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Manage Your Hunger–Not Your Calories 💡
Three articles to help you see the effects of food and food products.
I abandoned restrictive eating practices seventeen years ago, which includes every diet you can think of, but my approach went even deeper. I stopped thinking of food in terms of calories. I not only didn't count them, but they ceased to matter.
I cleared the deck, so to speak.
Food is an experience, not a math problem. I wanted my hunger to be my guide for when to eat and when to stop. Consider how radical an idea that is, even today. Dieting supposes your hunger is broken. It's the fundamental tenet of food suppression schemes because we're so willing to blame ourselves.
I created the Hunger Practice to help you reconnect with a good thing–your hunger.
The Reads 🍎
- This is an interesting piece about how highly and ultra-processed foods influence your brain chemistry. Yet another reason to quit thinking of food as calories eaten/calories burned. What's most important in your food environment is spotting 'junk' food and finding new ways to celebrate or self-soothe.
How Junk Food Really Affects Your Brain
One day of overindulgence might not be so bad, but what if that game is the day before Independence Day? Then there are those back-to-back family picnics, barbecues, and long summer nights filled with ice cream, chips, and other high-caloric treats. Still, no harm done if it’s just for a few days, right?
Wrong. According to a recently published study in Nature Metabolism [1], even a short-term binge on high-caloric foods can cause significant changes in brain activity. The type of changes that persist even after returning to a normal diet. Worse yet, these changes resemble patterns seen in people with obesity, even though the participants in this study didn’t gain weight. A junk-food binge can affect your brain long before it shows up on your waistline.
2. I rarely consume fake sugars. You can call this part two of abandoning calories as a guiding principle. They act on you to stimulate hunger, and in obese individuals, they can raise blood sugar like real sugar.
If that isn't enough, they are most often found in health-washed, overly processed foods, such as protein bars, low-calorie yogurt, and 'diet' sodas.
Artificial Sweeteners Trick Your Brain into Eating Too Much
In a randomized experiment, researchers split 75 people (men and women whose weight ranged from healthy to obese) into three groups and had them drink plain water, a sugar-sweetened drink, or a drink sweetened with sucralose, a manufactured product that substitutes atoms of chlorine for other atoms in sugar molecules, making them 600 times sweeter. Before and after the drinks, they did brain scans, drew blood and asked the participants about their hunger level. The experiments were repeated on three different days, so each participant tested each drink type.
The main finding: When people consumed sucralose, they felt hungrier afterward compared to those who had the other drinks. The brain scans explain why.
3. I've read this piece 2-3 times and each time took something of value. It solidified why my approach works. It removes the obstacle of engaging with misapplied scientific theories. You can't fix a problem with the wrong tool.
The Calorie Myth
Calorie counting has become a religion in Western countries — but we’re getting it all wrong
On the surface, calories seem straightforward. You use them to measure how much fuel you put in your body and how much energy you use when you walk, run, or even just sit on the couch breathing. If you pump your body full of calories and leave it idle, all that extra fuel sloshes around inside you. It doesn’t get used and instead, it becomes the fat that pads your skin and engulfs your organs.
This is more or less the central myth of Western diet. The word “myth” here doesn’t necessarily mean that calories aren’t real. It just means that calories are a story around which we organize our Western beliefs and values — just like ancient societies that had their own culture-shaping myths about why it rained and which spiritual beings ran the show.
But here’s the problem: If you take even a moment to learn about how the calorie was invented, how calories are measured, or what they actually represent, the whole story starts to unravel — fast.
4. My friend Kristen Zeigler of Minima Home Organizing was featured on the wildly popular The Minimalists podcast, discussing kitchen clutter and gave COOK! a shoutout, as well as sharing some of my kitchen wisdom.
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Yours in joyful eating and living,
Rebecca ✌️
