There are many things that can be mistaken for hunger. Your ability to detect hunger and fullness gets clouded by other influences; a primary influence is emotions. Any emotion under the sun can mask your sense of hunger. Stress is a term possibly used to describe ANY uncomfortable feeling. More specific words to describe stress might be anxiety, worry, sadness, anticipation, restlessness, frustration and loneliness. When any of these stressful emotions come up it can make you feel hungry when you are not. Happy emotions can be confused with hunger too: excitement, anticipation, joy and love. All these emotions happen at your core. They catch you in your gut. That’s where you feel them. The ability to detect physical hunger and fullness can get blocked by any emotion, even happy, positive emotions. You feel the sensation of emotion in the center of your body, the same place you feel physical hunger.37  It is not just emotions that get in the way of detecting hunger and fullness. There are external triggers in your surrounding environment that make you believe you are hungry. Seeing and smelling food, especially yummy favorites, can make you think you are hungry. Really, what has increased is … Continue reading Partly Cloudy