Cravings and the “urge to eat” eat may sound similar, and there is some overlap between the two. Craving, on the other hand, is a desire for a specific food item, whereas hedonic hunger is a desire for all pleasant foods.
Food craving is an aspect of hunger, according to Jon May, a psychology professor at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom.
May said that how a person responds to hunger emotions ultimately decides whether or not a need develops. The expanded intrusion theory, first offered by May and colleagues in a 2004 study in the journal Memory, is one idea for how cravings evolve.
Consider the following to understand the elaborated intrusion hypothesis and how it relates to food cravings: People aren’t always conscious that they are hungry until their feelings grow very intense, or until they have nothing else on their mind, and hunger becomes the focus of their attention, according to May. For example, you might discover you’re hungry after working extremely hard to complete a project at work. “This shift from unconscious to conscious makes hunger appear very urgent, so we pay attention to it — which we call an intrusive thought,” he explained.
May explained that if a person went out and ate something, the thought would be dealt with, and there would be no need to need or desire anything. If a person does not eat, though, that bothersome idea may linger. May speculated that individuals may visualize the food’s appearance, fragrance, and taste, as well as consider where they could obtain some. We continue to think about meals because it is pleasurable, he continued, making our knowledge that we are hungry (and still not eating) worse. He claims that the client has formed a need by expanding on the initial intrusive idea.
May claims that visualizing foods in more detail can trigger emotional responses that increase appetites. In fact, research has shown that imagining foods has such a significant impact on appetites that simply asking someone to visualize a food can cause them to crave it, he said.
So, if you want to stop your craving, impede the mental processes that allow you to imagine the food, he says. Also, consider other visual imagery as a starting point.
May has looked into controlling hunger by engaging the brain in other tasks in a growing body of studies. May revealed, “We’ve utilized a number of tasks, ranging from direct directions to envisioning scenarios that aren’t related to food.
Finally, because “the food images cannot sneak” into your mind, “the more a work requires continuous visual imagery, the more it will lessen a craving,” May stated.
Individual appetites, of course, are fleeting and vary in severity, according to May. While ceasing mental elaboration can help a person fight a want, he says it’s still possible that a new craving will arise a few minutes later.
However, studies have shown that attempting these exact actions might help people lower the severity of their cravings as well as the amount of food they consume. In a study published in the Journal of Appetite in 2013, researchers discovered that when women glanced at a smartphone app with a fast changing visual display whenever they felt a need, the craving became less powerful. Furthermore, individuals consumed fewer calories throughout the course of two weeks.
“Knowing how cravings begin and end can help you let them go without having to react to them,” May explained. “Most cravings subside on their own if you can fight them,” he added, adding that imagining a familiar, pleasant location, as well as tinkering with something out of sight and concentrating on generating shapes without looking at them, can help reinforce willpower.
Since May’s 2004 proposal of the extended incursion idea, a number of other scholars have looked into it, and there is a growing body of evidence to back it up. May published a retrospective in 2015 that detailed how the hypothesis gained traction in the realm of cravings and addiction research.
Managing Hunger in the long term
Beyond our fleeting thoughts about eating, the systems that control hunger in our bodies are intricate. Indeed, numerous things other than the foods we eat on a regular basis can have an impact on these systems. Sleep, exercise, and stress are among these influences.
Sleep
According to Erin Hanlon, a research associate in endocrinology, diabetes, and metabolism at the University of Chicago, not getting enough sleep increases appetite. According to the National Institutes of Health, sleep deprivation can cause an increase in ghrelin and a reduction in leptin.
Although changes in leptin and ghrelin levels are thought to have a bigger role in homeostatic hunger, there’s mounting evidence that sleep deprivation can also boost hedonic hunger, she added.
According to Hanlon, when people’s sleep is limited, they report higher levels of hunger and appetite. However, laboratory studies have revealed that sleep-deprived people eat far more than their caloric needs, implying that they’re eating for pleasure and reward, she added.
Hanlon’s study, published in the Journal Sleep in February 2016, looked at one measurable element of hedonic eating: blood levels of endocannabinoids. Endocannabinoids are chemicals that stimulate the same receptors that marijuana’s active component does, resulting in greater pleasure.
Endocannabinoid levels fluctuate throughout the day and are connected to food intake. However, it’s unclear whether these compounds encourage people to eat or make it more difficult for them to stop, according to Hanlon.
The researchers discovered that after a 24-hour period of sleep deprivation (when people slept 4.5 hours instead of 8.5 hours), endocannabinoid levels peaked later in the day and stayed increased for longer durations of time than when people were not sleep deprived.
According to the study, such peaks corresponded to other data in the study, such as when people reported being hungry and having increased inclinations to eat, as well as when they reported eating more snacks. Overall, the findings of the study add to the growing body of evidence that inadequate sleep has a significant impact in eating and hunger, according to the researchers.
However, while there is mounting evidence that not getting enough sleep increases both forms of hunger, the issue remains if the opposite is also true — that is, will people feel less hungry if they receive more sleep?
According to Hanlon, researchers have only recently begun to investigate that subject. According to her, some study has revealed that getting more sleep may help to minimize food cravings. But, she noted, most “sleep extension” research have focused on how sleep impacts blood sugar levels rather on which foods people pick or how much they eat. To find answers to these problems, more research is required.
Exercise
The idea that exercise might lower appetite may seem paradoxical to anyone who has ever felt ravenous after working out. However, some evidence suggests that certain types of physical exercise, such as a short, hard workout, may inhibit appetite-stimulating hormones.
“It certainly appears that exercise would decrease the appetite-stimulating hormone ghrelin,” said Tom Hazell, an assistant professor of kinesiology and physical education at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, based on the scholarly literature. (However, he added, not all research on the subject have revealed this effect.)
Exercise also appears to enhance levels of other hormones that limit appetite, such as cholecystokinin and peptide YY, according to Hazell. However, additional research into the precise effects of exercise on suppression and release of these hormones is needed.
Meanwhile, not all forms of exercise seem to have the same impact. According to Hazell, most people feel hungrier after undertaking low- to moderate-intensity exercise, which is why many people prefer this type of activity.
It seems natural for the body to want to replenish the energy it expended during exercise, and when the intensity is low to moderate, it is very simple to do so afterward, according to Hazell. To put it another way, the body wants to eat food to replenish the calories it just burned. When someone conducts a high-intensity workout, on the other hand, the body undergoes many more metabolic changes than just burning calories, he noted. So, while the body wants to replace its energy supplies, it prioritizes dealing with other changes before doing so, he said.
All of this raises the question of whether or not exercise can help you feel less hungry.
“I believe there would still be a benefit by reducing hunger if the person was hungry and conducted an exercise session of appropriate intensity,” Hazell said. Exercising around periods when hunger is likely to strike “may be an attractive preventive alternative as well,” he noted, though this hypothesis has yet to be investigated in a formal study.
Stress
It’s difficult to overlook stress, when it comes to elements that influence eating. But, according to Dr. Michael Lutter, a psychiatrist at the University of Iowa, different types of stress might have different impacts on different people.
Major stressors, such as war, famine, and severe trauma, are linked to an increased risk of serious mental illnesses like major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, both of which have been linked to appetite changes, according to Lutter, who has studied the neurological basis of feeding and disordered eating.
However, the evidence on whether minor stressors, such as those people face on a daily basis, might cause hunger is less clear, according to Lutter. According to polls, roughly 40% of people say they eat in response to stress, while another 40% say they lose their appetite in response to stress, he said. What about the remaining 20%? They report no effect, according to Lutter.
It’s also unknown what happens in the body to cause stress-related eating. “Traditionally, cortisol [the stress hormone] has been associated with stress-induced eating,” Lutter explained. However, he noted, this association was based on research indicating that high amounts of cortisol, which can be caused by medication or illness, might alter metabolism. Mild stress causes cortisol levels to spike, but these spikes are considerably smaller and last much shorter, so it’s unclear how much “stress-induced” cortisol fluctuations promote comfort eating, he added.
Rather, “ghrelin, and maybe leptin, have a role in alterations in food intake and body weight in response to chronic stress,” according to Lutter. However, the best evidence for this comes from mice, not humans, he says.
Mindfulness-based treatments are perhaps the best studied for persons who want to reduce “stress eating.” However, according to Lutter, the data in this area isn’t overwhelming. (“Mindfulness” refers to the ability to be aware of one’s bodily and mental feelings from moment to moment.) However, in addition to mindfulness, keeping a food journal can assist you in tracking the relationship between food intake and emotional changes.