Active Low-Carber Forums - View Single Post - Hunger overrides sense of fullness after weight loss

Quote:

Originally Posted by M Levac

There's a difference between calorie restriction and fasting. After a time, hunger disappears during fasting. This also makes sense from the point of view of survival. If we're neurotic, it's hard to focus on hunting for food, which could be somewhat a complex task.

There's also an important aspect of calorie restriction - disruption of those hormones. I imagine the cause of this disruption is what we eat, because it doesn't happen with a fast where we eat nothing.

The point is if there's disruption because of what we eat, and this disruption is more obvious merely because we don't eat enough, then there's still disruption when we do eat enough of whatever we do eat. So when we eat nothing, we remove the disruptor. We still don't know what the disruptor is, but at least we know there is one. A process of elimination should help us find it.

Thanks for bringing this up - I was going to mention it, because a friend whose mother grew up during the Great Depression, and her family was so poor that they often had no food at all for several days always told my friend that not having anything to eat wasn't so bad after the first couple of days.

I'm not suggesting anyone fast that long of course.

I've seen entirely too many people go on extreme calorie restricted diets - 500-800 cals, and it always ends up the same - they can white knuckle their way through it for a few weeks, and if they only needed to lose 10-15 lbs, maybe even stick to it long enough to lose the weight they wanted to lose, but as soon as they go off the diet, they go crazy eating all the things they fantasized about while dieting... and of course end up regaining the weight in record time. I never thought of it as a neurosis, but that's essentially what it is, because while dieting their thoughts are consumed with all the foods they wish they could have.