The Sensation of Hunger
I had a conversation with someone the other day about severely obese people and the perception, right or wrong, that fat people are lazy or undisciplined.
I guess I think that it’s not a cut an dried case of willpower. But even if it were consider this: is it easier for a person who is 100 pounds overweight to loose five pounds, or for a person who is five pounds overweight to loose five pounds? After all, if you’re 100 pounds overweight there is a strong possibility that something is wrong with your biochemistry. If you are only five pounds overweight, you are probably a normal person. But those of us who are five pounds overweight might think that those last five pounds are the hardest to loose.
Consider this. A can of soda has about 150 calories in it. If you burn 2500 calories per day, this will get you by for a little more than an hour. Say you’re on a diet but you get hungry at a certain point, and the hunger impulse tells you that a can of soda would be the bees knees. If you say no to that impulse you’ve saved 150 calories. Do that 23 more times, and you’ll have saved the equivalent of a pound of fat. To loose five pounds, you’d have to say no to about 100 cans of soda.
Okay, some of you may be thinking, that’s easy because I dont drink that stuff anyway. Well I unfortunately rely on the stuff to get through the workday, an unfortunate habit that started in all-night coding sessions in grad school when the only food in the lab was a vending machine. The stuff is great for keeping mental focus, but there are side effects.
Today I asked myself to fast a bit in the afternoon and asked what the sensation of hunger feels like, and I realized something important. The impulse to eat while working isn’t really hunger at all - at least not the hunger associated with an empty stomach. I actually noticed that my cravings had at their source a general feeling of irritation and fatigue. It was a sort of diffuse itchy tingling in my skin and throughout my body, which might have been resolved with a short nap instead of a snack.
Is it possible that the sugar and caffeine actually act as an analgesic?
I reasoned that if I stayed with this feeling of hunger long enough that I might become desensitized to it, but that experiment was interrupted by something else. Maybe tomorrow I will try fasting some more and see what deeper insight I can get into hunger.