Basically as the title says. If I’m already obese right, why does my stomach still feel hungry when it has “food at home” aka an excess stored up as fat. Why would it not just utilize the energy that is already there and then when it gets to a certain body fat percentage become hungry again at that point? Why does the body just continue to store up fat to an uncomfortable and unhealthy point and keeps asking for more food when there is already so much available to it?
UPDATE: Thank you everyone for your responses. There are lots of great explanations and viewpoints here 😊.
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In addition to the genetics everyone is talking about, no one has mentioned epigenetics yet – epigenetics are ways that the body changes the way it inteprets your DNA depending on what is going on around it. For instance, if your grandfather lived during a famine, your parent and likely you are going to have different epigenetics that tell your body to behave in different ways – eg continue to build fat resources as a reaction to living in famine. Both your genetics/DNA and your epigenetics control a lot of who you are. Your DNA always stays the same but your epigenetics can change over time depending on what you’re dealing with. It doesnt have to be YOUR lived experience or written in YOUR DNA that determines how your body reacts to something like storing weight.
There is a school of thought that believes what youre saying – that every healthy person has a normal weight range that is correct for their body and that they will naturally settle into. But that has the caveat of “healthy”. You can have physical maladies like malabsorption, insulin resistance, etc that mean your body is STILL hungry because its not getting what it needs despite the amount of food. You can also have mental and emotional reactions, whether thats high stress and increased levels of cortisol or something like an eating disorder where you overeat (your question applies to people with anorexia too – on the flip side its even more illogical that someone starves themselves to the point of death).
DNA, your inherited epigenetics, your own epigenetic scenarios from your life, your physical and mental health all play a very complex role.
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