Takeaways: The Hungry Brain by Stephan Guyenet
The Hungry Brain gives an insight into why our brain undermines our weight goals and turns those insights into practical guidelines for eating well. Along the way, it explores how the human brain works, revealing how this mysterious organ makes us who we are.
At times I found the book quite hard-going. Shocker: science can be pretty complicated. Stephan actually does a great job explaining our complex biochemistry, but even so, there are a lot of acronyms to decode and a lot of data to process. He also nearly lost me early on with a long section about lamprey eels. (Don’t ask.)
But those small niggles aside, The Hungry Brain really helped me to better understand the relationship between my brain and body, as well as offering a bunch of practical advice which I’ve started to put into practice.
Here are my top-4 takeaways:
Our unconscious brain often works against our conscious goals.
The unconscious, intuitive parts of our brain work behind the scenes, directing our behaviour and responding to stimuli in our environment, in order to keep us alive. Unlike our rational brain, our unconscious brain has no concept of the future and doesn’t care about my pursuit of the perfect summer body.
As Guyenet writes, “When you accomplish a goal like eating a triple bacon cheeseburger, dopamine is realised in short bursts that reinforce your “successful” behaviour. This is how dopamine teaches us to think, feel, and behave in ways that help us achieve our hardwired goals — whether or not our conscious, rational brains support them.”
What to do about it?
When making a decision that pits your present self against your future self — whether or not to eat that tub of ice cream, for example — try to imagine yourself in the future. Place yourself in a scene, like at the beach, and imagine yourself enjoying it — the more vivid, the better. This is called ‘episodic future thinking’ and it’s been shown to reduce the intake of tempting, calorie-dense food by nearly one-third.¹
Our body regulates our weight with a mechanism called the lipostat.
Just as the thermostat in our house is set to our preferred temperature, our body has a setpoint for our weight and fat levels (our adiposity). When our weight goes up, a cascade of hormones suppresses our appetite to try and reduce it. When our weight goes down — like after a diet — our body releases hormones to increase our appetite and prompt us to return to our setpoint. This is why so many people regain weight after a diet. Our bodies are doing everything they can to get us to eat.
Surprise, surprise, our bodies are better at getting us to increase weight after we lose it than to reduce weight after we’ve gained. And what’s more, as we gain weight over time, it slowly raises our set point and our bodies start to defend this new, higher weight.
What to do about it?
There’s a weight management secret you’ll rarely find in a diet book: eat simple food. This idea doesn't get a lot of attention because it’s not what we want to hear. I’d love to believe I could eat the most delicious meals of my life and still lose weight. (Many Instagramers and diet books would have us believe this to be the case.) But ultimately, a simple diet of fairly unexciting foods has been shown to discourage overeating and reduce our setpoint over time.
We eat for plenty of reasons besides hunger.
There are two main culprits: Excess stress and a lack of sleep — which can often go hand-in-hand.
A bad night’s sleep basically makes us less likely to live in accordance with our own health goals. We’re less likely to go to bed on time the following night, less likely to go to the gym, and more likely to overeat, as lack of sleep impairs our decision making and increases our appetite.
Our response to stress, interestingly, seems to go one of two ways: we either overeat or skip meals altogether. The determining factor seems to be which foods we have available. Appetising, calorie-dense food is easy to overeat, whereas plainer foods don’t seem to pose as much of a problem. (Do you know anyone who considers celery a comfort food?)
What to do about it?
Do all you can to ensure a good night’s sleep. This means getting enough time in bed and creating a good sleep environment. If you do have a bad night, try to keep this in mind the next day as you’re making food choices, and ask yourself, ‘do I want this because I’m tired?’
With stress, less is obviously better. Can you be proactive by tackling the source of stress? If not, try to create an environment that’s not going to exacerbate it, by removing problem foods and practising calming behaviours.
The concept of ‘moderation’ is totally alien to our ancient brains.
In just a few decades, our food environment has changed almost beyond recognition. Spending on fast food has shot up; we buy more ready meals and pre-prepared foods; we’re bombarded with advertising, as companies compete for a share of our stomach.
Moderation didn’t exist in the times our hunter-gather ancestors. If you don’t know where your next meal’s coming from, it makes sense to eat everything that’s in front of you. But today, with calorie-dense foods readily available, it’s easy to overeat. In a race for profits, manufacturers have also perfected the combinations of fat, salt, and sugar, which we find almost irresistible.
What to do about it?
Fix your food environment. Guyenet (and my mum) takes the line that if some foods are a problem for you, don’t have them in the house. Guyenet also recommends keeping your counters clear of food — ‘out of sight, out of mind’. In an effort to eliminate absent-minded snacking, he even recommends buying foods that mostly require some kind of cooking or preparation to eat.
Final thoughts
The book really challenged my thinking about how much control I can really exert over my body. It also explained why I regained weight after previously losing it.
At first, the thought of not being able to achieve and maintain my ‘dream body’ was pretty depressing. If my brain is going to sabotage my efforts to lose weight, then why even bother in the first place?
But it also got me to reassess the goals I have for my body. Rather than fixating, say, on reaching specific weight way off in the future. Perhaps I can accept where I’m at right now and work on cultivating good behaviours which, if done repeatedly, will help me feel happier now and going forward.
You can find more from Stephan Gutenet and learn about The Hungry Brain at his website: www.stephanguyenet.com
