Why is it that when you are hungry and you drink a lot of water, you never actually feel “full”?
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So you are hungry that means your body is asking for food, not for water.
Water also doesn’t have any nutrients to fulfill your “hunger” needs.
Satiety, the technical name for feeling full or otherwise without need to eat, doesn’t just involve the amount of content in your stomach. There are various hormones and chemicals that regulate it such as serotonin and orexin, and the body can release these in response to blood sugar, sensing nutrition entering the digestive system, or because of other responses like anxiety, nausea, etc.
Feeling anxious often makes you feel less hungry because the body is effectively deciding there are more important issues than eating right now.
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Your body is asking for protiens, fibers, sugars and fats.
Water has none of these, and passes through the stomach very quickly as there’s nothing to proccess.
You can drink a lot of water to the point of being feeling bloated but thats not full in terms of how your body percieves it.
If I may take the opportunity to add on, if you do still feel very hungry all the time after drinking water and eating a substantial meal it could be a sign of diabetes, as even though your body is recieving the products and hydration it needs it struggles to extract and supply them so your muscles and tissues keep sending signals.
It totally works if you swallow air as well. I’ve used this trick when I can’t sleep because I’m hungry.
Other commenters are correct in that hunger is triggered by a desire for carbs, protein, and fat, but there are specific cells in your stomach designed to quench hunger and provide reward (dopamine) upon ingestion of food. These cells detect how ‘stretched’ your stomach is by its contents (food, liquid, etc). When ‘stretched’ by normal food, they trigger temporary satiety (the feeling of being full) until the stomach is cleared, at which point you’re absorbing glucose into the blood from the intestines, a separate mechanism used to trigger satiety.
Compare this to when your stomach is ‘stretched’ by only water. You achieve temporary satiety from the period of time during which the water is stretching your stomach (15-30 minutes, it is absorbed through the stomach walls) but achieve no long-term satiety as your intestines absorb no nutritional content.
So your stomach produces a hormone called Ghrelin, this hormone tells your brain that is has nothing of substance in it and so needs to be fed.
Aka you get hungry.
A little further down the road in the small intestine there is another hormone that is produced once the food passes through it. When this hormone is produced it says to the brain, I got food so thanks! No longer hungry.
Now this process takes quitte some time in reality so when you hear of people getting a Bypass they do exactly that. They create a bypass that makes food go directly to the small intestine thus giving you an almost instant feeling of being full.
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