Monday, March 23, 2015

Hunger, Cravings, Desires to eat

No flies, well less, on that one... or mosquitoes either
 Picture just because...

If the blind lead the blind, both will fall in the ditch. 

Some kind of biblical or old literature quote.

Warning: Political Incorrect Post, all Opinion.

This is a restatement of the facts as I understand them. Around the blogs on this list, there are a series of wrong concepts that if I was to believe them, it would drive me back into the food. Studies can be biased to make them appear to something just plain wrong. It is beliefs must be changed to gain psychological repair. Reason can change beliefs. If it does not withstand my history, it is questionable, for I may be a black swan. (to disprove the proposition that all swans are white, look for black swans). I have been on the weight yo-yo for sixty years now, and have collected a bit of knowledge about the problem. We are luck for the last 20 years to have so much unsorted knowledge at our finger tips, some wrong, but mixed in is a bit of right.

Hunger is the body demanding food. Cravings and other forms of the body and/or the mind demanding food are not so well understood or even experienced by some people. Some people just have hunger. Good for them. They do no know the problem of cravings. These are the driving force behind eating disorders, compulsive overeating aka emotional eating, food addiction, obesity, and all that other host of issues that drive overeating. Yes, obesity is a driving force of overeating. Circular feedback in the wrong direction.

Appetite is generated, and we can resist for a while, but eventually the desire wins, until it does not. If we remove the cause, the problem becomes overcoming a habit. That is where diet comes in. Exercise may also have a effect at this point where the desires can be displaced. Exercise uses energy and displaces hunger for a short time, as long as you have the impulse and motivation to exercise. Weight loss is simple in theory; just quit eating. It is the doing that is the problem because the physical, habitual, primal and  unconscious brain functions take over and over ride the rational mind. Salivating in the grocery store is not normal.

First we must recognize that the problem has a cause. That cause is beyond our control, for the most part, it is genetic, and/or chemical, and/or induced chemical, or psychological, which we may be able to alter. We may be able to impact the psychological causes.

Sometimes the driving forces is chemical/biological and can be reduced by the elimination of specific foods, as by removing the fast digesting carbohydrates, sugar, ground grains, processed foods, and well cooked and ground calorie dense carbohydrates. Be aware that some of us may need some carbohydrates, at least to start with. That amount is not fixed, and may be dependent on our stored glycogen level. We can alter what we eat easier that how much we want. Some people, including the government disagree with this HFLC approach, but that is their problem. I cannot respect a government that does not follow reason. But there still remains more problems, in the soft psychological sciences and belief system philosophy areas of life.

It is pointless to having family, medical personnel, and the like chewing on the obese. Most do not understand the problems. It is also pointless to try to correct their illogical ideas. They are not listening. Each specific problem must be addressed with the specific solution required. But these problems are often nested, and may require a chain of solutions, and in specific order. Therein lies the problem, sorting and ordering the solution. Carbohydrate induced cravings do not respond to HFLC diets.

If the problem is boredom no diet will fix it. We may need to make changes to our life, get a life, if necessary. If the problem is anxiety, we need to understand the cause of the anxiety, remove it, or learn to deal with the anxiety. It it is stress, we can remove the stress, or learn other methods of dealing with it. It the problem is environmental, we can change our environment, change conditions within the environment, or learn to deal with it. It we eat in front of the TV, perhaps we need to go off line, or off cable, and get back to reality more.

But what do I know?





3 comments :

  1. "what do [you] know"...? :-) what you know is what you're read and observed, which makes you wiser than an awful lot of people whose writing are much more widely spread.

    as i was reading the above, it popped into my head that as we get older, we seem to appreciate truthfullness more -- and that it's through truthfullness that we are able to get a handle on the problems we need to solve. all the sugar-coating and attempted manipulation through "selective information sharing" is what gets us into messes like our current global problem with diabesity. thank goodness that we can now more easily ferret out the science ourselves, and that some outstanding scientists have shared the tools with which we can determine what studies really show as compared to what their performers try to convince us that they "prove"....

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  2. Tess: Thanks for the comment.

    My original purpose for that but what do I know line is to discourage people who feel the need to tell me that I am wrong. A kind of preventive deflector if you like. It seems to work, but I have no "study showing an actual decrease in negative responses." I just delete them anyway.

    It is not self questioning, nor some misguided humility concept. I try hard to avoid humility, I am anyone's equal, while humility is not greater than, aka, less than. Equal is always forgotten.

    It is that old Haroldism: Don't get into a pissing contest with a skunk.

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  3. Hi Fred,
    I finally got around to reading “Satiation, from Gut to Brain.” Boy, is that a dense read, unless you’re an organic/biochemist, which I am not! It’s a well-ordered and structured series of papers, all well written except for Chapter 8. I don’t know how that one made the cut for Smith.
    Anyway, while the methodologies were all interesting and apparently well designed, I didn’t think it added much to my current understanding of satiation. Maybe it was “cutting edge” in 1995, but so much has been learned since then, perhaps on the backs of this and other’s work, as it should of course.
    I did get to add about 50 new words to my vocabulary though. The last, and perhaps my favorite, is nimiety, in the Chapter 10, “Satiation and Alcohol Intake.”
    Dan

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