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The 3 whys of weight loss Part 2/2
Homeostatic Hunger
See Part 1/2 of this discussion.
The Satiety Hormones
There’s a popular opinion that humans are eating machines, designed to eat everything in front of us, like The Blob from that old horror movie, and now that food is so easily available, we eat too much and therefore become obese. If you don’t think too hard, it seems plausible. But like a rotting watermelon, once you get past the surface, it starts to smell really, really bad.
We stop eating when we are full. The human body has multiple overlapping powerful satiety mechanisms that tell us to stop eating. Think about a time you’ve eaten just way, way too much food at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Stuffed to the gills, now your friend says ‘Hey, just eat two more pork chops, otherwise we’ll get charged for them’. The very thought nauseates you. Yet these are the very same pork chops that you hungrily ate just minutes ago.
Eating one hamburger is delicious. Eating 20 hamburgers is near impossible. Why? It’s the same hamburger. It is very hard to keep eating once you’re full because of the powerful satiety hormones that our body produces, including:
1. Incretins (GLP-1, GIP)
