Talking about diets and weight in terms of psychology is wrong, because the brain doesn’t regulate appetite directly. A true explanation would be phrased in terms of biochemistry.
Is this true for values of not directly that make a practical difference? I find my appetite more strongly driven by the expectation of eating and /or the convenience of eating than by anything else. If I know in advance that eating at a certain time will be inconvenient I won’t feel any need to eat then even if usually would at that time.
I ’m probably a special case with respect to eating for other reasons, but I would expect the capacity of the brain to influence appetite to be universal and only the way it’s used to differ.
Yes. Your brain determines what and how much you eat in the short term, but its choices are a combination of habit and responses to biochemical cues. And habits just repeat decisions that were decided by biochemistry in the first place.
The body has redundant mechanisms for determining when you need to eat, which feel different and interact with psychology differently. Some of them have very unintuitive properties. It is possible to be hungry according to one mechanism, but not according to others, and in these cases people tend to misreport whether they’re hungry.
I can only speak from my own experience because I’m far from an expert, but I don’t know about “short term”. I once spent several weeks eating much less than I normally do (less than half as much) without suffering from hunger/unsatisfied appetite at all, mostly due to inconvenience. The only problem for me was worrying about losing weight or even damaging my health, and those are the only reasons I would rather like to avoid a similar situation in the future.
for me was worrying about losing weight or even damaging my health, and those are the only reasons I would rather like to avoid a similar situation in the future.
There are people who swear by calorie restriction. Sane ones. They have pictures of monkeys without grey hair.
Talking about diets and weight in terms of psychology is wrong, because the brain doesn’t regulate appetite directly. A true explanation would be phrased in terms of biochemistry.
Is this true for values of not directly that make a practical difference? I find my appetite more strongly driven by the expectation of eating and /or the convenience of eating than by anything else. If I know in advance that eating at a certain time will be inconvenient I won’t feel any need to eat then even if usually would at that time.
I ’m probably a special case with respect to eating for other reasons, but I would expect the capacity of the brain to influence appetite to be universal and only the way it’s used to differ.
Yes. Your brain determines what and how much you eat in the short term, but its choices are a combination of habit and responses to biochemical cues. And habits just repeat decisions that were decided by biochemistry in the first place.
The body has redundant mechanisms for determining when you need to eat, which feel different and interact with psychology differently. Some of them have very unintuitive properties. It is possible to be hungry according to one mechanism, but not according to others, and in these cases people tend to misreport whether they’re hungry.
I can only speak from my own experience because I’m far from an expert, but I don’t know about “short term”. I once spent several weeks eating much less than I normally do (less than half as much) without suffering from hunger/unsatisfied appetite at all, mostly due to inconvenience. The only problem for me was worrying about losing weight or even damaging my health, and those are the only reasons I would rather like to avoid a similar situation in the future.
There are people who swear by calorie restriction. Sane ones. They have pictures of monkeys without grey hair.