Differentiating Between Hunger, Desire and Cravings
Developing a healthy eating habit requires you to eat according to your own plan, avoid impulse eating, change to healthy snacking, and manage your hunger. However, it’s not always easy to distinguish between hunger, desire and cravings. As humans, we tend to mistake craving for hunger. We might have difficulty distinguishing the two because our mood and emotions have a tendency to cloud our rational thinking at times. It is important for us to learn the differences between them in order to prevent eating excess foods and sabotaging our health.
Hunger is your body’s necessary signal that it needs fuel (food = energy). Hunger is a basic survival instinct and eating any healthy snack or meal can satisfy your hunger. While we need to address our body’s signals, normal hunger is actually not an emergency. Habits like skipping meals usually tend to trigger people to overeat. Therefore, try to start a habit of eating smaller and frequent healthy meals to avoid feeling too hungry for too long. To handle hunger, it is important to examine and understand what feelings arise when you feel hungry.
If you are experiencing stomach growling, headaches, difficulty concentrating, or dizziness that intensifies over time and will only go away when you eat food, it is hunger. You can also try drinking water and see if you’re still hungry in 10 minutes. If your body sends signals to you to just eat something, but not any particular type of food, it is a craving.
Cravings are caused by either psychological or physical needs, whereas hunger is a biological response to your body’s need for food. Cravings are more of an emotional trigger. Most of the time, it is a result of junk food addiction or an unhealthy diet. Cravings are often due to the person seeking comfort from certain types of food such as sweet, salty or crunchy foods as a result of loneliness, boredom or stress. You will feel like indulging in your guilty pleasures like fast food, desserts and chocolate. Food industries thrive on producing human dependency by manufacturing addictive foods that we end up craving. This is why we rarely crave foods like fruits, vegetables or nuts.
You can recognise a craving when you are not physically hungry and the feeling of hunger doesn’t really intensify as time goes by. You will also have a powerful emotional hankering for a specific type of food typically due to emotions or hormones. Cravings are not the same as hunger as it does not indicate your body’s need for energy.
Desire, on the other hand, is usually caused by habits. It is the urge of still wanting to eat more even after a big meal and when you know your stomach is full. Common excuses for desire are holidays, seeing an appealing food advertisement, or using food as a reward for accomplishing something. It is vital to understand what lies behind your desire to eat so that you can work on addressing the root of the cause.
Luckily, over time, it is possible for you to restructure your lifestyle and take control over your cravings and desires.
