Hunger Games
How to Manage Hunger When Losing Weight
In a previous essay, Obesity and the Physics of Weight Gain, we explored an immutable law of physics related to the epidemic of obesity: if a person expends more energy than they take in, they will lose weight. Because of this certainty, calories in vs calories out (CICO) has long been used as a model for weight loss. While it is not incorrect, it is incomplete, impractical, and ineffective.
1. Incomplete
a. Not all calories cost the same to process. It takes significantly more energy to digest and metabolize protein than it does carbohydrates or fats. This is known as the thermic effect of food, or said another way, the net caloric increase of eating protein is less than fats or sugars because the body has to work harder to make it useful to itself.
b. The source of calories can affect hormones, and hormones control access to fat. Protein, carbohydrates, and fat have differing effects on insulin, cortisol, and thyroid signaling, which in turn affects how your body processes and stores energy.
c. Calories out is not fixed. When intake drops, the body often lowers energy expenditure, meaning the “out” in CICO goes down even as the “in” decreases.
2. Impractical
a. Calories out is also very difficult to measure accurately and it is constantly changing. Wearable devices that estimate calories burned are often off by 10-40%, and sometimes worse.
b. Most people struggle to properly track their calorie intake, even when trying to do it. The general population tends to underreport their calorie intake by 20-30%, while obese and overweight individuals underreport by closer to 40%. Practically, this means if they report 2,000 calorie intake, it was more likely closer to 2,800.
3. Ineffective
a. It’s not that people don’t know about calories in vs calories out. Everyone has heard it. It’s that it’s essentially impossible to accurately track both sides of the equation, the discrepancy in tracking leads to suboptimal behavior because one assumes they have a larger buffer than they actually do.
b. A person can only ignore hunger signaling for so long, regardless of strength of will.
c. Despite all this knowledge, obesity has been steadily increasing, with the exception of the past year and the introduction of GLP1 receptor agonists (Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, etc.)
This is all to say that using the CICO model to pursue weight loss is only minimally helpful at best. Calories are descriptive, but not prescriptive.
So we’re not going to discuss the physics of weight gain/loss, but everything else that affects weight loss in an attempt to reach a useful and effective model for weight loss.
Hunger as a Signal
The hardest part about losing weight is fighting off feelings of hunger. It’s not easy, but understanding what your body is communicating to you is essential. The key to weight loss is not obsessively counting calories or building up the willpower to constantly push through discomfort, but in learning how to properly manage hunger.
Your body (meaning the collection of cells and more importantly, organs) has limited methods to communicate needs or warnings to the part of your nervous system consciously in charge of executive decision-making. For example, pain is a signal indicating injury of some sort is taking place. What is hunger signaling?
We commonly say, “I’m hungry,” implying that we want to eat. But that is a simplistic mistranslation. Hunger is a far more nuanced and layered signal. It’s the body communicating, in its limited way, that something is lacking.
For starters, in can imply a true energy need. You have expended more energy than your body can easily access, and it’s asking for a refueling. But if your calorie needs have been met, it could be signaling that macro- or micro- nutrient needs have not. You may have enough energy availability, but insufficient amino acid (the building blocks of protein) availability. If you’re hungry right after eating, craving “real food”, or snacking without satisfaction, it likely means your diet is incomplete, not in the amount of energy, but in other nutrients that your body needs to carry out the range of metabolic processes that keep you alive. You are likely missing a significant amount of certain vitamins or nutrients, and eating more of food that lacks those nutrients won’t fill the void. It will, though, result in excess energy being stored as fat in unflattering areas of your body.
Feelings of hunger could also be alerting you to blood sugar instability. Blood sugar rises after eating in proportion with the amount and type of carbohydrates and to a lesser extent, protein. A meal high in simple or rapidly absorbed carbohydrates will cause a greater increase in blood sugar, which prompts your body to deploy insulin, telling liver, fat, and muscle cells to remove the sugar from your blood. Because high blood sugar is harmful and your body wants to get rid of it quickly, it often over-reacts and produces too much insulin, which leads to an ensuing crash in your blood sugar. Simply put, meals high in rapidly absorbed carbs (i.e. refined sugar, especially if it’s dissolved in liquid) leads to greater swings in blood sugar, leading to greater hunger.
High levels of stress can raise cortisol. Cortisol’s job is essentially to get your body ready to survive/escape a life-threatening event. That language may be a little hyperbolic, but it’s preparing you to face some challenging event. Part of cortisol’s action is to raise your blood sugar so you have access to easily available energy if needed. If you’re constantly in a state of stress (physical or emotional), the signal is detrimental, leading to a constant need to increase blood sugar. In addition to psychological stress, poor sleep, over-training, or chronic dieting can lead to persistently high cortisol levels and unending hunger. Hunger late at night, carb or salt cravings, or a calming sense when eating can be clues that your hunger is inappropriately driven by cortisol.
Chronic dieting, excess stress, poor sleep, and persistent inflammation also affect thyroid hormone. Thyroid hormone helps manage your base metabolic rate, or how much energy your body uses to carry out the continual metabolic processes necessary to live. If the thyroid gland is negatively affected by any of the above stressors, your internal processes may be running more slowly than normal.
While cortisol and thyroid are both hormones, two often overlooked hormones that affect hunger directly are leptin and ghrelin. They are integral parts of the systems that regulate appetite, satiety, and energy availability. When dysregulated, they cause hunger signals that don’t match actual energy needs.
Leptin signals long-term energy sufficiency and adequate fat stores, but if the signal is constant over time, meaning you always have access to excess energy, your brain starts to ignore leptin and disregard the presence of extensive energy reserves (body fat).
Ghrelin, on the other hand, rises in anticipation of meals, helping create the feeling of hunger around habitual eating times. Irregular or disordered eating patterns can disrupt this rhythm leading to hunger signals that can appear at inappropriate times. On the reverse side, though, if your body is conditioned to breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, and a late-night snack, ghrelin is going to rise in anticipation of the timing of all those meals. If you cut back on snacking or to fewer meals a day, ghrelin is still going to rise at 10 am, 3 pm, and 11pm (or whenever your habitual snacking times were), telling you it’s time to eat. Ghrelin will adjust and regulate to a new eating schedule, but it may take weeks to months.
There is also a range of social or emotional cues that can spur hunger, but for now we’ll focus on the other physical aspects of hunger.
Weight Loss Approaches
As you likely know, there is a wide range of approaches to weight loss. But they are not all created equal. The debate over which is “best” is endless, and what is “best” for certain people may not be best for you.
As we’ve discussed, and while technically correct, CICO is one of the least useful approaches to weight loss. If the first step in your diet plan is to “just eat less”, the chances of long term success are low.
Insulin Resistance
The most effective first step is to understand and control insulin. Insulin is a hormone released by the pancreas and is the primary regulator of fuel partitioning, meaning it determines whether energy is stored or released. It’s three main jobs are to move sugar out of the blood stream, tell tissues to store energy, and inhibit fat breakdown. When insulin is elevated, the body is in storage mode. Fat is effectively locked away, inaccessible to meet energy needs.
When organs in your body are repeatedly exposed to elevated insulin levels, most commonly from frequent high carbohydrate meals or snacks, chronic stress, poor sleep or inflammation, they become insulin resistant.
A helpful analogy can be a coach who constantly yells at his team or a parent who constantly yells at their child. At first, the player/child responds and acts as instructed. But if the yelling is constant, the player/child tunes out the yelling. This leads to the coach/parent yelling even more to get a response. Eventually the yellers voice is going to give out.
In insulin resistance, the cells become less responsive to insulin and the pancreas has to produce more and more to achieve the desired response. And when insulin is always at high levels, stored fat becomes increasingly difficult to access. Additionally, if the pancreas constantly has to produce high levels of insulin, it can’t meet demand and the insulin-producing beta cells start to wear out. This is the pathway that leads to type 2 diabetes.
When insulin is high, decreasing calories is minimally effective, because your body can’t access the stored energy sources (fat) to meet its energy needs, resulting in persistent, overwhelming feelings of hunger. In order to burn fat, and thus lose weight, insulin needs to be reduced so cells become less resistant to it, and the body can function as it should.
Rather than lower calorie intake, the first strategic step is to lower the calories that cause the greatest insulin response. Since simple sugars (especially if dissolved in soda or juice) trigger the largest blood sugar spike and largest insulin release, those need to be the first to go.
My unofficial hierarchy of sugars, going from worst to best, is
1. Sugar in liquid form, including fruit juice.
2. Sweets. Usually pretty obvious, like candies or cakes.
3. Ultra-high processed foods: chips, crackers, refined snack foods
4. Processed foods: white bread, white flour, most boxed foods
Note: ultra-high processed and processed foods can be tricky, because they’re often salty. But the carbohydrates in potato chips almost instantly turn into sugar.
5. Fruits. Eat whole, with fiber intact. There is a hierarchy within fruits, but that is beyond our scope at this time.
6. Whole grains: intact grains, high in fiber, sourdough
7. Vegetables: non-starchy vegetables are best
This is obviously not comprehensive, but it’s a good guidepost. The simple rule of thumb is as carbohydrates get further from how they are found in nature, ie more refined, dissolved, and fiber-depleted, they behave more like sugar and raise blood sugar, and thus insulin.
The more of the worst carbohydrates you can avoid, the better. Ideally, and especially if you’re trying to tightly control blood sugar, carbohydrates should come almost exclusively from non-starchy vegetables with maybe the occasional whole grain or fruit.
Proteins and fats have much smaller effects on insulin, so even without reducing calorie intake, shifting your diet to high protein high fat will decrease insulin, decrease insulin resistance, allow your body to more easily access stored fat, and result in weight loss.
There are also a range of supplements that can improve insulin sensitivity. I will leave it to the reader to investigate further, but magnesium, berberine, chromium, alpha-lipoic acid (ALA), inositol, omega-3 fatty acids, and cinnamon can all help restore insulin sensitivity. Drinking apple cider vinegar before a meal can also modulate the post-meal glucose spike.
With the overall goal of managing hunger, controlling insulin directly affects your body’s ability to access stored energy which decreases cravings. It also prevents the large fluctuations in blood sugar that can also drive cravings.
Last, and certainly not least, exercise is essential to improving insulin sensitivity. Exercise improves insulin sensitivity by increasing muscle glucose uptake (without needing an insulin signal to do it) and expanding muscle mass, which acts as a major sink for circulating glucose. Both resistance training and aerobic activity enhance insulin signaling pathways, allowing cells to respond to lower insulin levels. Over time, regular movement reduces baseline insulin exposure, making stored energy more accessible and hunger easier to regulate.
Some benefits of decreasing persistently high insulin will be noticeable quickly, but to truly reset/improve insulin sensitivity is a process that takes place over months.
Hormones
To manage hunger driven by hormonal dysregulation, the primary goal is to reduce the signals that tell the body it is under threat or energy deprived. The most effective levers are often the least intuitive: improving sleep, reducing chronic stress, and avoiding overly aggressive dieting. Adequate sleep lowers baseline cortisol and improves both leptin sensitivity and ghrelin regulation, while consistent sleep and wake times help align hunger with true energy needs. Similarly, dialing back excessive training volume or intensity can reduce cortisol-driven hunger that is often mistaken for a lack of discipline rather than a physiological stress response.
Regular, adequately sized meals also play an important role in calming hormonal hunger. Eating enough protein at meals helps stabilize blood sugar, reducing the need for cortisol-mediated glucose release and preventing stress-induced cravings later in the day. Avoiding constant grazing while maintaining a predictable meal schedule allows ghrelin to recalibrate over time, so hunger becomes more proportional and less intrusive. During this adjustment period, temporary hunger at previously habitual eating times is expected and does not necessarily indicate true energy need.
Finally, improving leptin and thyroid signaling requires patience and consistency rather than restriction. Chronic under-eating, frequent weight cycling, and prolonged inflammation all reinforce the body’s perception of energy scarcity, even in the presence of adequate fat stores. Prioritizing whole foods, maintaining sufficient intake, supporting recovery, and allowing the nervous system to exit a chronic stress state help restore normal hormonal feedback. When these systems are supported, hunger becomes quieter, more predictable, and easier to interpret, making long-term weight management far more sustainable.
Again, anything to do with hormones is not a quick fix. The process of re-regulating dysregulated hormones takes place over a time frame of weeks to months.
Food Quality and Satiety
Food quality plays a central role in satiety because the body does not eat solely for calories, but for nutrients. Highly processed foods are often engineered to be calorie-dense while being low in protein, fiber, and micronutrients, which means they deliver energy without adequately satisfying the body’s nutritional needs. As a result, hunger persists even after sufficient calories have been consumed, driving continued eating in an attempt to meet protein and micronutrient requirements.
Macronutrient balance strongly influences satiety. Protein is the most satiating macronutrient and provides the amino acids necessary for tissue repair, hormone production, and metabolic signaling. Diets that are low in protein relative to calories often lead to persistent hunger and frequent snacking. Carbohydrates vary widely in their effect on satiety depending on their form and fiber content, while dietary fat tends to enhance satiety most effectively when consumed alongside adequate protein and whole-food carbohydrates.
Micronutrient deficiencies further complicate hunger signaling. Inadequate intake of minerals such as magnesium, zinc, iron, and sodium, as well as vitamins involved in energy metabolism, can manifest as cravings or nonspecific hunger that does not resolve with eating more calories. Improving food quality by prioritizing whole, minimally processed foods increases nutrient density, allowing hunger to quiet naturally as both macro- and micronutrient needs are met.
Eating whole, minimally processed foods helps manage hunger because it aligns calorie intake with the body’s true nutritional needs. Whole foods naturally provide adequate protein, fiber, and micronutrients while avoiding the rapid blood sugar swings and low satiety that drive overeating. By improving satiety signaling, stabilizing hormones, and reducing the need for constant insulin release, a whole-food diet allows hunger to regulate itself and weight loss to occur as a consequence rather than a constant struggle.
Conclusion
The most effective way to pursue weight loss is not to count calories, but to manage hunger. This includes managing insulin by avoiding simple carbohydrates that spike blood sugar and result in persistent insulin spikes. It also includes managing stress and sleep, as neglecting important major stressors on the body will lead to dysregulated hormone signaling. Finally, eating whole, nutritious foods give you the best chance of meeting all your macro- and micro-nutrient needs, thus eliminating the confusion between hunger signaling for energy needs compared to signaling for nutrient deficiencies.