Real hunger or hunger games? Types of hunger and how to manage it

You wake up thinking about a coffee and a croissant, it brings you joy. You grab this on your way to work, like most mornings, it makes you feel ready for the day.

Lunchtime comes, your colleagues suggest trying out the new local pub for lunch. You look at their menu online, see the pictures of their meals, it looks scrumptious, you go.

A couple of hours later after lunch, you crave a chocolate bar from the vending machine. You feel tired and drowsy, and you need something sweet to pick you up. You think this will also go nicely with your afternoon coffee. 

In the evening after dinner, you and your partner have an ice cream while relaxing in front of the TV, like most evenings.

Can you relate to this situation above? What is happening? There is a lot going on here centred around the different types of hunger. When are you truly biologically hungry and when are you hungry from the games your body plays with you?

To understand this, let’s identify the different types of hunger. Firstly, what exactly is the definition of hunger?

What is hunger?

The simplest definition is ‘the feeling you have when you need to eat’, or ‘a situation in which the body does not have enough food.’

Thinking about this definition, ask yourself how often you are in a “situation where your body does not have enough food” and how often you get “the feeling that you need to eat”. I would imagine, for most of us, the latter prevails. However, my question would be, is it a need or a want? 

The appetite hormones in our body are:

• Ghrelin – to tell us we are hungry (think stomach grumbling, 'grr…' noise).
• Leptin – to tell us we are full.

There are many complex interactions going on between our digestive system, our hormones and the brain.

It would seem logical to think that the body would only give you hunger signals when it does not have enough food. However, if we start thinking about the different types of hunger, you will see that the body can play hunger games to fool you.

Different types of hunger

I would put it into two categories – physiological hunger and psychological hunger.

Physiological hunger

This can be physical or nutritional.

• Physical hunger is a basic biological need for food. This is where there has been a lack of food, and your body is asking for more fuel to function and survive. 

• Nutritional hunger is due to poor eating habits and dietary imbalances, for example not enough protein, fat, fibre, and too many refined carbohydrates. Research suggests that drinking too much alcohol and sugary beverages can promote hunger. Alcohol impacts judgement, desire, reward, and can stimulate appetite. Sugary drinks contain fructose, and fructose has been linked to impaired satiety hormone signalling.

There are also lifestyle factors that make you feel hungrier, such as lack of sleep, stress and a lot of exercise. Lack of sleep can reduce your levels of leptin, which is why we tend to feel hungrier if we’ve had poor sleep. Stress is a big factor in increasing hunger, due to the raised levels of the hormone cortisol, also linked to cravings. Regular exercise affects energy systems and metabolism, and your body interprets this into how much you need to eat.

Some medications can also induce more appetite and some medical conditions are associated with frequent hunger such as diabetes, hypoglycaemia and hyperthyroidism.

Psychological hunger

This can be emotional, sensory or habitual.

• A lot of people eat due to emotions. For example, we tend to crave comfort foods when we are stressed or sad. We may even be bored and turn to eating as something to do. Emotional hunger is where we are responding to our emotions by eating to bring comfort, instead of a physical need for food.

• A feeling of hunger can also be stimulated by our senses. Therefore, the sight, smell, taste and even imagining food can trigger our desire to eat. In today’s society, our senses are getting stimulated all the time, and many triggers all around are enticing us to want to eat. 

• We also eat out of ritual and hence there is a habitual hunger. For example, some of us wake up in the morning and think we must eat breakfast, because that’s part of the morning routine, we don’t pause to see if we are actually hungry. Other common rituals are a bowl of snacks on the coffee table while watching TV and getting a bucket of popcorn and all sorts of sweets and soda when we go to the cinema. People and society have created habits which become the done thing, but is it really the necessary thing?

Going back to the scenario at the beginning of this article, can you identify the different types of hunger happening? Let’s break it down.

• thinking about a coffee and a croissant, it brings you joy: Sensory hunger - imagining food. Emotional hunger – brings joy.
• grab this on your way to work, like most mornings, makes you feel ready for the day: Habitual hunger – daily morning routine. Emotional hunger – comfort to start the day.
• look at their menu online, see the pictures of their meals, looks scrumptious: Sensory hunger – visual, enticing food pictures.
• crave for a chocolate bar from the vending machine. You feel tired and drowsy, and you need something sweet to pick you up: Nutritional hunger - dietary imbalances, possible blood glucose dysregulation. Emotional hunger – sweet to pick you up.
• this will also go nicely with your afternoon coffee: Habitual hunger – something sweet with afternoon coffee.
• an ice cream while relaxing in front of the TV, like most evenings: Habitual hunger – a ritual after dinner to relax in front of the TV.

You can see that, in this scenario, there is no biological physical hunger from a lack of food. Whereas there are plenty of other types of hunger going on, which are effects of dietary choices, or tricks being played in our bodies by multiple influencing factors.

Tips to manage different types of hunger

To manage nutritional hunger, and to help with blood glucose regulation in particular, it is important to have a balanced diet. Ensuring meals are higher in protein, healthy fats, fibre, variety of vegetables and lower in starchy carbohydrates is a good starting point.

When emotions are high, to help us refrain from turning to food for comfort, we can think about mindful eating, and alternative coping strategies such as exercise, hobbies and different therapies. We can break the cycle of habitual eating by forming alternative healthier habits and setting specific mealtimes. We can also identify our sensory triggers and make plans to minimise the exposure or be aware of not responding to these triggers. 

Keeping a food and mood journal is also a great way to reflect and highlight the way our hunger signals and eating behaviours are influenced by our diet, lifestyle and environment.

First and foremost, we need to recognise and be aware of what is going on. I am a huge believer in listening to our bodies, the cues and the messages it is trying to communicate to us. It is down to us to really hear this carefully and interpret it sensibly. 

The human body is designed to survive and maintain balance, or homeostasis. This means that it has mechanisms in place to signal to us when we are biologically hungry and have the basic need for food. However, in today’s developed world, we have come so far away from experiencing this basic physical hunger. Food surrounds us everywhere and it is consumed excessively. We also live in increasingly stressful lifestyles, which influences our eating behaviours. These eating behaviours then play on the biological pathways in our body disrupting our natural appetite regulation. These disruptions can then lead to chronic conditions. 

Therefore, it is important to pause and listen to your body carefully and be mindful of whether it is real hunger or hunger games.