Hunger pangs are your body’s way of tracking your food intake. Instead of seeing it as your enemy, you should recognize that it’s an essential part of your digestion and metabolic process.
Your hunger is how your body helps regulate energy levels throughout the day. Thus, when you need refueling, you get hungry.
The trick, however, is knowing when and how to manage your hunger in healthy ways. The first step in stopping our frantic feeding mania is to develop a healthy relationship with food. Once you do that, everything else will fall into place.
Below are 10 science-backed ways to manage your hunger in healthy ways. They can help you maintain a happy weight to stay fit and healthy.
Free Download: 15 Foods To Eat Before & After Your WorkoutsHow To Manage Your Hunger In Healthy Ways
1. Sit Down When You Eat
It sounds simple enough: we get hungry, we eat. Yet, we always seem too busy to sit down and enjoy a healthy, nutritious meal.
We have to re-learn the right way to eat. Sitting in front of our food and slowing down our pace when we eat makes us focus more on the food.
Another benefit is that mindful eating eliminates distractions and allows us to stay connected with our satiety and hunger cues. As a result, it helps curb our tendency to overeat and reduces our food cravings.
What all this translates to is that we consume fewer calories, and we still feel satisfied at the end of the meal. It’s a win-win!
2. Eat Small Portions Every Few Hours
By eating frequently, you keep your blood sugar levels in check. The more stable your blood sugar is, the fewer cravings you’re likely to get.
Now, when we say a ‘small’ meal, we usually mean anywhere between 300–500 calories. This means you have to choose wisely. Pick nutritious, tasty foods that will tide you over until your next meal.
3. Avoid Overeating
It seems we’re always eating while doing something else: driving, talking on the phone, finishing up work. Our hectic schedules have forced our hunger hormones to go out of whack and cause us to eat way more than we should.
We sometimes even get hungry shortly after having finished our lunch or dinner.
That’s not even the worst part. What really causes our feeding habits to spiral is that our cravings tend to be anything but healthy.
So, not only do we eat when we shouldn’t, but we also consume foods we shouldn’t! This puts us on a fast track to chronic conditions such as cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, and Type-2 diabetes.
4. Make Sleep a Priority
When you don’t get hours of good, quality sleep each night, your body releases higher ghrelin levels, which is the hormone responsible for hunger pangs and increased food intake.
There’s also another hormone that regulates your appetite, called leptin. Levels of this hormone also increase when we get little sleep, which increases our feelings of food cravings and hunger.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, adults need between 7–9 hours of quality sleep each night. However, children and teenagers need more, in the range of 8–12 hours, to maintain their overall health.
5. Perform HIIT Exercises
Any type of exercise can help adjust hunger hormone levels. Plus, you drink more water when you work out, which helps increase your feelings of being full and satiated for longer.
Nevertheless, studies show that high-intensity interval training (HIIT) exercises have a longer-lasting effect on our appetites. They help reduce the release of ghrelin, which means you don’t feel hungry as often.
Hence, with regular exercise, you curb your cravings and hunger, and you burn off stored fat for energy!
6. Make Pistachios Your Go-To Snack
One of the best types of food that ticks all the nutrition boxes is pistachios. They’re high in protein, fiber, healthy unsaturated fats, and minerals, like potassium.
Case in point, they’re perfect for decreasing your hunger and preventing you from overeating when it’s time for your next meal.
Yet, their one drawback is they’re quite high in calories. About 3 ounces of pistachios can add up to nearly 400 calories. This comes to about 6 tablespoons or a couple of handfuls.
7. Cut Back on Processed Foods
Processed foods have no fiber content or any other healthy food content. Plus, they’re high in sugar, especially high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This type of added sugar has been proven to boost ghrelin levels while lowering leptin and insulin concentrations in the bloodstream.
8. Eat More Protein, High-Fiber Foods, and Healthy Fats
Incorporating more proteins into your diet is a great way to manage your hunger and reduce food cravings. Remember, proteins aren’t restricted to lean meats and poultry. You have a slew of other options, including eggs, beans, and peas.
Foods that are high in fiber slow down digestion. When this happens, the fullness hormone leptin is released, allowing you to feel fuller for longer.
As for healthy fats, these are definitely not the enemy, contrary to popular belief. In fact, some plant-based fats contain oleic acid, which suppresses appetite and reduces feelings of hunger.
9. Drink a Cup of Water Before Meals
Numerous studies show the benefit of drinking water before meals. For example, some show that people who drank before a meal ate almost 25% less than those who didn’t!
Water is also good for all times of the day. It helps lower your risk of dehydration, protects your organs, and normalizes blood pressure.
It’s also worth mentioning that sometimes, you can mistake their thirst for hunger. So, instead of reaching for a bottle of water, they reach for food when they aren’t even hungry in the first place.
10. Give in to Your Cravings
You’re probably thinking, ‘This is the opposite of what I should be doing!’
Yet, studies show that your body will retaliate when you deprive yourself of certain foods or restrict their intake. Researchers aren’t exactly sure why this happens, but the results are pretty clear.
Say you decide to go all-out and cut all types of chocolate from your life. That might work for the first couple of days, maybe a week at most.
Then, after a while, you’ll start seeing chocolate everywhere! Of course, this will only make you want it even more, and your chocolate cravings will only become stronger.
The only way to avoid falling into that bottomless pit we all know too well is to give in. Just make sure it’s in moderation and no more than once a week.
15 Foods To Fuel Your Workout (Before & After)
People are often amazed at how small dietary changes can reap huge results with their fitness goals. Whether you want to build muscle or improve your cardio performance, this free report, 15 Foods To Eat Before & After Your Workout provides details on how to manage your hunger with the correct foods to help you achieve better nutrition and a new personal best.
