are you feeling so hungry like you just cannot stop eating do you feel like something is straight up wrong with you and it must be your lack of willpower well that's probably not the case and you might be dealing with extreme hunger or binge eating in this video i'm going to explain to you what extreme hunger is what to do about it what the difference is between extreme hunger and binge eating and how to possibly know if you're going through extreme hunger or binge eating now i've experienced both extreme hunger and binge eating and at the end of this video i'm going to share a little bit more about my actual experience with extreme hunger and kind of what i did wrong so be sure to stick around to the end to see that first what the heck is extreme hunger extreme hunger is a phenomenon that a lot of people talk about and you might experience it after periods of dieting or restrictive eating essentially your body hasn't gotten enough food it hasn't gotten enough energy so your body gives you this strong urge to eat in order to kind of play catch up on the energy that it missed out on essentially your body's trying to fix itself from being in a state of kind of starvation when this extreme hunger happens a lot of people think that it is their lack of willpower guys totally not the case this is literally your body trying to save you and trying to protect you a lot of things happen when we restrict our food or we diet extremely our bodies are going to produce more ghrelin which is the hunger hormone and this builds over time so the more that you deny your hunger the more that you deny your want to eat that urge to eat the more it's going to come back with vengeance i mean think about it i can think of different examples just in everyday life where i can see this ghrelin this hunger hormone building up for instance if i'm out running errands and don't have a snack i start to get hungry by the time i get home i'm famished and i'm just find myself in the pantry like diving into snacks that's because that ghrelin builds up and when we deny our hunger be it intentional or we just don't have access to food our body's going to keep giving you more of that because it wants you to eat that's why i'm a fan of purse snacks so that feeling of wanting to eat all the foods is normal it's not your willpower now imagine denying that ghrelin denying that wanting to eat for a long time it's gonna build up and that is kind of where that extreme hunger phenomenon comes in that urge to eat is going to be stronger and stronger now on the flip side of things we have a hormone called leptin that helps us to realize that we're full so essentially it's the opposite of ghrelin leptin is influenced by fat tissue and depending on where you are at in relation to your set point weight the weight that your body wants you to be it will give you cues to eat or not eat so theoretically when we are below our set point weight we'll be driven to eat so when we diet essentially you see these hormones coming into play you see that ghrelin build up because our bodies see that diet as a state of starvation it's not getting enough so it's going to drive you to eat ever wonder why you're so hungry on a diet that's why one thing to know and i'm not going to go into too much detail about this because i have a whole other video on it is the idea of the set point weight our setpoint weight the weight that our body wants to be the way that it feels best at can change throughout our life and it actually can change with every diet that we do dieting is actually a predictor of weight gain because of this it's literally your body trying to protect you from the next diet that you thinks that you're gonna go on saying okay i better keep some extra fat tissue around because i know starvation might be on the rise in the future again that's why it's so so important to break this cycle of dieting and i'll link to that video up here if you want to give that a watch it's super super interesting another thing kind of going off of that is that a lot of people think extreme hunger can only happen to people who are below you know a normal what we think to be bmi on the bmi chart and that's just not true extreme hunger can happen to any shape size it does not discriminate if it sees that we are in danger of starvation it's going to kick in if your body sees the need to fix itself to be able to catch up on the energy that it was missing it's gonna do that now you can experience leptin resistance and some people feel that this resistance is contributing to obesity and weight gain but the thing is with leptin resistance a lot of people try to go on more diets to try to control their body to control what they're eating when in actuality giving your body consistent adequate energy not putting it in that sense of semi starvation may actually improve leptin resistance during restriction our bodies also slow their metabolism it starts to run more efficiently off of less food as a survival mechanism in fancy terms metabolic adaptation and your body's going to shut down any unnecessary things that it thinks it needs to do one of the big ones is losing your period thermogenic regulation so a lot of people feel cold all the time and with the loss of your period it doesn't necessarily mean you totally stop it it can mean abnormal periods so it could be lighter it could be just not regular another thing to note about extreme hunger is that when i'm talking about this feeling of hunger it's not always going to be that grumbling in our tummy especially if you've restricted food for a long time you may not get those hunger cues it could show in more of an obsessive thinking about food this feeling of you just want to eat this phenomenon is also talked about in the minnesota semi starvation study which is really really a great resource to kind of understand all of this extreme hunger what happens when we restrict i'll link to a couple of resources for you about that in the description below i think it's fascinating in this study they found that a lot of people were becoming obsessed with food they were looking at cookbooks you know watching cooking shows we have that all the time now and they were just thinking about food all the time so not getting these hunger cues your ghrelin has built up for so long but you've ignored it like what happens when we go on a diet or restrict food so your body's like i'm trying to talk to this person and tell them that i need food but they're not listening to me basically your body sees it as okay i'm like talking to a brick wall so why am i even trying and that is when our hunger cues kind of stop metabolic adaptation begins and your hunger cues may look more like just thinking about food it's possible to get those hunger cues back and i have a blog post on it i can link it below in the description for you but you gotta eat in order to do that okay so now that we know what it is what the heck should we do about extreme hunger you need to eat and you need to eat to satiety meaning until you are satisfied i'll be honest with you you're probably going to gain weight during this period of extreme hunger it's very likely be it long-term weight gain short-term weight gain it's probably gonna happen when you're experiencing extreme hunger it can feel like it's going to be forever that you're just going to keep eating more and more that you're going to keep gaining weight forever but it's not our bodies will likely level off for lack of a better term and this will happen when they reach their set point weight we've seen this time and time again with different studies that we've seen and also with now influencers a lot of times giving up dieting we see this happen i experienced the same thing and i talk about it more in this video that i talk about how to handle weight gain i talk a little bit more about my kind of process with it after they restricted their food they let them feed adlib which means as much as they want whenever they want they found that they overshot their fat mass by 145 now i know that this is scary sounding because when we went on a diet in the first place we probably wanted the opposite to happen right but they found that over time over about a year their fat mass reduced to within five percent of their pre-starvation now i'm not saying that you are going to get within five percent of where you were everyone is totally different and it depends where your body wants to be for me i definitely kept weight on because my body needed it where i was at was not my set point weight so it's not going to go back there it's going to go to a place where it feels best at where it's most comfortable where it's healthy we need to stop this cycle of dieting and then going off diets this yo-yo dieting effect because it's just causing our set point weights to increase more and more which leads a lot of us to feel frustrated we've been taught by diet culture that we can't trust ourselves but we've been told by science that we can i know the later is a lot less sexy but it's true okay so now how is extreme hunger different from binge eating so here's the deal extreme hunger can lead to binge eating which is defined as eating unusually large portions of food in small amounts of time typically it's coupled with feelings of guilt and shame and this feeling of loss of control but this is not bad especially if it's coming from that place of extreme hunger your body needs the food so i think the first thing to do if you're wondering if you're dealing with extreme hunger or binge eating is to assess is there the possibility for extreme hunger the possibility that your body needs that extra food have you been dieting have you been restricting have you been over exercising you can even have that feeling of extreme hunger from trying to be good all day and then all of a sudden at night comes in and you're just so hungry you may have been restricting during the day sometimes if you are not dealing with extreme hunger you're not restricting foods you're eating all types of foods you're not over exercising binge eating can be a way to cope with our emotions maybe you had a fight with your significant other and just oh to make you feel better eating cookies just seems like the best thing or maybe you just feel like you're bored and need something to do maybe it feels soothing to you in that case it's important to focus on new ways to cope with those emotions first identify what do you think the emotion is that you're using that kind of is coupled with binge eating and what are some ways that you can address that i'm going to talk more about how to kind of handle the binge eating side of things in my next video so be sure to give this video a like if you're excited to see more on binge eating because that's coming and leave a comment with any questions you have about binge eating now the difference of binge eating and overeating i'll get more into in that video too but overeating is normal it's normal to eat past fullness sometimes things just taste really good sometimes we have to use practical hunger and eat at times where we're not super hungry because maybe we can't have lunch until later to be honest i feel like a lot of times we do especially with social media use the term binge and binge eating a little bit too loosely and it's sometimes it's literally just a past fullness i think understanding the process and did you eat a large amount of food in a short amount of time not did you eat more cookies than your body needed let me know in the comments if you want more clarity on that okay so now i'm just gonna spill some quick tea on my experience with extreme hunger so i was living in a sorority house at the time when this happened when i was like okay i'm done i'm ready to nourish my body and i specifically remember one instance when i ate an entire cake like ate an entire cake like i could not stop and what i did wrong with my extreme hunger was that i just kind of kept going back and forth i felt so guilty because honestly i didn't know what extreme hunger was i didn't know that was a thing i didn't know my body was trying to fix itself i thought i just had lack of control and that there was something wrong with me because i legit ate an entire cake i was like okay oh my gosh i've got to make up for that i have to i just kept going back and forth like one day i was like okay i need to restrict and the next day i was like okay i'm gonna let myself eat and had i just been more educated on what extreme hunger was what was happening to me was normal i would have been able to stick with it and nourish my body so don't feel like there's something wrong with you your body's trying to fix itself so if you like this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and remember the next video is going to be all more on kind of the binge eating side of things especially binge eating at night you know when 8 pm hits and we all go to the pantry and just want to eat all of the things yeah that be sure to subscribe to the channel too and i will see you next sunday see you later