With New Years Resolutions fresh on many people’s minds, I thought this was a pertinent topic to address.
“If only it were a little easier to control my cravings, I could eat healthier and lose some of this excess weight.”
I’m a big believer that knowledge is power. Another powerful aspect of life is perspective. Knowledge and perspective go together. When we have the right knowledge, then we can have the right perspective, and we can make a better choice.
I want to show you how this applies to hunger and cravings and how you can beat your sabotaging cravings.
The foundation of this comes from understanding something which is very basic and simple. It centers around the amount of sugar (glucose) in your blood.
All the cells in your body rely on glucose to power them. There is another source that they can use called ketones, but your cells prefer glucose if it’s available. If you’ve ever tried the Atkins diet or another very low carb diet like the Ketogenic diet, then you may be familiar with ketones. For our purposes and for the general person’s normal diet, we don’t need to talk about those.
I’ll get into the applicability of this info further down and how you can use it, but we first need a basic understanding of blood sugar and insulin.
Why Do I Get So Hungry?
A normal fasting blood sugar level should be between 70-100 mg/dl. Probably between 80-90 mg/dl is a more normal and optimal number. You will need to find your fasting level. I’ll show you how later on. This is a very important biomarker of health. Most experts would agree that this biomarker is more important than your cholesterol levels.
As your fasting blood sugar starts going above 90 mg/dl you are heading in the direction of type II Diabetes. The American Diabetes Association defines prediabetes as a fasting blood glucose level between 100-125 mg/dl.(1) I’m not going to go into detail about the havoc that elevated blood sugar leaves you susceptible for. It is important to know what your fasting blood sugar is though because of what happens when we dip below that.
When we dip below our fasting blood sugar level, we get the sensation that we are “starving”. That’s the sensation you feel when you just want a cookie or French fries, or cake, or bread SOOO bad. And YOU WANT IT NOW! Some people get very cranky, and others are just not as happy as they would like to be.
So why is it, that when you feel that intense hunger craving, you don’t FEEL like higher protein or higher fat foods like turkey or chicken or eggs or nuts will do the trick? Why don’t vegetables sound appetizing at all?
The reason is because those foods don’t raise your blood sugar NEARLY AS QUICKLY. However, they will raise your blood sugar, you just have to give them a little more time. They also don’t tend to give you that same sense of instant gratification that you get from devouring that bag of salty chips or that can of soda. But you won’t have the sense of regret later on, and you’ll feel just fine and might even wonder why your body was in such a frenzy about being so hungry.
So now what? What am I supposed to do about this?
How to Test Your Blood Glucose Levels
There’s a really simple way to make this all become real and tangible for you, and you don’t even have to take my word on all this because you can try it out for yourself very inexpensively. I did this a couple years ago, and I strongly urge you to try it.
1) Buy a glucose meter – They cost about $15 and you can usually find a rebate that will make it free.
2) Buy some glucose test strips. The cheapest I found them was about $25 for 50 strips. (Make sure the test strips are compatible with the glucose meter; different meters take different strips.)
3) Now all you have to do is test your blood sugar at some key times.
The kit will include instructions but basically you: 1)Wash your hands. 2)Put a test strip in the machine. 3)Prick your finger. 4)Squeeze your finger and place the drop of blood to the end of the test strip.
You first want to establish your fasting blood glucose level. You can do this by fasting overnight for 12 hours and checking in the morning. I would suggest doing this a few times.
I also tested several times during those moments that I felt like I had to have cookies NOW (my blood sugar had always dropped below fasting levels at these times, in the range of about 75-80 ng/dl). I also tested after different kinds of meals such as a very large meal or a carb heavy meal or a protein and high fiber meal. With a few meals, I would test every 15 minutes after eating to see how quickly my blood sugar came back down.
The other side of this is that you don’t want your blood sugar levels going above 130 mg/dl after eating. It may go above that when eating a very large meal or a very carbohydrate heavy meal, especially with sweet sugary foods and drinks. The problem this creates is that it is damaging to your body to have “high” amounts of glucose in your blood so your body will secrete a large amount of insulin from your pancreas to bring those levels down as quickly as possible since this is somewhat of an emergency situation. The large amount of insulin will tend to bring a person’s blood glucose levels below their fasting level which will again create the intense carb craving, hunger feeling. This is the yo-yo effect that a person can easily get into. It can be tough to get off that train.
When we eat the right foods and don’t go too long between eating, we can keep our blood glucose levels between our fasting amount and about 130 ng/dl, and our body releases steady, well-controlled amounts of insulin, keeping us from feeling those intense hunger pains. You’ll still get hungry, but it won’t be the same kind of emotional, crazy, uncontrollable hunger. Oh, and by the way, insulin is the major hormone that signals your body to store energy, aka FAT. This is why fat doesn’t make you fat, CARBS DO.
An interesting note: My wife was doing a low-carb, ketogenic diet (less than about 30 carbs/day) a few years ago, which will ideally keep a person teetering right around their fasting blood sugar level. It sounds extreme, and it kind of is, but if you don’t drop under your fasting blood sugar level, you won’t get those extreme hunger sensations. There has been speculation that diet soda can still influence insulin and blood sugar even though there is no sugar in it. I’m not sure if this has been proven or debunked by research yet. From my wife’s experience, if she drank diet soda, it would create enough of an insulin response to drop her blood sugar under fasting levels, and she would get those intense hunger pains. It’s possible that it’s not an insulin response but potentially a cortisol/glucocorticoid or some other hormone/chemical response that could cause this.
MSG (notoriously found in Chinese food but also in processed beef jerky) has been said to drop your blood sugar as well. My wife found that eating beef jerky with MSG had a similar effect as the diet soda in that it would drop her blood sugar just under fasting levels, giving her intense hunger.
So after doing all this, what does this really change? Is this going to keep me from getting hungry?
Eat Consciously
I can tell you what this knowledge does for me. It helps me to eat more consciously. I’m not as swayed by the emotions and pain of my hunger. I know physiologically what is going on, and I’m not going to let the whims of my emotional hunger run the show. I know that I’m not starving and that I have enough reserves that when I do drop under fasting blood glucose levels, it isn’t going to kill me. (It sounds silly to say, but it helps to remind yourself.) I know that if I can wait a little bit, I can get something healthy and nutritious that will satisfy and make the sensation go away, and I can forget about the whole situation without having the regret that I am sabotaging my health or fitness goals or goals to look better. It helps to have some healthy options prepared ahead of time. This is one of the keys to making good dietary decisions. Another key is to not keep tempting junk food in your house. If it’s not there, you can’t eat it in a weak moment. And you will have weak moments.
One other tip that I use in eating consciously is to think about whether you really WANT to eat this particular food/snack/dessert or if you’re just eating it because you are bored or because it’s going to give you very temporary pleasure. How many times have you eaten something that wasn’t even that good just to regret it later? What’s the point in eating that thing if you’re going to feel like that? On the other hand, if it’s a special treat or something you really like, and later on you would regret not having eaten it, THEN EAT IT. Enjoy your life. In most cases, there is no need to become obsessive. Just think about what you’re eating, and be conscious and responsible in your decisions.
After testing your blood sugar over the course of a few weeks, 50-100 times, you should have a much better understanding of how your hunger is associated with your cravings, and you won’t really need to test. You’ll be able to know that your blood sugar has dropped below fasting by how you feel.
If you do find that you get that super-hungry feeling when your blood sugar is in the mid to upper 90’s, it would be wise and prudent of you to get that under control now because you are headed in the diabetic direction, something that will affect nearly every cell in your body and prematurely degenerate your tissues, causing inflammation that can result in cognitive decline, vision decline, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, etc. Of course, if your resting blood sugar is still higher than that, the situation is even more advanced.
If you’re looking to make a change in your diet, lose weight, and get healthy…
Here are two great sources to get you started
- The Deflaming Guidelines: How to Reduce Inflammation with Diet and Supplements.
- What is the Paleo Diet?
Sources:
(1) http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/prevention/pre-diabetes/pre-diabetes-faqs.html
