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Imagine that for breakfast you eat a vegetable omelette with three eggs and cheese, which contains 500 calories. Omelets will keep you full at least until lunch. Now imagine that you are drinking a 500-calorie Frappuccino. You will probably be hungry 10 minutes later. Omelette and Frappuccino trigger dramatically different hormones and have different effects on eating habits.
This means that some foods are more fattening than other foods. That seems to be self-evident, despite the constant exhortations that ‘a calorie is a calorie’. Cookies are more fattening than broccoli. Brownies are fatter than eggs. It’s alive. The importance of controlling hunger is a key lesson for weight loss drugs like Ozempic, which acts on the GLP-1 hormone. This medicine does not contain or block calories. Instead, hormones reduce hunger.
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2. Emotional hunger (hedonic): pleasure that overrides fulfillment
Hedonic hunger is eating for pleasure or comfort. The emotional payoff is the reason that dessert still looks ‘worth it’ even after a full meal. It is also the reason that comfort food soothes our stress and boredom and gives us joy during celebrations. Ultra-processed foods are engineered for maximum reward and minimum satiety, which makes the brain’s reward system so hard that we can’t resist ‘one more bite’.
3. Social and environmental hunger (conditioned): you are trained to eat all the time
Conditioned hunger is triggered by routine and surroundings. Breakfast time. Snack time. A movie. A sports game. Conditioning is a learned habit. Your brain links cues like time and specific events to rewards and behaviors, like eating. When almost every moment can trigger eating, ‘food noise’ can be the loudest sound in the room.
All of us need to stop treating hunger like a moral failure. Instead, focus on avoiding ultra-processed foods; in eating whole, natural foods that create satiety and reduce hunger. Not eating all the time allows our body to use the food energy (calories) we have stored. Choose an activity with a group of friends that doesn’t involve food. Remove as many food cues as you can.
Rather than defaulting to ‘eating all the time’, develop a mindset and behavior that supports weight loss. When you feel hungry, ask yourself a key question: What kind of hunger is this? Physical, emotional or social? Each type of hunger needs a different toolkit. In other words, don’t bring a snorkel to a bike race.
The premise behind The Hunger Code is simple: hunger is not an option. You can decide not to eat, but you can’t decide not to be hungry. When you understand what triggers your appetite, you can start working with your physiology instead of fighting it. And when you control hunger, eating less stops as a punishment and becomes automatic. Weight loss is not math and hunger is not an option. Achieving a healthy weight is about understanding different types of hunger.
The Hunger Code by Dr Jason Fung is out now (Greystone Books, £21.99).
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