Habit: Extending Food Windows and No Snacking
Postponing eating.
When you feel hungry before eating, take a break, postpone eating for 30-60 minutes. If you've been ignoring true appetite signals for months, you may need some practice to get used to feeling them again.
Hunger is not an emergency, and meals that match your feeling of hunger are your guarantee that you are eating exactly the amount you need to lose fat. In fact, your body is well adapted to periods without food.
Here are some tips on how to recognize real physiological hunger and distinguish it from false emotional hunger:
🍴 Real physiological hunger comes on gradually and may go through an initial phase of coming and going before becoming a permanent sensation.
🍴 False emotional hunger or a desire to eat out of habit can occur suddenly and last no more than 20-30 minutes. This is because it usually occurs in response to emotions, the time of day, the smell or sight of appetizing food, etc., and not the true need of the body.
🍴 If you are not sure whether you feel real physiological hunger or false, just wait 20-30 minutes.
Think of hunger the way you think of being tired at the end of the day. Feeling tired is not a sign that something is wrong and you need to take immediate action, it's just a signal from your body that gently reminds you that it needs to rest. Nothing bad will happen if you get tired for a while, just as nothing bad will happen if you get hungry for a while. You will not experience sleep deprivation or hunger if you experience certain sensations for a moderate amount of time. These signals are simply information, wisdom coming from within your body.
The feeling of real physical hunger is favorable; hunger should convince you that you are on the right path to weight loss if you feel it every time for at least 30 minutes before eating. Likewise, not being hungry is a call to action: if you don't feel physically hungry, you are given the right direction not to eat.
If your job, like many people, involves set times when you can eat, such as an inflexible lunch break, do your best to change the size of the previous meal so that you get hungry around the right time, half an hour or an hour before lunch break.
If you're tempted to eat to stave off hunger because you could potentially stay hungry for several hours, try to identify eating options before and after that time frame. The disadvantages of eating before when you're not hungry include the possible excess of your caloric needs, and the disadvantages of not eating after is the possible feeling of being hungry for several hours. Long-term hunger can lead to poor food decisions and overeating at the next meal.
This habit will give you incredible strength and further increase the pleasure of every meal. It will also help you become aware of your other unmet needs and begin to reflect on them rather than using food as a substitute.
Your body is already equipped with an amazingly accurate system for controlling energy intake and expenditure, and using this system correctly will help you determine the right amount of food. This is how your body helps you on your path to weight loss. And having your body give you a hunger signal is actually helpful: it can help you assess how your energy expenditure compares to your energy intake from food, reassure you that you are on your way to lose weight, or tell you what needs to be adjusted to achieve better results. .
By acquiring this habit, you may face the fear or anxiety associated with hunger, but by moving in small, comfortable steps, you will eventually let go of both fear and anxiety.
Practice will help you create the energy gap you need for weight loss from food, without undereating, stressing yourself or counting calories. And your feeling of hunger will help you with this.
Each person experiences hunger before eating in different ways. Do not force things, start with a pause before eating for 5 - 10 - 15 minutes and gradually increase this time. It is normal that postponing your meal for 30-60 minutes seems too difficult for you in the beginning.
Note that avoiding ignoring hunger for more than 60 minutes is also an important skill. You should stop doing this to yourself. When you regularly neglect your body's needs, your body becomes stressed and will seek what's available by any means necessary. This is the path to overeating and uncontrolled eating behavior.
During the first weeks, you may find that hunger is not that hard to endure for short periods of time. This time passes easily, especially when you are busy with something.
Clean food windonws
Now we will be focusing on introducing two habits. They are interconnected and depend on our feelings of hunger and satiety after eating. We look at the “postponing eating” habit, today in addition to the “clean food windows” habit.
A clean gap is the complete absence of calories in any form between meals, including snacks, "liquid" calories (coffee, tea, juice), etc. Healthy eating behavior means that in between meals you are busy with other issues: you don't snack, don't talk about food, don't study recipes, etc.
Traditionally, food intake was strictly regulated, people ate at a common table at a certain time. Our grandmothers forbade "dragging food", "spoiling the appetite" and considered it very important to "eat at the table." In the past, people ate less. Due to the lack of refrigeration and ready-to-eat food, the rule of clean spaces was strictly observed in the old days, but today we are constantly surrounded by a lot of ready-to-eat food.
Studies say that since the 1950s, the number of meals has been steadily increasing. Indeed, now people eat very often. Today we are at the center of an epidemic of snacking - people eat often, on the go, outside special zones. Meals became random and chaotic. This is due to the emergence of a wide variety and widespread availability of ready-made food, the destruction of traditional food culture, and aggressive advertising. As a result, we are guided not by hunger, but by external stimuli.
Violation of metabolism and hormones.
Snacking reduces levels of the hormone ghrelin, which is responsible for feeling hungry, and this, in turn, can increase anxiety and decrease satisfaction. The ingestion of even a relatively small amount of food into the stomach causes a chain reaction from the release of digestive enzymes, the production of insulin, and a decrease in ghrelin levels. These fluctuations, repeated many times during the day, can lead to a decrease in hormone sensitivity (resistance).
One of the side effects of snacking is that more calories are inconspicuously consumed outside of meals. Snack foods are often high in calories and have the ability to increase appetite. Accidentally snatched a piece at work, under stress, with tea - all this turns into an imperceptible for us, but pronounced overeating. Snacking provokes fluctuations in blood glucose ("sugar swing"). Surely you have noticed that even a small piece of food against the background of satiety can awaken the feeling of hunger.
Violation of the diet and eating behavior.
The more snacks, the less healthy food you will eat in the main meals. A vicious circle is formed: snacking, you eat less at the main meal and want to eat again.
Decrease in intensity of cellular recovery.
You must have heard of the health benefits of fasting. When we fast, our body increases the intensity of the autophagy process, i.e. removal of unnecessary or damaged cell components, which directly affects the preservation of youth and longevity. When you skip snacking, treat the clean intervals between meals as micro-sessions of hunger, a time when the body has an opportunity for cellular repair and cleaning.
In addition to the above, an increase in the frequency of meals increases the load on the liver and the level of acid load on the teeth.
It is important to understand that even a small amount of calories in the form of snacks is not just a mechanical addition to the amount eaten, but, in fact, an additional meal, starting the entire digestion process (enzyme release, changes in intestinal motility, release of intestinal and metabolic hormones).
Genetically, we tend to control access to food not by restricting calories, but by limiting the time of access to it. Looking back at the evolution of man, almost all the time the availability of food was connected precisely with the external natural environment and the seasons.
Therefore, to introduce this habit, first of all, pay attention to the environment in which you are - start gradually changing your food environment. Do not provoke yourself once again with various snacks and fast food. If you are going to eat sweets, then do it in the main meal, and not in a clean interval.
Keeping a “snack diary” (for this you can continue to take pictures of your snacks) will allow you to see hundreds of extra calories eaten unnoticed during the day. Many snacks your brain does not notice at all - you just eat on the machine.
Don't ban, make rules. Do not focus on what is forbidden or impossible for you. After all, prohibitions can increase food cravings. Creating your own diet is not prohibitions, but rules. You can eat whatever you want, but do it at your next meal. There are no restrictions, but there are clear rules.
A good appetite is a sign of health. For several hours of abstinence from food, you will not spoil your stomach, slow down your metabolism, and do not eat twice as much food afterwards. If you find it difficult to control your appetite, then intense tastes - sour or spicy - will help. Brewed spices (cinnamon, star anise, cardamom) or hibiscus are healthy, contain virtually no calories and help control appetite.
The least harmful snack. If the feeling of hunger becomes unbearable, then try to refrain from starchy, sweet foods, give preference to whole foods. These can be nuts, raw vegetables that you can nibble on (carrots, celery, peppers), or a green salad. You can also add to tea or take separately a spoonful of butter (butter, coconut, olive), fats effectively suppress cravings for sweets.
Habits can fail you, but don't be discouraged. It can be difficult at first, sometimes you can suddenly find yourself with food in your hands. This is the result of your long established habits and doubts. For example, if you had a snack in the car, then the brain will suggest that you do it again. Don't reinforce these habits and they will die out over time.
The secret to burning body fat
Our bodies are amazing machines that have adapted to use a wide range of fuels! The table below (adapted from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5326984/?fbclid=IwAR0536odsJ0sfPeI_ID7VYdwQTMgqmUdzdU4Lm7iB4MCRIpl5-28nLbxIhA) shows the fuel sources that can be in your body and the order in which we we burn them. Oxidative priority is a term used to describe the order in which each fuel is used.
While you can only store small amounts of alcohol and ketones in your blood, you have more capacity to store carbohydrates (in your blood, liver, and muscles) and a very large (but still not infinite) capacity to store energy as fat.
Imagine that you poured crude oil on the ground, gasoline on top and lit a match. Gasoline will burn quickly, and oil may not even ignite. Oil burns slowly, while gasoline burns quickly.
Volatile fuels such as gas or rocket fuel are also difficult to store. On the contrary, it is much easier to store large amounts of energy in the form of unrefined crude oil. The more we recycle these fuels, the easier they burn. Likewise, the degree of processing and macronutrients in the food you eat cause different fuel sources to behave differently in the body.
While protein is hard to convert into energy (most of it is used for muscle protein synthesis), the body loves to use carbohydrates for explosive activity, while fat is a great slow-burning fuel for storage and everyday use.
The fact that various macronutrients are more difficult to convert into usable energy, and there is a large loss of energy in their conversion, is a hugely underestimated parameter of food, which is called the thermal effect of food.
Alcohol and ketones MUST be used first because they are very volatile and we don't have much room to store them (other than in the bloodstream).
We find it difficult to overeat protein because it is satiating and it is more difficult for our body to convert protein into ATP (the universal energy source for all biochemical processes in the body), so protein is a poor source of energy for everyday use. The appetite for high-protein foods fades as soon as you are full.
So, your main sources of fuel are carbohydrates and fats. While your body likes to keep some glucose in your blood, if you have too much, you won't be able to burn fat.
Since only about 5g of glucose (about a teaspoon) can be stored in the blood, even a small amount of extra glucose from the diet can quickly change blood sugar levels (especially if your fat stores are already full and you can't easily absorb excess energy).
Although we can convert sugar into fat (via de novo lipogenesis https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10365981/ ), in most cases the fat in your diet is stored away because the body first tries to burn glucose, and leftover fat from the diet is easily stored as body fat.
Not that fat is a better source of fuel than carbs. Glucose essentially "floats on top" of fat in the bloodstream and adipose tissue. To gain access to fat, you must first remove glucose and fatty acids from the blood.
In your body, the fuel tanks are separate but interconnected. As blood glucose stores are depleted, they will be replenished from glycogen stores in the liver. As liver glycogen stores begin to deplete, your body will turn to fatty acids in the blood and then finally to body fat.
So, in order to gain access to body fat, you first need to remove both excess glucose and excess fat from the blood, and the habits of "Delay Meals" and "Clean Spaces" will help with this.
Hunger Management Mastery
The good news is that the ability to correctly recognize your own feeling of hunger and distinguish it from other stimuli allows people to naturally regulate food intake and reduce weight. How well can it work? One study reported that after learning to recognize hunger and eat only in response to hunger, overweight subjects lost an average of 15 kilograms in five months!
Today, let's take a look at some of the typical challenges you might face in aligning your meals with hunger signals.
If you don't feel hungry for one to two hours after waking up, pay attention to your evening meal first. Try to reduce it a little, so that by the time you go to bed you do not feel a full stomach. Too heavy dinner is the most common reason for the lack of morning appetite.
You can also adjust the time of the evening meal, making it earlier. This will cause you to wake up hungry! However, some people just don't feel hungry when they wake up, even if they were hungry before bed.
If cutting down on portions and eating dinner earlier doesn't help your appetite in the morning, then just focus on a protein-focused breakfast within an hour of waking up and focus on feeling hungry in subsequent meals.
Eating breakfast (even if you haven't really felt hungry yet) is preferable to not eating breakfast and fighting an insatiable appetite when it appears.
You may have situations where eating is tied to the time or to certain circumstances and you do not have the opportunity to wait for hunger signals. In this case, you can make sure that the feeling of hunger comes at a convenient time for you. To do this, you can change the time of the previous meal or increase / decrease the portion of the meal from it.
For example, if you have a fixed time for lunch, you need to experiment and find out what kind of breakfast is right for you to feel hungry in the stomach 30-60 minutes before lunch time. This is such a projection of hunger from the opposite).
If you have an early dinner with friends, you can eat a smaller portion for lunch that day to make sure you feel hungry 30-60 minutes before dinner time.
Your body has two main types of fuel - carbohydrates and fats, and a healthy metabolism can easily switch between them depending on the availability of one or the other. Unpleasant symptoms that may occur due to the fact that the body suddenly lacks energy may be due to the fact that physiologically you are used to giving preference to carbohydrates for example and are having difficulty adjusting to burning fatty acids.
Adopting the "Delay Meals" and "Clean Spaces" habits can actually help improve these symptoms by helping your body stay flexible to different types of energy, readily burning fat or carbohydrates depending on your needs.