Do You Eat Only When Hungry?

I’ve tried it, and it’s ancient.

chandarani bonypk009

4 min readDec 19, 2020

If I were to ask you when do people eat?

You would probably answer when they are hungry.

But do they? As it turns out, things are a little bit more complicated than that.

Photo by Jarritos Mexican Soda on Unsplash

Our body has many biological mechanisms to regulate hunger and satiety, both in the short and the long term. But these mechanisms are much more effective in protecting us from under-eating than they are to protect us from overeating.

The Psychology

Psychologists would say that eating is not exclusively an unconditioned behavior, but it is also a conditioned one, by our environment, habits, beliefs, mood, etc.

For example, many of us eat when it’s time.

“Maybe I’m not hungry, but hey, it’s lunchtime.”

Most people say they’re not hungry in the morning and yet have breakfast because they’ve been told they shouldn’t skip it. Time of meals is a socially determined behavior. We learn to eat when it’s time we are not necessarily hungry.

The proof that this is not a biological but a social behavior is that meals are different in different cultures. In Boston, it would be considered normal to have dinner at 5 pm. That would be regarded as a late lunch in southern Spain, at 11 pm being the most appropriate time for dinner.

What’s more, the concept of three meals a day is an invention of the industrial revolution.

The ancient Romans, for example, usually ate just one large meal a day and considered it very unhealthy to eat more frequently than that.

The memory of when and how much we have recently eaten also determines our eating behavior.

“It’s three pm, and I haven’t been eating since breakfast. I’d better have something now. I only had a yogurt for lunch; I’d better eat a rich dinner. “

Again, I’m not necessarily hungry, but my concept of what’s appropriate drives me to eat.

Can you resist food in front of you?

Another factor determining eating behavior is food availability, which stimulates food consumption.

In other words, we eat when it’s there. It’s an ancient instinct because remember we are designed to accumulate food; it’s often a respondent behavior: the sight or the smell of food triggers our appetite.

The food industry knows this very well. Our environment is designed to induce passive overconsumption by exposing us to eating stimuli and opportunities everywhere, from vending machines to advertisements on television.

There are two situations in which we are even more likely to eat available food.

One is when we like it. As we already learned, our favorite food’s sight or smell can trigger the release of endorphins in our brain that make it irresistible.

If we come across our favorite cheesecake, we are likely to eat it even if we are not hungry, and possibly even if we’ve just had a meal and we’re absolutely full.

The other situation is when food is offered to us.

Many of us find it hard or impolite to decline food when it’s offered, even if we usually wouldn’t have eaten it.

So far, we have identified a few situations in which we may eat even though we are not strictly hungry: we eat because it’s time, we eat because we are aware of not having eaten in a while or not enough, we eat because it’s there, we eat because we like it, and we eat because it’s offered to us.

Don’t Worry

All these eating behaviors are not considered disordered eating.

We can certainly learn to willingly change these behaviors if we need it to control food intake. Still, they are otherwise normal eating behaviors whose regulation is not strictly biological but mostly psychosocial.

I had a muffin because my colleague tried a new recipe, offered it to me, and I didn’t want to disappoint her, big deal. However, other eating behaviors are more disordered, and these are stress eating, comfort eating, and food addictions.

Disordered eating behaviors are not to be confused with eating disorders.

Do You Eat Only When Hungry?

I’ve tried it, and it’s ancient.

The Psychology

Can you resist food in front of you?

Don’t Worry

Written by chandarani bonypk009