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Satiety is a mental construct. I've been underweight, normal weight, and overweight in my life. What your brain tells you to put in your stomach is almost entir

Satiety is a mental construct. I've been underweight, normal weight, and overweight in my life. What your brain tells you to put in your stomach is almost entirely divorced from nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving. The only way to be exceptionally healthy and thin is to ignore the urge to overeat, and this urge is extremely dynamic on a per human basis. As a result, some people out there will eat a case of potatoes and still feel very hungry and unsatisfied.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
I've never managed "underweight", but having been as high as 320+lbs and as low as 161lbs, I agree. The key to losing weight is to find ways to ignore what your brain tells you to eat and stick to a calorie intake limit that matches the base metabolic rate of your target weight.
bumby 4y ago
>Satiety is a mental construct. Are you implying that there aren't physical manifestations that cause hunger? In other words, I could inject you with a suprahuman amount of ghrelin and you wouldn't feel hungry?
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  There are physical situations that can nudge your brain's choice to make you feel hungry or not, IME. For example, I stopped eating breakfast and lunch for two years (because, I am a colossal idiot, and knew it was stupid when I did it) and it took very little time for my body to realize "feeling hungry" at noon was a fools errand, so it quickly stopped happening. I was absolutely physically hungry, seeing as I wasn't eating larger dinners, and having been about 18 hours since I last put food in my body, but habit has a large effect on your feelings of hunger if you aren't living in the wild Savannah. If my thoughts are correct, then a possible indicator would be people with wildly different "normal" times for dinner would get hungry at those different times, ie my grandparents who eat at 4 get hungry at 4 compared to someone who normally eats at 8pm getting hungry at 8pm. I'm unsure if that "support" for my argument exists.
  - bumby 4y ago
    That fits with my current understanding. Your body's hunger response (driven in part by hormones) is complicated, and for lack of a better word it can be "habituated" to a routine. But I believe there are still very real mechanisms (like said hormones) rather than being a psychological construct. I would be willing to bet if you had blood samples, you would see very real distinctions in blood markers associated with hunger as your response changed.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      This leads into the very real feedback loop between hormones and psychology. Addiction is a classic example. Both chemical and psychological addiction are real. It's basically impossible to break an addiction without tackling both
coldtea 4y ago
>Satiety is a mental construct. Yeah, just not according to science. E.g. there's ghrelin, cholecystokinin and other "satiety signals". Except if you mean "satiefy is a mental construct" the same way pain is a mental construct. In which case, in a Kantian way, everything is, including space and time. >What your brain tells you to put in your stomach is almost entirely divorced from nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving. (a) You'd be surprised. (b) It only appears that way because we have diverged in a exteremely small span of time (evolutionary speaking) into completely different circumstances and food availability. Otherwise, what the brain tells us is very much based on nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving. It's just that in 2022 we have an endless supply of food we can just order or walk into a supermarket and buy, as opposed to food scarcity where we don't know if we will be able to find something to hunt tomorrow - like the last 100,000 of thousands of years before historical times (and millions of years considering our primate ancestors)...
- jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago
  >not according to THE SCIENCE sorry, dont care
  - coldtea 4y ago
    Science, like reality, is that that doesn't stop existing when you close your eyes (or when you don't care).
    - fsckboy 4y ago
      did the sciences of phrenology, plum pudding model, God doesn't play dice, et al stop existing? I hope?
      - coldtea 4y ago
        You seem to conflate science with individual theories (which can be abandoned, expanded, improved, or kept as a special case approximation, like Newtonian physics, and so on), and advances in knowledge. You also seem to think that the prevailig theory at some era is intechangable with arbitrary personal opinions about how things are.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
This is bro science. Sorry dude. Caloric intake matter because in the end it is CICO. However, there are foods that absolutely make you feel full quicker and for a longer period of time and that matters as much as calories because if you can't fight off the hunger because your diet is primarily white bread and doritos as opposed to healthy fats , greens, and proteins then calories won't matter because you will 100% fail because of cravings.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  It could be much much more than CICO. If you want to read an epic saga on modern obesity and it's theories check out https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...
  - trentgreene 4y ago
    It seems like everything in that article reinforces CICO. Is there something that diverges from the CICO model that I might be missing? E.G. it’s examples of the Maasai and Inuit eating higher calories make a lot of sense when you consider their exposure to temp extremes and additional cal burn coming from thermoregulation (along with probably elevated levels of daily activity). Most of the nuance I’ve seen around CICO that holds isn’t that CICO isn’t true, it’s that the intake and output are hard to calculate when you look at nutrient absorption and lifestyle
    - nikkwong 4y ago
      CICO may be scientifically valid but it's useless in practical terms. People who tend to be constipated absorb much more energy from their food and those with fast digestive tracts absorb much less. Everyone is somewhere on that spectrum, so, from person to person, you would never have a practical way to assess what the CI or the CO is in the CICO model.
      - trentgreene 4y ago
simplify 4y ago
If you mean "mental" as in "not based on reality", then no, that's wrong. However, it is true that your hunger urges are not solely based on thriving and surviving, but also significantly on the current state of your gut bacteria, which is highly influenced by diet and stress. They say the gut is a second brain for good reason.
ajconway 4y ago
In some sense, pain is also a mental construct — just some electrons bouncing around in one's brain, yet it feels very much real.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

I've never managed "underweight", but having been as high as 320+lbs and as low as 161lbs, I agree. The key to losing weight is to find ways to ignore what your brain tells you to eat and stick to a calorie intake limit that matches the base metabolic rate of your target weight.

bumby 4y ago

>Satiety is a mental construct. Are you implying that there aren't physical manifestations that cause hunger? In other words, I could inject you with a suprahuman amount of ghrelin and you wouldn't feel hungry?

mrguyorama 4y ago
There are physical situations that can nudge your brain's choice to make you feel hungry or not, IME. For example, I stopped eating breakfast and lunch for two years (because, I am a colossal idiot, and knew it was stupid when I did it) and it took very little time for my body to realize "feeling hungry" at noon was a fools errand, so it quickly stopped happening. I was absolutely physically hungry, seeing as I wasn't eating larger dinners, and having been about 18 hours since I last put food in my body, but habit has a large effect on your feelings of hunger if you aren't living in the wild Savannah. If my thoughts are correct, then a possible indicator would be people with wildly different "normal" times for dinner would get hungry at those different times, ie my grandparents who eat at 4 get hungry at 4 compared to someone who normally eats at 8pm getting hungry at 8pm. I'm unsure if that "support" for my argument exists.
- bumby 4y ago
  That fits with my current understanding. Your body's hunger response (driven in part by hormones) is complicated, and for lack of a better word it can be "habituated" to a routine. But I believe there are still very real mechanisms (like said hormones) rather than being a psychological construct. I would be willing to bet if you had blood samples, you would see very real distinctions in blood markers associated with hunger as your response changed.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    This leads into the very real feedback loop between hormones and psychology. Addiction is a classic example. Both chemical and psychological addiction are real. It's basically impossible to break an addiction without tackling both

coldtea 4y ago

>Satiety is a mental construct. Yeah, just not according to science. E.g. there's ghrelin, cholecystokinin and other "satiety signals". Except if you mean "satiefy is a mental construct" the same way pain is a mental construct. In which case, in a Kantian way, everything is, including space and time. >What your brain tells you to put in your stomach is almost entirely divorced from nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving. (a) You'd be surprised. (b) It only appears that way because we have diverged in a exteremely small span of time (evolutionary speaking) into completely different circumstances and food availability. Otherwise, what the brain tells us is very much based on nutritional requirements for thriving and surviving. It's just that in 2022 we have an endless supply of food we can just order or walk into a supermarket and buy, as opposed to food scarcity where we don't know if we will be able to find something to hunt tomorrow - like the last 100,000 of thousands of years before historical times (and millions of years considering our primate ancestors)...

jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago
>not according to THE SCIENCE sorry, dont care
- coldtea 4y ago
  Science, like reality, is that that doesn't stop existing when you close your eyes (or when you don't care).
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    did the sciences of phrenology, plum pudding model, God doesn't play dice, et al stop existing? I hope?
    - coldtea 4y ago
      You seem to conflate science with individual theories (which can be abandoned, expanded, improved, or kept as a special case approximation, like Newtonian physics, and so on), and advances in knowledge. You also seem to think that the prevailig theory at some era is intechangable with arbitrary personal opinions about how things are.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

This is bro science. Sorry dude. Caloric intake matter because in the end it is CICO. However, there are foods that absolutely make you feel full quicker and for a longer period of time and that matters as much as calories because if you can't fight off the hunger because your diet is primarily white bread and doritos as opposed to healthy fats , greens, and proteins then calories won't matter because you will 100% fail because of cravings.

diordiderot 4y ago
It could be much much more than CICO. If you want to read an epic saga on modern obesity and it's theories check out https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...
- trentgreene 4y ago
  It seems like everything in that article reinforces CICO. Is there something that diverges from the CICO model that I might be missing? E.G. it’s examples of the Maasai and Inuit eating higher calories make a lot of sense when you consider their exposure to temp extremes and additional cal burn coming from thermoregulation (along with probably elevated levels of daily activity). Most of the nuance I’ve seen around CICO that holds isn’t that CICO isn’t true, it’s that the intake and output are hard to calculate when you look at nutrient absorption and lifestyle
  - nikkwong 4y ago
    CICO may be scientifically valid but it's useless in practical terms. People who tend to be constipated absorb much more energy from their food and those with fast digestive tracts absorb much less. Everyone is somewhere on that spectrum, so, from person to person, you would never have a practical way to assess what the CI or the CO is in the CICO model.
    - trentgreene 4y ago

simplify 4y ago

If you mean "mental" as in "not based on reality", then no, that's wrong. However, it is true that your hunger urges are not solely based on thriving and surviving, but also significantly on the current state of your gut bacteria, which is highly influenced by diet and stress. They say the gut is a second brain for good reason.

ajconway 4y ago

In some sense, pain is also a mental construct — just some electrons bouncing around in one's brain, yet it feels very much real.