Eat When You’re Hungry, Lose Weight

This may be my favorite new study of the last several months. Italian researchers have proven that if you eat when you’re hungry, and only when you are hungry, you will lose weight if you are overweight and sustain your weight if you are not overweight. It sounds absurdly simple, and on one level it is, but it is a simple idea that has been obscured by certain complexities.

The core concept is that eating behaviors are regulated by both physiological sensations linked to specific underlying physiological events such as declining blood glucose levels and by conditioning, such as the conventions of eating breakfast, lunch and dinner at certain times of day. “Initial hunger” is a term that refers to the purely physiological triggers of eating. The authors of this new study hypothesized that initial hunger is the body’s true guide to how much food it needs. They further proposed that overweight individuals who were trained to recognize and respond to initial hunger–eating only when they were truly hungry instead of always at planned meal times, when food happened to be available, etc–would lose weight.

And guess what? In five months, the subjects trained to eat only when hungry for this study lost more than 10 pounds, on average–far more than members of a control group who were encourage to lose weight by means of general eating restraint (which is known to be ineffective because it is unsustainable). The study was published in Nutrition & Metabolism.