Tips for controlling hunger pangs

If hunger is sabotaging your weight loss efforts, here are a few suggestions to "tame the tiger".

1. Eat solids over beverages, especially avoiding all those sports drinks, sodas and flavored coffee drinks loaded with calories. While beverages may make you feel full, they quickly go through the system and don’t maintain that feeling for long. Eating solid food that includes protein, carbohydrate, fat and fiber will take longer to digest, leaving you feeling full longer. Studies have shown that eating a whole apple instead of applesauce or apple juice reduced lunch calorie intake by 15%, which can really add up over time.

2. Have a low-calorie appetizer before meals such as a salad or soup. This serves to calm the appetite and the overall result is reduced intake over the course of the meal. However, to achieve this calming effect, soup or salad should be eaten before the meal, not with it, and be aware of the type of soup and the amount of salad dressing used. Broth-type soups have few calories than a denser cream soup, which, while it will calm the appetite, may have the adverse effect on weight loss efforts due to the amount of calories.

3. Eat more fruits and vegetables. Typically, people eat the same volume of food every day. By substituting bulky lower calorie fruits and vegetables for higher calorie, less satisfying items, the total calorie intake for the day is reduced and weight loss occurs. Eat a piece of fruit instead of chugging a soda or another cup of triple shot mocha latte. The recommendation is to include 9 servings (1/2 cup is a serving) of fruits and vegetables in the diet every day.

4. Fill up on fiber. Fiber impacts the feeling of hunger in several ways: 1) it displaces calories and nutrients in the diet, resulting in lower calorie intake and weight loss, 2) foods higher in fiber require more chewing, which causes increased production of saliva and stomach juices, which in turn fill up the stomach and increase the feeling of fullness and 3) fiber in the food mix reduces absorption in the small intestine. Studies show that increasing fiber in the diet by 14 grams per day resulted in a 10% decrease in energy intake even while not intentionally reducing calorie intake. Once again, include a piece of fruit or 1/2 cup of berries.

Taming the Tiger Called "Hunger"

In these times of an obesity epidemic in America, it is important to understand how "hunger pangs" impact our efforts to lose weight. Those hunger pangs are the reason we eat and the secret to long-term weight loss and weight maintenance is learning how to tame the tiger called "Hunger".


Back in the days of the cavemen (and women), hunger is what drove them to hunt for food, a very important survival mechanism. We don't have that concern today - hunting for our food. All we have to do is wander down the isles of the local grocery store and pick out those foods that appeal to us on any particular day. But that doesn't change the fact that our "tiger" (hunger) makes it difficult to stay true to our weight loss goals.

The bottom line is, no matter what any diet plan tries to tell you - to lose weight, you have to eat fewer calories than your body requires. This results in your body burning fat for the calories, or energy, it needs to do your daily activities of life, and you lose weight. Hunger, that "growling" you feel in your stomach, is defined as a strong desire or need for food. I won't go into the physiological details of hunger pangs, but basically they are contractions in the stomach and typically may begin a couple of hours after eating. The reason the body has these hunger pangs is because it wants to maintain energy balance - keep the same number of calories coming in as the body is using. Thus hunger drives the person to seek out food to assure survival. There is no way to trick the body into thinking it isn't hungry. The challenge is to develop eating habits that keeps the body satisfied.

Next post: more on "taming the tiger" - or controlling those hunger pangs.