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One of the reasons I am obsessed with knowing how our body works is that the most important currency for me, besides time, is energy. How, when and what we eat is a large determinant of our energy. And understanding why we want the foods we want is part of that knowledge. If you didn’t know there are 6 types of human hunger, you know it now. And I revealed the first two in my last blog. I’m sure you can guess some of them, but understanding how they work and putting it all together can be a game changer.

Today I’m going to talk about the third kind of hunger. It is blood sugar hunger. It’s the reason I have most of my patients on CGMs (continuous glucose monitors). If your blood sugar is not balanced, it can make you ravenous, grouchy, hyper-emotional, angry, anxious and worst of all, if it’s really low, can actually cause a panic attack.
Ultimately you want to be metabolically flexible to prevent blood sugar highs and lows. That means your body can easily dip into fat stores when you don’t have sugar available. It keeps your energy and sleep even. It allows your insulin to be lower. Insulin is a fat storage hormone.
When insulin is high you pack on weight because your body is being sent the signal that winter is coming and it needs to store energy for bleak times. The only problem is that in our modern age, a natural scarcity of food during winter never transpires. It also does not allow you to lose weight. When insulin is chronically lower, you can more easily access fat for energy, thereby easily losing weight and maintaining great energy throughout the day. Gaining metabolic flexibility is a more involved process, but balancing blood sugar will take you a long way to feeling more even keel.
My tips for eliminating blood sugar hunger:
Eat within 30 minutes of waking.
Don’t go longer than 4 hours without eating.
In more severe cases, eat every 2.5-3 hours.
Follow these rules and you will be on your way to eliminating human hunger number #3. I’ll talk
about human hunger #4 next time!