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    5 Habits to Master Your Hunger
    5 Habits to Master Your Hunger
    5 Habits to Master Your Hunger
    Ebook127 pages1 hour

    5 Habits to Master Your Hunger

    By Michael Forest

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    About this ebook

    At last... a sane approach to stop snacking in the real world.


    It is a fact of life that as you diet to lose weight, your hunger and cravings will rise. These are not just the cravings you get because you're not eating your favorite foods. Metabolic compensation and hunger signals in the brain mean that as you lose weight, your body wants you to eat more food, not less. 

    This is one of the most important reasons why long-term weight loss is so hard to maintain.

    It doesn't matter if the disconnect between what you really need to eat, and what your brain tells you to eat, is small. What matters is that it stays with you every day, and you need to address it. You can't rely on willpower alone, because willpower is a resource that can be depleted, and really, don't you need it for other more important things in your life?

    Hunger and cravings are a reality you need to deal with, and there are no magic quick fixes to just erase all of them, all the time, but still: there are realistic strategies you can use to intelligently deal with this stuff. There are specific habits that will dampen cravings and lessen your hunger, preserve your willpower and help you focus, and have real, beneficial effects on your body and brain, your energy, and your ability go and get things done.

    There are habits that will make your life easier. This book will show you how to use them.
     

    Hunger Habits and Smart Strategies


    5 Habits to Master Your Hunger doesn't argue that if you use one or two of these habits your hunger will disappear, or that the habits in this book are somehow the only habits that matter. Life doesn't work like that. Instead, the book gives you five keystone habits (plus about a dozen smaller habits or tips spread throughout) that can work together with each other, as well as with your own particular lifestyle needs. Instead of hoping one particular strategy solves everything, this book is about habits you can build on and leverage.

    In short: instead of offering a whole new diet, this book tells you how to optimize the diet strategy you're already using. If you don't currently have any diet strategy at all, and you're not sure where to start, the book includes recommended resources to help get you started.

    Imagine right now that you could implement a few simple fitness and lifestyle habits designed specifically to stop unwanted snacking, rid yourself of unwanted hunger and cravings, and actually helped you become more productive, instead of draining you, like most diets out there. 

    The five habits in this book combine research in behavioural psychology, nutrition and physiology research, and practical experience. Although there are principles related to hunger this book discusses, it doesn't speak only in absolutes, and instead lets you weigh the pros and cons of a few different strategies, so that you can use something that works for you, your life, and your own particular cravings and your relationship with food.

    You Will Learn:

    ✔ How to get into the "sweet spot" of hunger and productivity.

    ✔ How to create positive feedback loops so that your best habits reinforce one another.

    ✔ 3 key principles of hunger and satiety that most diet strategies fail to address.

    ✔ Quick start assessment guides for thinking about where your hunger is at, and whether or not you "need" a cheat day.

    ✔ Much, much more.

    Download 5 Habits to Master Your Hunger Now!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Forest
    Release dateAug 1, 2017
    ISBN9781386208112
    5 Habits to Master Your Hunger

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      Book preview

      5 Habits to Master Your Hunger - Michael Forest

      5 Habits to Master Your Hunger

      Michael Forest

      3

      thehabit.space

      Copyright © 2017 Michael Forest

      ISBN: 9781521892213

      https://thehabit.space/

      3

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission. The author of this book is not a medical doctor, a psychologist, or a superhero. He does not dispense medical advice. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature. In the event you use the information in this book for yourself, the author assumes no responsibility for your actions.

      Table of Contents

      Author's Note

      Introduction. Raise Your Hand If…

      3 Key Principles (…about Your Hunger and Cravings)

      Habit 1

      Habit 2

      Habit 3

      Habit 4

      Habit 5

      Practical Section

      Am I In the Sweet Spot of Hunger?

      8 Factors Affecting Your Ability to Assess Hunger

      "Do I Need a Spike Meal?

      Conclusion

      Further Reading

      Bonus Free Downloadable Resource

      Author's Note

      3

      Before we begin, I want to clarify who this book is for, and how it is designed to help people.

      This book is not a medical textbook about how hunger and cravings work. I've cited a number of references, but as references go, these are quite casual, and whether or not something was cited was based on a simple question I asked myself: If I were reading this, is this something I might want to follow-up on?

      Also, although there are a few principles I think it's important to talk about before we talk about the five habits, more than anything, this book is a practical set of strategies for dealing with hunger and cravings. Hunger and cravings are not the enemy, but they are an extremely important factor in sustainable weight loss, fitness, and metabolism.

      Obesity research is showing just how important increases in hunger are in terms of your metabolism and your bodyweight setpoint regulation. Setpoint regulation is more complex than after you lose weight, you burn fewer calories. Yes, that's true. That exact thing does happen. People debate about how drastic such changes really are, but to my mind, the key isn't how many fewer calories per day someone burns; instead, the key is that the drop in calories burned is also accompanied by a relative increase in your hunger levels and your desire to consume more calories. It is my opinion that any reasonable diet strategy needs to deal with this disconnect. That's what this book is about, because willpower alone won't do it.

      This book is for you if you want to have better control over your hunger and cravings. These things can seem to rise up to the surface at the absolute most inopportune times, just when your willpower is at its lowest ebb. It's useful to have strategies that will prevent this before it happens (as much as this is possible), as well as provide you with a plan to deal with it in some way as it is happening.

      To be honest, it doesn't really matter why you want better control over your hunger. Just that you do. If that sounds like you, and if you agree that this would be useful, this book should help give you some ideas.

      The strategies I will give you in this book are designed to help you if you want to lose fat because you just want to look good naked. But they can also help if you really don't care about how you look, except that a few weeks ago your family doctor placed a stethoscope on your chest, listened to your heart, turned their head in this sort of odd way, frowned, looked you up and down with their eyes, then gave you the spiel you already knew was coming: the one about losing a bit of that excess weight for the sake your family.

      Similarly, these strategies can be used in conjunction with whatever you are currently doing, or they can be used to slightly modify what you are currently doing, whether you are trying to use a well-known name-brand diet (The ____ Diet), or you're just tracking calories through MyFitnessPal, or you're using your own personal, unusual diet system.

      Whatever your current meal plan or diet strategy looks like, this book is designed to help you improve or tweak it. This means it is not designed to help you build a diet or meal plan from scratch. Yes, you probably could build a plan based on the information in this book, but the information really isn't laid out with that in mind. My intention was to help people optimize what they were already doing.

      However, with that said, if you don't have a current plan, and you want one, here are several options.

      First, I have a free guide on my website to do this. You don't even have to opt-in to an email list to get it (but you can, to get a few extra helpful tools). That free guide is at thehabit.space/mealplan.

      The guide is very in-depth, it's free, and it will work nicely and congruently with this book. The guide won't just tell you how to calculate calories based on some equation (like the Harris-Benedict or Katch-McArdle equations) like a lot of other meal plan guides out there do. Sure, that is a part of it, but a very small part. The real goal of the guide is to show you how to design a personal meal plan that gives you the variety you need, but which also keeps you on track with customized options and an underlying setup which automatically creates psychological bright lines in your brain. This makes it easy to stick to the plan and avoid psychological negotiating or bargaining with yourself.

      Second, if that guide doesn't sound like your cup of tea, I've included some other recommendations in the Further Reading section for books and websites that will also show you how to design a diet or meal plan. Some of those books are pretty darn good, and they've certainly influenced me.

      Whatever diet you use or design for yourself, the book you're reading right now will help you optimize it, make it better, and understand which parts are or are not working (at least with respect to hunger and cravings) and what you can do about it.

      Introduction

      Raise Your Hand If…

      3

      Raise your hand if any of these situations sound familiar:

      You try to diet, and you're super strict and everything's going totally great—but eventually you find the hunger and cravings are just too much. They're distracting, annoying, and take up too much mental space. It's like a dead-end.

      You lose weight only to gain it all back (also known as yo yo dieting).

      You have lost weight, and you have kept it off, but it just seems like so much extra work relative to what other people can get away with. It's tiring.

      There are reasons for these things.

      It's called metabolic compensation, or bodyweight setpoint regulation, depending on where you read about it and what term the author prefers.

      Metabolic compensation is not just, Oh, your metabolism is a bit slower now. That's too simplistic, because metabolism is not just energy in, energy out. Certainly, that is a very useful model for understanding the total picture, but since human metabolism is an open system (that is, what you put into the system affects how much the system is able to spit out¹), it's not a complete picture.

      To quote Dr. Diana Schwarzbein, You are your metabolism.² To quote her again: Metabolism is the totality of all the chemical actions and interactions that are constantly occurring in your body.

      In other words, your metabolism is a combination of biochemical processes related to energy metabolism, your own energy levels, your hunger, your cravings, your concentration and mental focus, your hormones, and a bunch of other things. Yes, calories in, calories out provides a bird's eye view, but it's not the complete picture.

      What metabolic compensation looks like…

      People who have lost just 10% or more of their body weight can experience a 15% drop in metabolism beyond what you'd expect based on their new body composition. That works out to, on average, around 300-400 calories per day.³  ⁴  ⁵ Former Biggest Loser contestants are starting to find this out for themselves.⁶

      The math on this can seem very depressing.

      Take a look:

      If a 250 lb. man loses just 25 lbs., or a 160 lb. woman loses just 16 lbs., both of them could have their metabolism decreased by several hundred calories each and every day, but their hunger will increase relative to what you'd expect.

      How hard would this be to deal with, every single day, for the rest of your life?

      Even if we assume those numbers above are a bit high, so that the metabolic compensation isn't quite so drastic and we're really talking about a smaller disconnect, the fact that this disconnect is always there, each and every day, is an immense roadblock to permanent weight loss.

      Metabolic compensation occurs, at least in part, because dieting results in sustained drops in the hormone leptin. Drops in leptin result in more hunger and a decreased metabolism.⁷ Leptin is a master

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