Half truths and smarmy marketing

Eat till you are xx percent full is the single most pointless advice one can give you. 

Your stomach is a balloon. A muscular balloon that stretches as you fill it with food or water. And shrinks as it empties. Your brain tracks this and regulates appetite. Only problem is all the other stimulus competing convincing you to eat again. 

Content from chocolate companies, self help gurus and even doctors flirts aggressively with self-help content. Its not uncommon to hear things like:

* Listen to your body
* Stop eating when you’re full
* Love yourself as you are
* Be kind to yourself 

Most advice is along those lines. I have a bone to pick with this specific bit of advice: ‘Listen to your body and stop eating when you’re full’. 

It’s hard enough to have a conversation with a fellow human being let alone jumping in on a chemical conversation that involves the brain, gut, endocrine system, emotions (also brain), adipose tissue (energy storage) and your environment. 

Then there’s candy bars and chocolate companies pretending to be the purveyors of health food and protein bars. They’re out to convince us that ingredients make the difference. It wasn’t the calorie density of the indulgence that makes it problematic. 

Most of us live in environments that are manipulated with foods engineered to look better, taste better, go down smoother and leave us wanting more ASAP. 

It requires many many calories per bite to produce that effect. More calories than is productive for most of us. 

Even simple foods like ghee and butter paired with carbohydrates and salt that are not a result of complex engineering can be a rollercoaster for our brain and gut.

Look at the few pictures in the image below. We don’t want you to fully understand what’s happening. I am supposed to be helping people with this stuff and I would be lying if I said I fully understood what’s happening. All I can tell you is hunger and biological urge to eat is not simply a case of ‘Stomach grumble, brain say I need to eat”. 

TAKEAWAY

Hunger is an incredibly complicated song and dance that is not determined solely by how well nourished or well fed you are. The complex problem requires some restraint, thought and planning. All of those require motivation. It requires us to redirect time and energy. Your mind will want to spend that finite attention on more entertaining fare. 

All of this will need you to pause and sometimes tell that voice in your head, ‘I don’t trust you’.