Toxic Hunger

What is toxic hunger?

For most people, hunger means a grumbling stomach, headaches, light-headedness, irritability, fatigue, and inability to focus. And for many people, these uncomfortable symptoms are the undoing of all of their attempts to lose weight by eating less food. Conventional wisdom, and even medical textbooks, would suggest that these are normal symptoms of hunger. 

Since eating removes the symptoms, they are mistakenly believed to be hunger, but they are not. The typical Western diet is loaded with calorie- dense processed foods, oils, sweeteners, and animal products; regular consumption of these foods results in inflammation, oxidative stress, and accumulation of toxic metabolites. I call the headaches, light-headedness and other symptoms “toxic hunger” because they are actually symptoms of withdrawal produced by the body’s attempts to detoxify the wastes produced by harmful, low-nutrient foods. 

People are consistently driven by these symptoms to consume more calories than they require. In addition, scientists now know that unhealthy food has effects on the brain similar to those of addictive drugs, producing a constant drive to eat more. These combined effects drive widespread overeating behavior, which has led to an epidemic of obesity and preventable chronic diseases.