Ask not...What do I feel like eating
It’s 12pm and you are away from home. It’s obviously lunchtime, and you ask yourself the same question that might be all too familiar…”What do I feel like eating”.
There’s almost no way to separate eating from stimulating the reward centers of your brain. Making decisions about what you’ll eat satisfies both your emotion as well as the caloric needs to keep your body functioning for the tasks of the day. You can sustain your body’s nutritional needs by eating what is healthy and unprocessed, foods that are ‘good’ for you etcetera. We know this to be fact, because we’ve seen people changed by this healthy action, and our healthcare providers recommend it constantly. But we don’t always live by facts do we?
By noon, our bodies have usually consumed the calories from breakfast, and our brain is registering an impulse that tells you that says you won’t be happy if you don’t get some food soon. You know from past experiences of skipping meals that you become less functional and less tolerant of stressful moments when you are under nourished. So the conclusion is...eat! Perhaps with some sort of urgency because you are getting “hangry”...so hungry that you are tense and impatient with others. Sound familiar? I know it very well, unfortunately.
If you find yourself asking “What do I feel like eating?” then you might be eating TOO LATE in the day as the hunger impulse has been processed by the brain for some time, and now the need-for-reward centers are overstimulated. The brain is stimulating a natural emotion for you to eat, which is a good thing. Our tendency to react by asking what we want to eat based on our emotion generally leads to impulsive behaviors in eating patterns. Your emotions might lead you to something immediately satisfying like high sugar or carbohydrate food sources which the body digests and utilizes MUCH faster than protein or fat sources. Impulsive eating patterns are generally unhealthy because of the need to quickly balance out a low blood sugar situation in which the common solution is to eat a carbohydrate source...often in abundance. This leads to subsequent carbohydrate conversion into fat and the storage of additional fats and proteins you consumed as unused energy in the form of more stored fats in your body. This metabolic process is also accompanied by hormonal stress to the pancreas, the organ responsible for stabilizing blood sugar by producing insulin and glucagon.
Getting ‘hangry’ too often causes our pancreas to stress, and our emotions to fluctuate sharply. It also triggers the need to satisfy a hunger phenomenon that is often interpreted as a distressing emotion that needs to be soothed. The best scenario is to avoid ‘hangry’ by having a low carbohydrate snack sometime between breakfast and lunch, perhaps one that contains a high protein or naturally occuring fats to stabilize the blood sugar. This will help maintain blood sugar by lunchtime, and hopefully avoids having to ask…”What do I feel like eating?”, with a better lunchtime question…”What does my body need?”
So don’t get hangry...get even, as in stabilizing your blood sugar! We slip from time to time, but the more you understand about hunger patterns, the less likely you are to eat with your emotions!
Dr. Adrian Pujayana has been providing drug-free solutions for health and wellness to adults, athletes, and youth since 2000 through his private practice at Family Chiropractic Center of South Pasadena, a place for strength training and nutrition based health care.
