, too.
Find healthy outlets for your emotions, like exercise or meditation. Get together with friends who can support you in your quest to eat more mindfully. And keep junk food out of the house. That’ll make it easier to be healthy if you do eat your feelings.
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SOURCES:
Food & Nutrition: “Binge Eating Disorder: An Introduction to the Most Common Eating Disorder,” “The Vicious Cycle: Sleep, Stress and Diet.
”
Harvard Health Publishing: “Eating Frequency and Weight Loss,” “Why stress causes people to overeat.”
Harvard School of Public Health: “3 ways decreased sleep contributes to overeating.”
Mayo Clinic: “Weight loss: Gain control of emotional eating.”
Health Psychology Research: “The Role of Anxiety in Binge Eating Behavior: A Critical Examination of Theory and Empirical Literature.”
Kids Health: “Emotional Eating.”
Health Psychology: “Alcohol’s acute effect on food intake is mediated by inhibitory control impairments,” “Priming effects of television food advertising on eating behavior.”
National Institutes of Health: “Diet Quality Worsens as Alcohol Intake Increases.”
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Why Do I Eat When I’m Not Hungry?
Binge Eating
Does this sound like you — able to control your portions sometimes but losing control and uncontrollably eating large amounts of food at other times? This is called "binge eating" and lots of people do it.
A binge is when you eat a lot of food in a short time and it's usually not healthy food. Binge eating is bad for you, especially if you have diabetes.
Emotional Eating
Many people eat when they are feeling upset, angry, stressed, sad, lonely or fearful. Emotions such as these can be powerful triggers to eat.
If you're an emotional eater, you can learn other ways to react to your emotions. Emotions usually don't last long — often just 10 minutes to an hour — so you only need to distract yourself from eating for a short time, until the emotion passes. Try going for a brisk walk around the block or doing some yoga.
Nighttime Eating
For many people, dinner is only the start of their nighttime eating. There's nothing wrong with a healthy snack such as fruit, plain popcorn or whole-wheat toast with a little peanut butter a couple of hours after dinner. However, nighttime eating is a problem when you eat large amounts of food or foods high in saturated fat, sodium and calories like cookies, chips, full-fat ice cream, sandwiches or leftovers.
If nighttime eating is a problem for you, try to eat most of your calories during daylight hours. Reach for a light, healthy snack in the evening.
Insteadof | Try |
| Cookies | 1 piece whole-wheat toast with peanut butter |
| Candy | 1 piece fresh fruit |
| Chips | 2 cups popcorn |
| Cheese and crackers | ½ cup fat-free or 1% cottage cheese with apple slices |
| Pizza | ½ to 1 cup of raw or cooked vegetables |
| Ice cream | ½ to 1 cup low-fat yogurt (flavored or plain) |
To help control binge, emotional and nighttime eating:
- Get into the habit of eating three healthy meals a day — breakfast, lunch and dinner — so you never get too hungry.
- Don't keep binge foods at home. If you're a binge eater, you know which foods you usually reach for. Common binge foods are cookies, candy, ice cream or chips.
- Make a list of other things you'll do. Here are some suggestions:
- Take a walk or enjoy another physical activity.
- Talk to a friend who can help you get your feelings under control.
- Do something you enjoy, like reading, playing or listening to music, playing with pets or children, arts and crafts, or taking a relaxing bath.
- Do some physical work, such as gardening or housecleaning.
If these behaviors become regular occurrences, talk with your healthcare provider about what you can do.
Written by American Heart Association editorial staff and reviewed by science and medicine advisers. See our editorial policies and staff.
Last Reviewed: Apr 18, 2018
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Why do we eat.
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Health and beauty Listen to your body
Without a balance in nutrition, no balance in life will come about. How to make appetite an ally of well-being? The task is not easy, because the feeling of hunger has many faces.
The very first food is the meaning of life
“Relationship with food is the first very intimate experience of bodily contact between a person and another person,” says psychoanalyst Ksenia Korbut. “There is such closeness between mother and child during feeding that they become almost a single being. Only gradually does the baby begin to perceive himself as separate from his mother, to distinguish between "I" and "not-I".
If this acquaintance with reality fails, the child, and then the adult, will not acquire a sense of separateness and isolation of his own body, his boundaries will seem fuzzy to him, he will poorly distinguish between “inside” and “outside”, and food will not be experienced by him as something external.
It would be easier if the matter was limited to physiology: then we would eat until the hunger is satisfied. “Both the mother and the child are anxious in such a situation,” continues Ksenia Korbut. - This experience will be traumatic if the mother has little - or, conversely, too obsessive - attention to the child, if she is depressed, or if he does not feel sufficiently protected with her. In the future, his relationship with food will be unregulated.”“Only if we regain our feelings, listen to our emotions, can we restore harmonious relationships with food and, therefore, with ourselves,” says Olga Dolgopolova, a gestalt therapist.
Physiological hunger: the need for food
Without the calories and nutrients we get from food, we cannot function either physically or intellectually. The feeling of hunger tells us that it's time to "refuel". How does hunger manifest itself?
“When I'm hungry, I can't concentrate and I lose my ability to think,” admits Nadia.
Some people experience excitement followed by irritation.
“I feel weak, my stomach growls, I become irritable,” says Elena. Biologically, these symptoms correlate with complex and poorly understood mechanisms. There are many hypotheses on this score: a decrease in amino acid reserves, processes associated with liver metabolism, a signal emanating from adipose tissue. The strongest stimulus is considered to be a 7% drop in blood sugar levels.
It would be easier if the matter were limited to physiology: then we would eat until our hunger is satisfied. But we are also endowed with five senses and reason - and this greatly complicates the situation.
Sensory hunger: passion for food
Since the human civilization has elevated the preparation and eating of food to the rank of a ritual and almost an art, the feeling of hunger is inseparable from appetite. Appetite, which Ozhegov's Dictionary (RAS, 1993) defines as "the desire to eat", serves as a harbinger of the pleasure that we will receive from the satisfaction of this desire.
It is enough to smell the dish being prepared, to see the cakes in the window of a pastry shop, to hear the crackling of oil in a frying pan - and we begin to salivate.
“The sight of the cake stimulates appetite, produces saliva and large amounts of insulin,” comments Dr. Gerard Apfeldorfer, a French psychiatrist and nutritionist. - We have not yet brought a piece to our lips, and the body is already ready to digest the cake it has seen. Conversely, the released insulin and hormones, sharpening desires, make this cake even more seductive.
With the help of food, we satisfy the need for love, comfort ourselves and want to relive pleasant moments from the pastAppearance and smell are the most appetizing. Then, of course, taste - it is not for nothing that they say that appetite comes with eating. Taste buds make us eat more than we need, just for the sake of taste pleasure.
“Taste and smell are the most ancient of our five senses: they mobilize the primitive areas of the brain,” continues Gerard Apfeldorfer.
- Moreover, they are inseparable - anatomically and physiologically - from our affects and from our memory. Each taste sensation is automatically attached to a certain emotion, an affective reaction of pleasure or displeasure, which gives it a special color.
Emotional hunger: craving for food
The hunger of the heart is added to the hunger of the receptors. This is about him the story of the madeleine cake, told by Marcel Proust in In Search of Lost Time.
Childhood memories are associated with specific foods or dishes, and we eat them not so much for the sake of taste, but to feel again the comfort, love and warmth that surrounded us then. We transfer these emotions to food, and this transfer has nothing to do with the feeling of hunger. The same thing happens when, with the help of food, we want to disperse boredom, brighten up loneliness, drown out anxiety, soften anger.
“In all these cases, refreshment is a way to get rid of an unpleasant thought, overcome melancholy, alleviate suffering, since the feeling of fullness is directly associated with a feeling of love, well-being and security,” explains Ksenia Korbut.
In the case of bulimia, which is considered an extreme, pathological form of emotional hunger, food intake acts as an immediate antidepressant. Such people, not knowing how to live their emotions, are fenced off from sensations.
So, we don't just eat to get the calories we need. With the help of food, we satisfy the need for love, console ourselves and protect ourselves, seek taste pleasures and want to relive pleasant moments from the past. What is your relationship with food?
Text: Alexander Belyakov Photo source: Getty Images
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And how to get rid of them.
To make a decision about how to deal with the constant feeling of hunger, you first need to understand: where did it come from? There can be two global reasons: physiology and pathology. If this happened suddenly against the background of complete well-being and for no apparent reason, then first of all you need to see a doctor (and read the text on the way to a specialist).
“There are different types of pathologies,” says nutritionist Irina Borodina. - This can, for example, insulin resistance, impaired carbohydrate metabolism, high stomach acidity, thyrotoxicosis of the thyroid gland (a disease associated with excessive production of thyroid hormones, manifested by tachycardia, weight loss, tremor, excessive sweating, impaired attention, memory impairment. - Note ), hyperinsulinemia. These are sure pathological reasons that the patient is constantly hungry. But in general, you need to understand and evaluate other clinical symptoms, how much you want to eat.
Irina Borodina — nutritionist, candidate of sciences, therapist of the 1st category.
Five main causes of constant hunger Infographics: Vitaly Kalistratov / Network of city portalsShare
When you have decided on the source of your brutal appetite, look at the ranking of the causes of constant hunger, and then we will tell you what to do about it.
In some cases, you yourself will be able to understand what to do and how to eliminate the symptoms. Starving due to alcoholism? Quit drinking. Diseases? Go to the doctor. Let's take a closer look at the rest.
Nutritional imbalance in terms of BJU is the first and main reason that a person does not eat enough. When the body lacks either proteins, or fats, or carbohydrates in the diet, it provokes a person to supplement in order to get the missing one.
— Strange as it may seem, this is especially true for carbohydrates, — nutritionist Inna Zorina says. “People are very concerned about whether they have enough protein, but usually there is just an overabundance of protein in the diet.
But carbohydrates are not enough. This is the main source of energy, and we need it not just to move - the body needs it for internal processes, for the work of cells, and a lot of energy is needed. The body directs it to its own work, and a person no longer has enough energy for some movements, and he experiences chronic fatigue or weakness. He constantly wants something, he himself does not know what, and asks himself the question: “Why would he eat this?” This just means that the body is missing something.
Inna Zorina — dietician-nutritionist, weight correction trainer, healthy nutrition specialist.
It is also important to remember that all carbohydrates in a row are also not healthy. Fast ones (cookies, sweets, etc.) usually do not carry any function. This is the rapid absorption of glucose and the same rapid splitting, the rapid rise in blood sugar and the same rapid decline. That is, the cells do not have time to get what they need. In addition, fast carbohydrates are often deposited in adipose tissue, and a person experiences a feeling of hunger again after a short time.
And above all, I want something sweet again. Meanwhile, complex carbohydrates are still lacking in the body. In this case, you first need to balance the diet and focus on complex carbohydrates.
“Another question is how to calculate the correct balance of BJU,” says Irina Zorina. - This topic is more complex. There are a lot of formulas on how to calculate BJU for yourself. This can be in the public domain, and everyone can easily calculate for themselves how many calories are needed per day to reduce, maintain or gain weight, to balance BJU. You can do it yourself. One option is the popular Harris-Benedict formula.
If a person lacks complex carbohydrates, then during the day his body will exhaust the energy resource, and by the evening he will want to compensate for it. Roughly speaking, if you didn’t eat porridge in the morning or in the afternoon (and this is the main source of complex carbohydrates), then wait for the zhor by the evening.
“Eating carbohydrates in the evening is extremely undesirable,” says Inna Zorina.
- Because in the evening the pancreas reduces its activity, insulin is produced in smaller quantities. In the evening it is better to eat proteins and vegetables. Therefore, here is a simple tip: to avoid such a feeling of hunger, please start the morning with porridge. Any one you like. Semolina is, of course, high-calorie, but sometimes you can eat it. And better different porridges: today oatmeal, tomorrow buckwheat, the day after tomorrow millet - whatever you like. This does not mean that eggs or cottage cheese cannot be eaten for breakfast. Can. But the priority of breakfast should be with cereals. Then the feeling of hunger will decrease absolutely.
In fact, stress affects each person differently. Someone on this background completely loses their appetite. But most often we still hear about stressful jams. In this case, we instinctively want to raise the emotional background, and few people find a better remedy than sweets (that same ill-fated serotonin). And if we are unable to eliminate stressful situations from our lives, then experts advise learning to work with them differently: for example, listen to music, meditate, watch a movie - find what calms you best, but let this activity be away from refrigerator.
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In the end, you can learn how to properly seize stress, and for this there are at least five practical recipes.
Oddly enough, we still have a hard time distinguishing between what we want to eat or drink. And take thirst for hunger. In many ways, the eating habits that our grandmothers and mothers taught us are to blame.
“For example, when a child runs into the street, comes home, asks his mother for a drink, and she says, don’t drink, we’ll sit down to eat now, otherwise you’ll get drunk and won’t want to eat,” says Inna Zorina.
“This is how our mothers accidentally wean us from drinking water, and subsequently we confuse thirst with hunger”
Inna Zorina, dietician-nutritionist
Nutritionists advise drinking water between meals and 15–20 minutes before meals.
— You should only drink warm water, because cold water, on the contrary, can provoke an increase in appetite, — says Irina Borodina.
Or green tea. It actually discourages appetite for some, fills the stomach. The receptors tell the brain that there is something in the stomach, and this can kill the appetite. But coffee on an empty stomach is better not to drink. Often this, on the contrary, provokes a surge in appetite. Therefore, many who skip breakfast and get by with a cup of coffee, then during the day they want to eat all the time.
This is partly due to the point about malnutrition. In this case, your feeling of hunger is affected by the total amount of food. Let's say you're busy at work and eat only twice a day - in the morning and in the evening. For these couple of tricks, you will eat a maximum of a kilogram of food. Much less than the daily allowance.
— For example, for a woman, the approximate norm of food is 1.5–2 kilograms of food per day, of any food, — says Inna Zorina. - You did not reach the norm, you did not get the right amount of calories, proteins, fats and carbohydrates.
“For those who work with abnormal food intake, when it’s not always possible to eat, you need to stock up on at least fitness bars.” he will support you,” the nutritionist continues. - There are BJU, and calories, and your body will receive a source of all nutrients and begin to process them. The feeling of hunger will subside for a while. It’s not that you won’t get hungry until the evening, but you won’t eat so much at dinner.
If all of the above is not about you, but the feeling of hunger is your faithful companion, most likely you should consult a doctor. Especially if you are experiencing these symptoms.
If you have these symptoms, it's time to contact a specialistInfographics: Vitaly Kalistratov / Network of city portals
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— In rare cases, in the elderly it may be associated with dementia, says Irina Borodina. - When they do not understand, they confuse hunger and satiety. A lot of reasons. If this happened suddenly, and you can’t explain the hunger in any way, and along the way some other incomprehensible symptoms have gone, then it’s better to resolve the issue through a nutritionist or endocrinologist.
You need to contact at least a therapist to diagnose these symptoms.
If you're serious about curbing your cravings, it doesn't hurt to know what foods can get in the way. First of all, do not eat fruit on an empty stomach. Some of them increase appetite by default. For example, fresh apples. They are best eaten between meals. It is also worth reducing the consumption of sugar and simple carbohydrates, increasing the amount of fiber - due to vegetables and cereals.
Closing the refrigerator is the first step towards recovery Collage: Vitaly Kalistratov / City Portal Network Five main causes of constant hunger Infographic: Vitaly Kalistratov / City Portal Network0008 on the topic
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