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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EL15: “Lite” and “sugar free” stuff contains chemicals that actually turn off the body’s natural “I’m full” hormones. You keep eating.
For millions of years, starvation has been a real risk, and much more lethal than obesity. We can see that a lot of human ancestors experienced starvation because we can see that their teeth often stopped growing for long periods during their adolescence. This is a sign of severe malnutrition.
Food tends to come and go in nature – sometimes there is plenty, and other times there isn’t a reliable supply of food for months or even years. If you don’t eat the excess, someone or something else will, and you lose access to those calories, and you’ll be at higher risk of starving later than if you’d eaten more than you needed at the time.
Food is also very hard to preserve if you don’t have freezers and preservatives. But once it’s fat stored in your body, you can keep those calories without needing to worry about mould or rats or other people stealing them. You can also use those fat stores to feed your children (by breastfeeding). If something other than your child is taking your fat supply, you have a bigger problem – something else is eating you.
To a caveman’s body, fat = emergency supplies. The body gets hungry and looks for new food rather than eat the fat for the same reason a man with three months’ emergency food in his cabin that might get snowed in buys groceries when he visits the cabin. Emergency supplies are for when there is no other food, not for a snack.
Fat is emergency rations. There’s no point in using up the emergency supply before eating the food in front of us just for the food to rot and being unable to find more.
Before modern times, food scarcity was an inevitability, so our bodies evolved to deal with it. That means eating what we have available and storing the extra as fat to be used for future starvation.
Because once a trait is acquired (hunger in response to abdominal void) it is not lost upon the acquisition of a new trait (fat storage).
The short answer is blood sugar. as soon as it goes down, our body first puts on hunger, and only if no food is available for quite a long time, it starts burning fat
Because you eat too much sugar, your pancreas dumps all its insulin into your bloodstream, your blood sugar crashes, and your grelin hormones shoots up to make you hungry to keep you from dying of low blood sugar.
For millions of years, starvation has been a real risk, and much more lethal than obesity. We can see that a lot of human ancestors experienced starvation because we can see that their teeth often stopped growing for long periods during their adolescence. This is a sign of severe malnutrition.
Food tends to come and go in nature – sometimes there is plenty, and other times there isn’t a reliable supply of food for months or even years. If you don’t eat the excess, someone or something else will, and you lose access to those calories, and you’ll be at higher risk of starving later than if you’d eaten more than you needed at the time.
Food is also very hard to preserve if you don’t have freezers and preservatives. But once it’s fat stored in your body, you can keep those calories without needing to worry about mould or rats or other people stealing them. You can also use those fat stores to feed your children (by breastfeeding). If something other than your child is taking your fat supply, you have a bigger problem – something else is eating you.
If you want to tap into your Emergency Supplies. Cut out all carbohydrates and follow a keto diet. With no carbs as an energy source, your body reverts to fat. On this diet you will also feel a lot less hunger.
EL15: “Lite” and “sugar free” stuff contains chemicals that actually turn off the body’s natural “I’m full” hormones. You keep eating.
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