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WHY YOU ARE ALWAYS THINKING ABOUT FOOD. · No Forking Nonsense - The Nutritionist UK

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hello, thank you for listening first and foremost, we're always in the charts. Now I have something for you, if you struggle with weekends, whether that is knowing how to go out, how to eat, what to drink, if you can drink alcohol, if you get hungover, all of that stuff, then go to the nutritionistuk.com/weekend and download your completely free guide. Completely free, no nonsense. It's a thank you from me too. Welcome to No Forking Nonsense, the podcast that slices through the nonsense and serves you straight talking nutrition advice that actually works.
• 0:35
  I'm Paul, a registered nutritionist and your host. And every episode, I'll be debunking diet myths, breaking down confusing food advice and giving you practical science backed tips to help you eat better, feel better and get your edge back. There'll be no fads, no shite, just real talk that makes sense. Let's get stuck in. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Forking Nonsense and today we're talking about why you're always hungry and thinking about food.
• 1:04
  Now I have a lot of clients who will come to me telling me they cannot stop thinking about food, they end up either not eating it, distracting themselves, eating it and then feeling guilty and I really want to explore that so that we can dampen that and just change a bit of our mindset and the chemicals in our brain so that we're not constantly feeling like we're failing when it comes to food. Often you've eaten, you're not starving but you're still thinking about food, what's in the fridge, what you re having for dinner, whether that thing in the cupboard is still there and then you re wondering what the fuck is wrong with me and nothing is wrong with you, that s the short answer but the longer answer is what this episode is all about because constant hunger and constant food thoughts aren t things that you need to challenge yourself mentally, they are literally a physiological or biology, biology? Biological response and once you understand the biology, once you know what s driving that, it will hopefully stop feeling like you're failing all the time and it'll make sense. So we're going to go through the main reason this happens, the hormones, the sleep, the food quality, stress and we're going to talk about what you can do to actually fix it.
• 2:19
  So evidence based, no nonsense, let's go. So the first phase to start is talking about hunger, so there are technically two types of hunger, there's physical hunger, which is that hunger where we actually need food because we're underearned and then there's hedonic hunger and the first place I want to start is looking at that hedonic hunger and this is probably more interesting than physical hunger because physical hunger is where your body genuinely needs fuel, your blood sugar s dropping, your stomach s empty, your body s sending those signals out to your brain saying I need energy and that s pretty straightforward, but the hedonic hunger isn t about energy, s about wanting a reward, it s driven by dopamine which is the reward system in your brain and it the same system that responds when you re scrolling on your phone or a good tv show or perhaps you win something. And there was some research in 2009 that showed that hedonic hunger operates entirely separate from your energy balance system, which means you can be physically full but genuinely your stomach is at capacity and you still have certain cravings and you're still thinking about food and you still want to eat.
• 3:34
  This is why you can finish a big meal and immediately want dessert. But there is something that's happening here that we need to control and that is that often your body doesn't even realise that you've eaten, so I often say leave it twenty minutes or so before, question is this actual hunger or is it hedonic hunger? But when your stomach full, if it hasn't been an enjoyable meal, then your reward system hasn't been satisfied and they are two very different things happening in two very different parts of your brain. The reason that this matters is that if you're treating hedonic hunger, thinking that you need to overpower it and just push through, then you're trying to override your dopamine system with raw self control, and that is absolutely exhausting and probably an unsuccessful strategy. So a real practical kind of point here is before eating outside of planned meals, ask yourself, am I actually hungry here or is this some kind of habit?
• 4:34
  We see a lot of hedonic hunger when we re bored, so a lot of the time when we re working from home, we end up thinking oh I'll just go downstairs see what I've got in the kitchen and it's about us just recognising and questioning to ourselves, rate your actual hunger out of 10, how hungry am I? If you're below four, it's probably not physical hunger and that doesn't mean not to eat, it just means you at least have control and you know what you re dealing with. Now I want to talk about something which I ve spoken about before and that is ghrelin and leptin, so they are your homemade because this is where it gets really interesting and really important for anyone who has ever tried to lose weight and found that it got harder over time. There are two hormones I often speak about and they control hunger, ghrelin, which is your hunger hormone, the hormone that tells you you are hungry and that rises before meals to tell your brain it's time to eat Then there's leptin, which is your satiety hormone and this is produced by your fat cells and it tells your brain that you have enough energy stored so we can stop eating In a healthy, well fed person who s sleeping well and isn t under chronic stress, these two hormones work together pretty well.
• 5:42
  Ghrelin goes up before meals, it comes down after, leptin keeps you feeling reasonably satisfied between meals and that is your hunger system working as designed. But here s what happens when you go into too much of a calorie deficit. As you lose body fat, your fat cells produce less leptin. Your brain registers this as a threat and it thinks that you re starving. So it does two things.
• 6:06
  It will increase grenin which makes you hungrier and it reduces leptin which reduces that feeling of fullness and then your body is then actively fighting your attempts to eat less and this isn t temporary. So there was a study in 2011 by the New England Journal of Medicine and that followed people after a significant weight loss and measured their hunger hormones for over a year afterwards, and their ghrelin remained elevated but their leptin remained suppressed. The hunger response didn't just disappear when they reached their goal weight, their biology was still trying to push them back to where they started and this is why it gets harder or it feels harder the longer you do something. It isn't because you've got weaker, it's because your hormones are working against you, because you've gone too aggressive in a calorie deficit and that your body just wants to survive. The practical implication of this is really significant, you crash diet, so if you cut calories too aggressively and perhaps you cut out whole food groups or you go, you I was speaking to somebody who was eating 800 calories a day when actually they probably needed 2,000, what will happen is your body panics and it will trigger these hormone responses harder and faster.
• 7:22
  So it's very hard to maintain losing weight certainly, but also your willpower becomes a lot harder because you've made it really hard for yourself, so what we want to do when we're trying to lose weight is we want to do it very sneakily, I often say it's in the back door and we do it in the background. Because a more moderate deficit managed over a longer period is far more easier to sustain, but equally you're actually losing fat and your body kind of doesn't register it because you're not triggering same hormonal alarm bells. So now we need to talk about protein, the biggest lever you have on hunger. If there is one thing that you take from this episode and apply this week, let it be this next section. Because protein is the single most powerful nutritional tool for managing hunger and most people significantly under eat it.
• 8:11
  It is the most satiating macronutrient, more than fat, more than carbohydrate and well it s not even close really, the reason is partly mechanical. Protein takes longer to digest, which keeps your stomach fuller for longer, but it's also hormonal. Protein stimulates the release of GLP-one, which is obviously really popular now, which is a gut hormone that travels to the brain and signals fullness. It also has a hythermic effect, which means that your body burns significantly more calories digesting protein than it does digesting fat carbohydrates. There have been many many studies around protein intake and one notable one was a study in 2005, where participants had their protein increased from 15% of their calories to 30% calories, which is where I usually start my clients 30%, 35% depending on where they are at and they didn't ask people to eat less, they just increased their protein.
• 9:10
  And the result was a spontaneous reduction in calorie intake of around four forty one calories a day, without hunger, without restriction, just because they were fuller. Most people eating a typical diet are hitting somewhere between 60 to 80 grams of protein a day, when actually the research consistently supports 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram body weight and that s for satiety, body composition, muscle retention, especially when you re in the deficit, s so important. For a lot of people that means probably doubling your intake and when you re not hitting protein, you end up eating a meal that s mostly carbohydrates and fat, you end up feeding okay for a bit, then the hunger comes back, and it comes back hard, because you never hit the hormonal satiety signals, protein triggers, so you eat again, then it comes back, and the cycle continues. So as a practical point, you need to be building every meal around protein source first. Decide the protein, then build the rest of your meal around it.
• 10:10
  If you're constantly hungry, in an hour or two after eating, protein is almost certainly the thing that's been missing and it's the first thing to fix. Now we re going to talk about my favourite topic, sleep. This one surprises people because they don t connect their sleep to their hunger, but research here is some of the most compelling in this entire area. I cannot stress enough that one bad night's sleep will measurably change your hunger. It s the next day, not slightly but significantly.
• 10:43
  I wrote a sleep e book for my client, I will send that to you, but there is a sleep podcast here so scroll back, but send me a message with the word sleep to instagram paulnnutritionist or message me paulnutritionistuk dot com and I will send you my sleep e book which is just saved for clients. Anyway, there s a research study that I cited in it in 2004 that restricted participants to four hours of sleep for two nights, just two nights. Ghrelin, remember that hunger hormone increased by 28% and leptin, that satiety hormone decreased by 20% and participants reported substantially more hunger, more appetite and specific cravings for hyper palatable calorie dense foods, so high fat, high sugar, the things you know you don't want to be reaching for. I often say that it's it's one of the main reasons why if you've ever had a big night of drinking, that impacts your sleep and the next day you end up craving those foods, it's usually because of the lack of sleep and your body just wants hugely energy dense foods and that is literally because of sleep deprivation. There was another study that found that sleep restricted participants consumed an average of 600 extra calories the following day compared to when they slept normally and again the preference was for fatty, sugary, hyper palatable foods, not because suddenly they had a bad taste, but their hormones were telling them to seek out the most energy dense food available, because your body just wants simplicity.
• 12:22
  So think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, if your body thinks something's wrong and poor sleep is a stress signal, it s going to push you towards the most calorie dense food it could find, just as a survival mechanism. The problem is we re not running from predators anymore, we re sitting at death sleep deprived and our body is telling us to eat a biscuit because it s the most denting calories. If you slept badly and you're ravenous the next day, that is literally physiology, your hormones are a mess and knowing that doesn't make the hunger disappear, but it does mean that you could pamper it. So we want to be aiming for about seven to nine hours of sleep. On poor sleep days, we want to front load our protein earlier in the day, so high protein breakfast will blunt the ghrelin, which is why it's so important to ensure we're eating a decent breakfast and don't try to blag your way through it either, plan these days in advance, know if you think you're going to have a poor night's sleep, make sure you've got something in for breakfast.
• 13:22
  I could go on a massive tangent about sleep but the easiest thing to do here is to just listen to the podcast that is probably about 15 episodes back. Now we're going to talk about stress, stress and cortisol, so why you reach for biscuits and not broccoli. This is the last big driver here and this is the one that ties everything together because stress, specifically the hormone cortisol, is absolutely significant because when you're stressed physically or psychologically, your body releases cortisol. Cortisol directly increases appetite, but not appetite for everything, cortisol specifically drives cravings for high energy foods, we're talking fat and sugar, again evolutionary. Stress historically means that when we were cavemen, we were going to be waiting for an animal to eat us, so we needed fast energy.
• 14:18
  The system pushed you towards the most calorie dense foods available, and that was useful when stress meant running from something, but less useful when you just got a meeting at work. And there are many, many, many research studies, which explores this and showing that cortisol spikes triggered by stress are directly associated with increased feed intake, and a specific preference for those hyper palatable foods, and chronically elevated cortisol, which you'll get from ongoing work, pressure, poor sleep, under eating or just general life stress, will keep that appetite elevated as a baseline, This is why stress eating isn t necessarily an emotional response, it s a hormonal one, and why telling someone to just not stress eat is about as useful as telling someone to just not be stressed, it s your biology which is driving the behaviour. Stress management is something that is legitimate and evidence based nutrition strategy, which is why it s so important when I m coaching my clients to talk to them. I encourage my clients to share their wins and their struggles with me, because we can unpick it. And I say to my clients I never want you hungry and I never want you craving things and if you are, then we talk through it and we address what the real problem is and it is absolutely essential because if you can identify your specific stress eating triggers perhaps is it the 4PM dip, a difficult working day, boredom in the evenings if we can name the trigger then build a plan for that moment specifically then that's how we get result.
• 15:52
  The other thing as well is that from the most basic level, you're under eating, you're more likely to be stressed, you're more likely to have poor sleep, so we want to reduce the opportunity for you feeling like you're going to stress eat by nourishing your body as much as possible. So we ve covered the why, so now let s be really practical about what to do with this information. Firstly, want you to heat your protein. 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight, build every meal around protein, if you re constantly hungry this is the first thing to fix. Same with water, I need you to be consuming at least two litres, if not three litres of water a day, again, would go into a lot of detail about this, but if you go right back to episode one, I talk in detail about this.
• 16:34
  Two. Eat at regular times. Ghrelin is particularly fussy when it comes to timing and it's conditioned by habit. It rises in anticipation of when you usually eat, so if you are somebody who eats at regular times, then this becomes dysregulated and makes hunger unpredictable and harder to manage. Structure your eating even loosely and hunger will become far more predictable.
• 16:58
  Protect your sleep seven to nine hours, this is a non negotiable. If you're trying to manage hunger, you have to maximise the amount of sleep that you're getting, you have to prioritise your sleep as much as possible. You cannot consistently out eat a sleep death because you'll just end up overeating. The hormonal disruption is just far too significant for that. Four.
• 17:21
  Add volume and fibre, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, these foods physically fill your stomach and slow digestion, giving your brain time to register fullness before you ve overeaten. Five. Do not cut calories too aggressively. I did a little experiment the other week on my Instagram where I offered meal plans to people and I said I've got loads of meal plans ranging from 1,500 calories all the way up to 3,000. The amount of people who went for their lowest calorie meal plans was fucking frightening and that tells me that there is a lack of education.
• 17:57
  If you think the answer to your fat loss and the answer for you getting into your dream shape, your dream body, feeling the best version of yourself is to eat as little as possible, you are in big trouble. You need to reach out to me because I can categorically tell you, you probably need to eat more, in fact you almost certainly need to eat. I would say ninety percent of people I work with are not eating enough and ninety eight percent of the people I work with, when I show them what to eat, they say to me in the first couple of weeks I can't eat much more because they're just not used to the volume of food. So do not cut calories too aggressively, a deficit of three hundred-five 100 calories depending on how big you are is sustainable and your hormones can work with that. Cut 8,000, 8,800, 1,000 calories and you will trigger hormonal hunger response and that is unsustainable for more than a few weeks before you break, it doesn't matter how strong you are mentally.
• 18:52
  The slower approach, the boring approach consistently produces better results over time and I have the receipt for it. None of this is complicated but all of it works together. If you hit the things that I ve said in this episode and constant hunger will become a lot more manageable for most people. If you ignore what I said and just try and power through like you re a machine, you will probably realise that in the past five years you ve made very very little progress and a year from now you continually in the same place if not in the worst place because your biology is far more powerful than your mindset. And I can tell you that, I m going to give you a quick story.
• 19:34
  I was working with a ex GB athlete And this ex GB athlete was a junior GB athlete, and he was very, very, very overweight. The reason why he was very overweight is because as a GB athlete, he was in a very, very calorie deficit and he was put on water fasts, had to make weight and the result of that meant that he didn't know what to do. And so his body, he was very mentally strong and he would put himself on fasts for days, obviously lose quite a lot of water weight and guess what happened? As the kind of you lose the willpower because your mental strength is never going to be strong enough, he inevitably ended up just overeating for days, weeks afterwards, and his body was just used to this binge and restrict cycle that every time he ate it would store it knowing that a starvation period was coming. And that is in the most, that s an extreme version of probably what most of you are doing.
• 20:34
  So next time you re sitting there full from dinner, still thinking about what s in the fridge, want you to remember this episode. It s likely something s going on, it s likely your calories, your macronutrients are off, s likely you ve cut out too many food, your body is in balance, your ghrelin, your leptin, your dopamine, your cortisol and possibly a bit of product engineered specifically around you to make you feel that way is a system response and systems can be worked with. You don t need to just power through, you just need better information and you just need to specifically understand where you are at and what we need to change in the most sensible, boring background way to get sustainable results, not to change everything over a six week period, cut everything out because that s not going to get you results in a year s time. So if this episode has resonated with you, I want you to share it with somebody who needs to hear it. I'd love you to leave a review if you can be asked.
• 21:38
  Equally as well, download the free weekend guide because that shows you how you can go out, how you can enjoy going out the weekend, how you can not be hungover, how to incorporate alcohol into your life. It's summer, there's loads of social things happening, you need this guide, go to thenutritionistuk.com/weekend, you can download that guide for free, it will show you how you can have a social life, which I am all about, and at the very very least it will give you some strategies where you can learn to have a healthy social balanced life without feeling like you re ruining all your progress. So thanks for listening and I speak to you next time. That s it for this episode of No Forking Nonsense where the fluff gets binned and the facts get served. If you found this helpful, it with someone who could do with some clarity from an expert.
• 22:25
  That s me by the way. And make sure you hit follow so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you want more straight talking, no nonsense nutrition advice, come and find me on Instagram at Paul the Nutritionist. Until next time, eat smart, feel human again, and stop falling for the Forking Nonsense. See you next time.