Head Hunger or Body Hunger?
It’s not always easy to tell the difference between when we are hunger or when we crave food or snacks, but with a little insight it’s possible. You’ll find many times however, our minds trick us into thinking it’s time to eat, when in fact it’s a craving and not hunger at all.
The Power of Fasting
One effective way to differentiate between hunger and cravings is through fasting. Fasting helps you gain control over your appetite and, consequently, your waistline. Many people who have successfully lost weight and maintained it credit fasting as a key strategy. By practicing intermittent fasting and completing a few fasts, most people naturally learn to distinguish between hunger and cravings, much like how you develop a feel for driving over time.
Body Hunger vs. Head Hunger
To figure out whether it’s truly time to eat, you can learn to tell the difference between “body hunger” and “head hunger.” Body hunger is your body’s genuine need for nourishment, while head hunger is driven by mental or emotional desires.
When we overeat, it’s often because there’s a disconnect between our mind and body. Emotions or external stimuli, like the sight or smell of food, can overpower the body’s actual needs. This is why it’s crucial to pay attention to your body’s signals.
Mindful Eating
Mindful eating is a powerful tool in recognizing true hunger. Simply pausing and considering whether you’re actually hungry before eating can make a big difference. Whether it’s eating when you’re not hungry or continuing to eat even after you’re full, ignoring your body’s cues can lead to overeating. This could happen consciously, where you’re aware but don’t care, or unconsciously, where you’re mindlessly munching without realizing it.
By becoming more attuned to your body’s needs and practicing mindful eating, you can make better choices that align with your health goals.
Let me show you a trick I used to teach patients when it came to understanding hunger vs cravings. It’s called fasting, and it works really well. Fasting is the best way to control our appetite, and consequently waistline. Just ask anybody who has lost weight – and managed to keep it off for good. Likely from fasting.
You’ll find it a lot easier to implement a reduction of food intake, aka fasting, if you figure out the difference between hunger and craving. I’ve found most patients learn the difference between hunger and cravings by default once they are familiar with intermittent fasting, and have completed one or several fasts. Like driving your car, it’s something you get a feel for over time.
To help us figure out if it’s time to eat, we can learn to tell the difference between our body’s need for food, “body-hunger”, and a mental desire, also known as “head hunger.”
When we eat too much, there’s likely a disconnect between our mind and our body. Our feelings or emotions can and often will take over, leaving our body with little say in the matter. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to what our body wants. This can be hard to do when tasty, nice smelling and highly-processed foods and drinks seem to be all around us, or when we’re busy working, worried, tired, out with friends, or just eating mindlessly or emotionally in front of some screen.
But just pausing and thinking about what we are going to eat before we eat it is a very good start. Whether we eat when we are not hungry, or keep eating even though we are full, we are ignoring our body’s cues that it either doesn’t need food or it’s time to stop eating. This could be done consciously (you are fully aware but don’t care) or unconsciously (mindless munching).
Head-Driven and Body-Driven Cravings
There are essentially two ways we eat, we eat when we are hungry, or we eat for other reasons like craving or just wanting food. Let’s talk more about our food desires, are they driven by real hunger, a physiological need for food, or do we just want food for the sake of craving it?
To eat more in a way that meets our body’s needs, it can help to start paying attention to the things that make us eat. Hunger comes from inside our digestive system. We feel it, like a grumbling or rumbling empty-stomach feeling, or low blood sugar symptoms that many experience, like the afternoon “slump” or even feeling “hangry”, irritated, sometimes weak or even shaky. Low blood sugar is more a physical experience, but it can affect our emotions and even our cognitive function as well, regardless if we are diabetic or not.
Cravings, on the other hand, can come from either inside or outside the gut. They could be physiological, like the body wanting a certain food or nutrient due to a deficiency, although this is rare, or they could be psychological, like an emotional trigger based on our mood at the time, this is more common. A study has found that when people crave company, the same part of their brain lights up as when they crave food. (Tomova 2020)
A recent study found clinically significant low blood sugar (hypoglycaemia) results in acute declines in important aspects of cognitive function. The level of decline is rather consistent in adults with or without diabetes, and is largely independent of clinical factors, including the person’s age, and level of their awareness of hypoglycaemia. (Verhulst 2022)
Our mood can come from within due to our thoughts or from outside sources, triggered by a stressful situation, often involving another person. People seem to be our biggest source of stress, have you noticed? Studies have found that stress may increase motivation for food rewards, indicating that high food cravings may contribute to stress-related weight gain. (Chao 2015)
Your Taste For Sugar, Salt, And Fatty Snacks Will Go
I’ve noted in the clinic that once patients start to eat mainly fresh whole foods, their cravings for sugary, fatty, or salty snacks diminish, eventually disappearing altogether. There was an initial stage however that lasted a few weeks when certain food cravings would re-surface from time to time.
But with a focus on healthier eating incorporating intermittent fasting, these cravings and desires eventually disappeared.
A study found while short-term food deprivation may reduce our food cravings temporarily, longer term food restrictions like fasting appear to reduce our food cravings for the longer term, suggesting that food deprivation can help get rid of our conditioned food craving responses. (Meule 2020)
Food cravings therefore can be driven physically (body-driven) or psychologically (head-driven).
Some of the most common mental or emotional reasons we eat include:
Let’s now briefly look at some of the key differences between being hungry, and craving food.
Signs and Symptoms Of Hunger
Signs and Symptoms Of Cravings
What If You And Not Hungry?
You might think this is crazy, but some people have forgotten what it is like to feel hungry. Like an old volcano, their stomach hasn’t rumbled in years. If someone doesn’t feel physically hungry, it can be very helpful to learn how to tell the difference between hunger (the body’s actual need for food) and psychological hunger (a craving or desire for food).
Sometimes this can happen after years of strict dieting, or jumping from one diet to another, I’ve seen this happen so many times in our clinic I gave up counting. Sometimes certain health problems, some pharmaceutical drugs, including getting older can make you less hungry or make you lose your appetite.
I’ve found that some people are “scared” of being hungry, so they eat so often during the day that they never get hungry. They fear stomach rumbling, or a sensation of “feeling hollow” inside, almost as if it were some kind of illness. That’s literally like saying sneezing is an illness.
Giving our body a chance to tell us when it’s hungry by not eating as often (for example, no more than a few times a day) can help you start paying attention to those signals because you’re not eating as often. This gives our digestive system more time to process and deal with the meals or snacks we’ve consumed.
Being able to tell the difference between urges to eat that come from your body, and urges that come from your mind, can help us figure out when it’s appropriate to eat and when it’s not, instead of just giving in to the urge to eat without thinking about it first.
If someone is always thinking about food and overeating every day, they may need more in-depth therapy to deal with any fears or unmet needs that are at the root of the problem. Once we can tune into real hunger, our cravings will feel very different from real hunger. This can be a very powerful and liberating experience for many. It can in fact be one of those light-bulb moments for some.
If you are ready, let’s now explore several different intermittent fasting programs, some are more challenging than others.
Eric Bakker N.D.
Greetings! I am a naturopathic physician from New Zealand. Although I’ve retired from clinical practice since 2019, I remain passionate about helping people improve their lives. You’ll find I’m active online with a focus on natural health and wellbeing education through my Facebook page and YouTube channel, including this website.
