Page 74 - Eat Stop Eat by Brad Pilon PDF Program

Fasting and Hunger

The true feeling of real hunger is difficult to explain and I’m not sure many of

us have ever really experienced it. We have felt the withdrawal of not being able to eat
when we wanted to, and the disappointment of not being able to eat what we wanted
to, but true hunger is reserved for those who have gone weeks without eating and are
not sure when or where their next meal will come from.

Consider that most people get noticeably hungry or irritated if they have gone more

than two to three hours without eating. But during this time, metabolically speaking,
they are still in the fed state. This means their bodies are still processing the food they
ate at their last meal. There is still unused energy from their last meal in their system,
yet they are already feeling hungry enough to eat again. How can this be?

Most likely, what we call hunger is really a learned reaction to a combination of
metabolic, social and environmental cues to eat. Remember how I mentioned that the
food industry spends 10 billion U.S. dollars per year advertising food? Well, it turns
out that this advertising is very effective.

According to Brian Wansink, author of “Mindless Eating” and dozens of scientific
publications on ‘why people eat’, we make as many as 200 food related decisions every
day and are subjected to countless food advertisements. In my opinion, this is why
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almost all diets fail. It is virtually impossible for us to always be consciously in

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