Essentials: How to Control Hunger, Eating & Satiety

Food plays a profound role in our lives: It nourishes our bodies, satisfies our cravings, provides comfort, and serves as a focal point for celebrations. However, the relentless pressure to be thin, combined with conflicting advice on what and how much to eat, can turn eating into a struggle for many people. For them, the pleasures associated with food are overshadowed by guilt, shame, and a fear of making dietary mistakes.

In Intuitive Eating, dietician Evelyn Tribole and nutritionist Elyse Resch suggest a way to overcome this internal struggle and cultivate a healthy relationship with food: Fulfill your body’s needs by tuning out what others say you should eat and tuning in to what your body wants to eat.

This guide explores how succumbing to the pressure of dieting damages your relationship with food, and it presents advice for tuning in to your body and fostering a more positive connection to it. Additionally, we’ll expand on the authors’ ideas with research and advice from other health experts.

Most people think of willpower as a virtue, an admirable trait that we strive for but don't always achieve. But science tells a different story. Willpower—the ability to exercise self-control when you need it—is an instinct that's wired into our brains. Yet it seems like willpower vanishes at crucial moments, like when your coworker shows up with a box of donuts.

To harness your innate willpower, you need to understand what factors make you give up your self-control. In The Willpower Instinct, Stanford psychology professor Kelly McGonigal details how our natural willpower gets compromised by stress, distraction, lack of sleep and exercise, and a host of other factors. Using the latest psychology and neuroscience research, she offers strategies to help us defeat procrastination, control cravings, and achieve our goals.

According to psychiatrist and brain health expert Daniel G. Amen, many people’s physical, mental, and cognitive issues arise from physical damage to specific regions of the brain and their associated functions. To effectively treat and overcome these issues, you must help your brain recover from physical damage and enhance its overall health.

In Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, Amen asserts that even if your brain's health has been compromised, it has the potential for recovery and rejuvenation. Leveraging over 30 years of patient treatment experience, alongside insights gained from cutting-edge brain scans, he provides practical strategies for optimizing your brain's health and overcoming unwanted symptoms.

This guide explores how brain scans revealed the flaws of traditional treatment and informed Amen’s approach and offers practical advice for anyone to enhance their brain health. Additionally, our commentary will expand on Amen’s ideas with research and advice from other health experts.

Food plays a profound role in our lives: It nourishes our bodies, satisfies our cravings, provides comfort, and serves as a focal point for celebrations. However, the relentless pressure to be thin, combined with conflicting advice on what and how much to eat, can turn eating into a struggle for many people. For them, the pleasures associated with food are overshadowed by guilt, shame, and a fear of making dietary mistakes.

In Intuitive Eating, dietician Evelyn Tribole and nutritionist Elyse Resch suggest a way to overcome this internal struggle and cultivate a healthy relationship with food: Fulfill your body’s needs by tuning out what others say you should eat and tuning in to what your body wants to eat.

This guide explores how succumbing to the pressure of dieting damages your relationship with food, and it presents advice for tuning in to your body and fostering a more positive connection to it. Additionally, we’ll expand on the authors’ ideas with research and advice from other health experts.

According to Giulia Enders, the gut is a system of organs as complex and intricate as the brain. As you go about your day, your gut is hard at work breaking down food, delivering nutrients to your body, and even training your immune system to fight infection.

In Gut, Enders explains how your digestive system works and why it’s important to keep it healthy. In this guide, we’ll cover Enders's ideas on topics like where the food you eat goes, what your appendix actually does, and how tiny organisms in your intestines influence your immune system (and possibly your mood). We’ll fact-check Enders’s claims about the gut and elaborate further on the organs in this system. We’ll also discuss studies that have updated our scientific knowledge of the gut since the book’s publication.

Weight loss—all it takes is eating less and moving more, right?

Not according to Jason Fung, author of The Obesity Code and head of the Intensive Dietary Management Program. For decades, experts have believed that obesity was a matter of excess calories—that is, that people get fat from overeating. Fung challenges this view, laying out a comprehensive theory of obesity as a hormonal disorder that causes overeating, rather than the other way around.

In this guide, we unpack Fung’s theory of obesity, which he developed after observing the weight gain that insulin caused in his diabetic patients, along with his solution for overcoming it. In this guide, we’ll show why dieting doesn’t work and why exercise actually has little impact on weight loss. We’ll explore how the body processes food, learn why not all carbs are bad, and discover which foods to avoid at all costs. In addition, we’ll compare Fung’s ideas with perspectives from similar books on obesity, including Why We Get Fat and Salt Sugar Fat.

Do you often get hungry soon after eating? Do you feel tired and out of sorts throughout the day? If so, you may be experiencing glucose spikes. In Glucose Revolution, biochemist Jessie Inchauspé explores glucose’s role as our body’s primary energy source while also examining the adverse consequences of too much glucose. She argues that glucose spikes are at the center of most common health issues and offers a collection of strategies for taking control of your health by stabilizing your glucose levels.

In this guide, you’ll learn the basics of where glucose comes from and how it works in the body. We’ll also explore various diseases and conditions that can result from repeated glucose spikes over time and Inchauspé’s strategies for preventing these negative effects by stabilizing your glucose levels. Finally, we’ll examine alternative methods for managing glucose levels and take a closer look at some of the medical advancements Inchauspé references.

Weight loss—all it takes is eating less and moving more, right?

Not according to Jason Fung, author of The Obesity Code and head of the Intensive Dietary Management Program. For decades, experts have believed that obesity was a matter of excess calories—that is, that people get fat from overeating. Fung challenges this view, laying out a comprehensive theory of obesity as a hormonal disorder that causes overeating, rather than the other way around.

In this guide, we unpack Fung’s theory of obesity, which he developed after observing the weight gain that insulin caused in his diabetic patients, along with his solution for overcoming it. In this guide, we’ll show why dieting doesn’t work and why exercise actually has little impact on weight loss. We’ll explore how the body processes food, learn why not all carbs are bad, and discover which foods to avoid at all costs. In addition, we’ll compare Fung’s ideas with perspectives from similar books on obesity, including Why We Get Fat and Salt Sugar Fat.

In Western culture, you may find yourself overwhelmed by food industry ads, diet fads, and popular science articles about the latest superfoods. It can be difficult to keep up with what foods are “good” and “bad”—especially when these labels seem to change every week. Despite these mixed messages about nutrition, many experts agree that if you want to improve your physical health, eating well can be boiled down to two simple guidelines:

• Adopt a largely whole-food, plant-based diet.
• Avoid highly processed and high-sugar foods.

In this master guide, we’ll cover a range of expert advice on why eating plant-based whole foods can help prevent chronic illnesses, why processed and sugar-added foods contribute to modern health conditions like Type 2 diabetes, and why supplements don’t work the same way as the same nutrients delivered via whole foods. We’ll also touch on why you might need to account for nuanced factors, such as the source of your food and your unique body composition.