Where does the urge to eat come from?

Valerie got me thinking, where does the urge to eat come from, and how do I separate these urges from one another. Not everyone will call these the same thing. First get the grain, and sugar out of our diets. These are big issues for many people.

First the gut hunger, real hunger should occur 5 or 6 hours after the last moderate lower carb meal, or in the morning.  Just add a bit of fat, oil to abate 1 to 2 hours, or another low carb meal and it disappears for another 5 to 6 hours or overnight.  These are felt in the gut, it is true hunger.

But if that hunger appears 1 to 2 hours after a meal, not so low carb, then we have a likely blood glucose issue, not real hunger. Add a bit of fat or oil and tough it out (shangri la diet, Atkins advise). We may be suffering from an overshot of insulin (natural or otherwise). Insulin's first job is to lock all fat away, then stop glycogenenis, glyconeogenenis, then to help glucose into cells, out of the blood. If we overproduce insulin, we can run a bit low of blood glucose or on the low side of normal, or just rapid decrease. All future meals should contain less carbohydrates, but there is also a speed of digestion/absorption issue there. After two or three days of lower carb, this type of hunger dissipates.

There are also a number of chemical responses that can simulate physical gut hunger, most also will reduce as we get our carbohydrates down. Digestion resistant carbohydrates, potato starch, some fibers, some raw vegetables (brassica) and the like are slower to digest, and require different gut fauna.

Now the other types of cravings, which are not in the gut, but in the neck or elsewhere. The physical craving occurs before any though of food.  The order of occurrence of these two, physical carving, a feeling, and thought tells a bit of the story, especially if we add what was going on just before the feeling arose.

If any emotion, or feeling, stress, act, or other mental image occurred, then we could be dealing with a maladaptive response, often learned in childhood, to some situation, place, or thing. These are cues, and the response hides in the unconscious memory. Deal, as an adult with the problem, feeling, and do not eat. If it is in the unconscious memory, it will never be trained over; do it just once, and the problem will be back, as strong as it was before. We can only lay down new unconscious memory, not erase old.

If the idea come first, I could eat . . . , I could have  . . . , then the idea is coming first, and that is a different problem, desire lead issue. These may be from baiting, temptations, torpor, boredom, inactivity, . . . , a different group of causes. Keeping busy may help, but we do get tired, especially as we age. Now we run out of desire to do, before we run out of day, or food desire. Now what?

Some of the difficulty is there are no clear definitions for many of these food related issues. Consider food addiction, eating disorders, compulsive eating, and the other host of terms. But what part comes first, the impulse, craving, desire, judgement, the opinion, suggestion, reaction, habit, on natural response to the presentation of food (cue, bait, tempt, advertisement, improper offer, Yettie), ?

We need salt, trace amounts of particular carbohydrates found in leaves and stems, fish a couple of times a week, about 1 gm/kg lean body mass of protein, and the remainder of our food should be fat to address hunger issues. But non of this addresses desire issues for food.