The Hemp Connection + women's health

I just finished eating dinner and I am starving. How can this possibly be?

This is a common complaint I hear. Let's work backwards to understand what is happening…and what can be done about it.

Your hunger and satiety (fullness) is regulated by a number of factors. Only one of those is how physically full your stomach is. Another very important mechanism is your blood chemistry…primarily, your blood glucose.

Your blood glucose is strongly linked to your insulin levels. Insulin is a storage hormone, and its job is to pull glucose and fat out of the bloodstream and store it. One of the first things that happens with PCOS, before you develop full blown insulin resistance, is hyperinsulinemia (elevated insulin levels). This extra insulin is always in the blood, which means you may have more of a tendency than average to experience drops in blood glucose.

It takes awhile for food you've eaten to be digested, absorbed, and to get into your blood. So if your blood glucose dropped precipitously before dinner, it may take awhile to bring it back up to a place where you're not feeling hungry. Even though your stomach might be feeling physically full, you may not have enough energy in your system for your biochemical radars to trust that you're ok.

And so they tell you that you are hungry.

The very best solution to this, is to eat a diet higher in protein. About half of the protein that we eat is converted into glucose, and that process tends to kick in just about the time the carbohydrates we're eating have been used up. So if you're having trouble feeling hungry just as you're finishing up dinner, try having a snack with about 10 grams of protein mid-afternoon.

This is one reason why it can be challenging (and not appropriate) to use a 100% intuitive eating approach when you first start to change your diet. If you acted on that post dinner hunger, you would likely binge. Intuitive eating is what you're aiming for, but you may need to be a little bit more conscious about structuring your diet in the early phases of a nutrition plan so that your hormones aren't interfering with your ability to detect true hunger and satiety.

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I just finished eating dinner and I am starving. How can this possibly be? + women's health