What Everybody Needs To Know About the Types of Hunger

There are many different types of hunger. If you have been on and off of diets for your entire life and you have gained and lost weight repeatedly it is probably very difficult for you to determine if and when you are experiencing real physical hunger or one of the other types of hunger. Often, you think you're hungry but you know you just finished eating. What's up with that?

The different types of hunger are:

Physical hunger, when your body needs fuel
Emotional hunger, when your brain (emotion) is calling the shots
Sensory hunger, when external sights, sounds, smells, or tastes are leading the way

Characteristics of Physical Hunger

The following will be true if you are experiencing physical hunger.

Physical hunger builds gradually and during this building stage it can be put off temporarily.
You are aware of physical hunger below the neck, not in your brain. You feel it primarily in your stomach, although if you ignore it you may may notice that you become dizzy, light headed, jittery or tired. You make a conscious choice to eat because you are hungry.

Physical hunger occurs several hours after you have eaten.
When you eat, physical hunger goes away and you stop thinking about it.
After experiencing physical hunger and then eating you experience a sense of satisfaction.

I Just Ate and I'm Hungry Again

If you are hungry not long after eating and you have determined it's true physical hunger, think about the foods you are choosing. If you are eating processed foods and/or foods high in sugar then you are experiencing physical hunger as a result of a spike in your blood sugar levels.

Why is blood sugar important? When you have sugar in your blood, your body produces the hormone, insulin. The role of insulin in your body is to determine whether the available sugar should be used to generate energy or be stored as fat for later use.

Foods with a high glycemic index flood the body with sugar which it can't use right away (unless you are an athlete in training) and so your body immediately begins storing it as fat. If you eat a fat with the carb, for instance bread and butter, then none of the fat gets used either. It all gets stored as fat.

Insulin does its job so well that soon after you eat the high GI food your blood sugar drops and guess what - you're hungry again.

Cut back on foods with sugar and substitute protein and fiber and you will be hungry less often.

Return to the top of Types of Hunger