Getting reacquainted: Hunger

Last week, it dawned on me on my monthly weigh in that I have regained half the weight that I lost over the past 3 years. On the other hand, I have maintained half my weight loss, but the trend is moving in one direction - up - and it is a call to action.

There is an opinion piece in last Sunday's NY Times that felt more less like opinion and more like someone who is also struggling with the same issues, and is also disappointed that the culture and the science still hasn't quite caught up with whats making us and keeping us fat.

In a nutshell, the human body's hunger-drive has shown it's ability to override even the strongest-willed, rationality-lovingest person's desire to eat what they believe to be a moderate, weight-controlling, healthy diet...over time, on the day-to-day, boots-on-the-ground level. When the human body is called upon to lose weight and spend more calories it takes in to access fat storage,  the body kicks over into a mode that ha been developed over millions of years to guarantee the survival of the human race: "starvation mode". The science has been done, and it looks grim.

When the period of imposed starvation ended, the subjects were allowed to “refeed.” At first they were allowed to eat more calories, but restricted as to how much. A subset under continued observation was then allowed to eat to satiety, which was surprisingly hard to achieve. The men consumed prodigious amounts of food, up to 10,000 calories a day. They regained weight and fat with remarkable rapidity. After 20 weeks of recovery, they averaged 50 percent more body fat than they had when it began — “post-starvation obesity,” the researchers called it.

"Post-starvation obesity" is a concept that gives me chills. Is this where my monthly-weigh-in trend line is heading? For all this thought and effort, I'm going to end up fatter than I started, despite radically altering the quality of what I eat and how much of it?

I know what happened when the trend line evened out then started going up. I started getting hungrier. I took that as a signal that my body was ready for more food...but really it was a signal that it was worried that it was losing too much weight and wanted me to spend more time on the plains hunting for meat or baking bread or something. Hunger is literally like the addiction a junkie or cigarette smoker feels -- when you don't have it, all you can think about is getting it, and you don't feel right until you do.

That advice implies that the ensuing hunger will be an easily bearable burden (no depression, lethargy, irritability — no tantrums, please!). And bearable not just for 24 weeks, but a lifetime. The Minnesota experiment tells us that when semi-starvation ends, the refeeding period will not end well.

"Starvation", i.e. making yourself lose weight, increases hunger until a tipping point is crossed where the hunger will cause a person to eat enough to get them heavier than where the started...(bolding mine)

That humans or any other organism will lose weight if starved sufficiently has never been news. The trick, if such a thing exists, is finding a way to do it without hunger so weight loss can be sustained indefinitely. A selling point for carbohydrate-restricted diets has always been that you can eat to satiety; counting calories is unnecessary, so long as carbohydrates are mostly avoided.
But this advice raises a pair of obvious questions, or at least it should: If people on low-carb diets eat less (the conventional explanation for any loss of fat that ensues), why aren’t they hungry? Where’s the semi-starvation neurosis? And if they don’t eat less, why do they lose weight? It implies a mechanism of weight loss other than caloric deprivation and suggests that the carbohydrates and fats consumed make a difference.

It's easy to lose weight when you're not hungry all the time. It interferes with the basics of life and relationships when you are.

Questions like these about the relationship between calories, macronutrients and hunger have haunted nutrition and obesity research since the late 1940s. But rarely are they asked. We believe so implicitly in the rationale of eat less, move more, that we (at least those of us who are lean) will implicitly fault the obese for their failures to sustain a calorie-restricted regimen, without ever apparently asking ourselves whether we could sustain it either. I have a colleague who spent his research career studying hunger. Asking people to eat less, he says, is like asking them to breathe less. It sounds reasonable, so long as you don’t expect them to keep it up for long. 

Fighting hunger and the urge to eat is an innate drive like breathing, sex (hello, Josh Duggar!) and the need to be social. It's easy to be puritanical and dismiss all fatties as people of fallen morals who chose to be fat, but despite that being the American Way for many, it's just plain wrong and harmful. "No pain, no gain"? Fuck you. The system is rigged. You must understand the system then change it or work around it, not just grit your teeth and endure endless pain/hunger. The nonsense being spewed by corporations like Coke to protect their profits by encouraging us to exercise more and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain is essentially the definition of evil.

Perhaps all calories aren't equal, but the science isn't in yet, though anecdotal evidence suggests it's so. A person will feel radically different at the end of the day if they are 2500 calories of fresh fruit, vegetables and fatty protein as opposed to if they eat 2500 calories of just coca cola and hershey bars.

I crossed the tipping point about a year and a half ago when my starvation-mode kicked in and my hunger caused me to eat more despite my better judgement. I need to find a middle ground where I'm eating less but not getting too hungry. So here is some late summer resolutions:

• Sugar. We've been here before. No more sweets during the week except socially.
• New category in the food journal below: all evening snacks after dinner is now a "hunger snack", and needs to be rated on a scale of 1-10. One, being nauseous and the last thing I want is food, 10 being blinded by food lust.
• Count calories during the week a little more precisely.
• Limit weekday calories to 2,600, assuming it does not wake the hunger beast.

The Army of Overconsumption has a big weapon (our own instincts) and tremendous allies (capitalism that feeds on our instincts). The only real weapon I have in fighting my physiological imperative to get fat and a culture driven by profit  is mindfulness. This blog and journal is a mindfulness-bomb that makes me stay awake, despite the numbing effect of hunger and the desire just to lie down and eat a big bag of cheesy poofs.

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WEEKLY AVERAGE: 2488

With my injury further receding and my work flow allowing me time, I took two big bike rides during the week, and tracked my calorie consumption/expenditure closely those days. The fact that the budget came in so low those days gives me pause, but my hunger was revved up the next mornings, giving credence to the numbers.

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MONDAY COUNT: 2700

SLEPT: 9:30am-6am, 8.5 hrs

AM SNACK: 6:15 am, iced green tea

BREAKFAST 1: 9am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 11:30am, Fage yogurt with honey, vanilla, almonds, 450 cal

LUNCH: 2pm, falafel, chicken soup, pickles, momma salad, 620 cal

PM SNACK: 4pm, cheezits, 210 cal

DINNER: 6:45pm, mahi mahi,  asparagus, poppa salad with dressing, 650 cal

EVENING SNACK: 7:15pm, popcorn, +/- 400 cal

HUNGER SNACK: 8pm, kind bar, 210 cal, 8/10
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BIKE CREDIT: 1550 cal
TUESDAY COUNT: 2285

SLEPT: 9pm-6am, 9hrs

AM SNACK: 6:15 am, iced green tea

BREAKFAST: 8:45am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 9:45am, beef patty, 400 cal

BIKE SNACK 1: 11:30am, homemade granola bar, 425 cal

BIKE SNACK 2: 1:15am, homemade granola bar, 425 cal

BIKE SNACK 3: 2:45, cheese doodles, 525 cal

PM SNACK: 4pm watermelon, 310 cal

PM SNACK: 5pm, momma salad, cheezits, 310 cal

DINNER: 7pm, French Bread pizzas, poppa salad with dressing, 1080 cal

HUNGER SNACK: 7:30pm, Kind bar, 200 cal, 7/10
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WEDNESDAY COUNT: 2895

SLEPT: 10pm - 5:30am, 7.5 hrs

AM SNACK: 5:45am, iced green tea

 BREAKFAST: 8:30am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: noon, fruit smoothie, 450 cal

LUNCH: 1:45pm, chicken & mushrooms, poppa salad with dressing, 830 cal

PM SNACK: 3:30pm, momma salad, cheezits, 310 cal

DINNER: 8pm, burrito, diet coke, +/- 925 cal

HUNGER SNACK: 9:15pm, peanut butter crackers, 220 cal, 9/10
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BIKE CREDIT: 2900 
THURSDAY COUNT: 1640

SLEPT: 11pm-4am, 5 hours

AM SNACK: 4:15am, iced green tea

BREAKFAST: 4:30am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BIKE FOOD: 6:30am-3pm, 3 homemade granola bars, 1 bag of Fritos, 3 bottles of gatorade, 1 packet of cupcakes, burger with onion rings & diet coke, 3180 cal

DINNER: 6pm, vegetarian Ethiopian food, 1 beer, +/-1000 cal

EVENING SNORT: 9pm, pint of cider, +/-200 cal
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FRIDAY COUNT: 2920

SLEPT: 11pm-7:30am, 8.5 hours

AM SNACK: 7:45am, iced green tea

BREAKFAST 1: 9:15am, apple/beet/celery/carrot/cayenne/cucumber/ginger juice, 160 cal

BREAKFAST 2: 11am, steel cut oatmeal, 450 cal

LUNCH: 12:45pm, chicken meatballs, mushroom curry, steamed string beans, 600

PM SNACK: 2:45pm, momma salad, cheezits, 310 cal

PM SNACK: 4:15pm, poppa salad with dressing, 200 cal

DINNER: 5pm, hot dog, fries, cake, +/- 1000 cal

HUNGER SNACK: 7pm, watermelon, 8/10, +/- 200 cal