Weight Control  Infocenter

How Appetite Works

Most of us eat when we are hungry-though few of us experience actual hunger since our eating schedule is dictated more by habit and custom.

Hunger is a complex of unpleasant sensations that build slowly in the stomach, throat and mouth, and head and increase in intensity the longer you go without eating.

Appetite is the not unpleasant desire for a specific food and may have nothing to do with hunger. One may feel full but still have room for dessert.

Satiety, the active mechanism in weight control, is the subconscious, often abrupt signal to stop eating. 

Both hunger and satiety are regulated by the interaction of a number of areas in the brain responding to various stimuli. In most adults this mechanism maintains an ideal weight within a pound or two for 40 years or more. However, overweight people have disconnected this mechanism; their urge to eat is generally governed not by physical need but by external factors-such mental states as boredom or fatigue and such incidental stimuli as remembering that left- over cake in the kitchen.

Extracted from " Eat Better, Live Better: A Common sense Guide to Nutrition and Good Health" by Readers Digest

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