Hey everyone!
I finished another book today, called The Hungry Brain, by Stephan Guyenet. As the title suggests, this was a non-fiction read about how the human (another other species') brain controls hunger and satiety levels. It puts a focus on overeating - with the most prominent example being highly palatable foods which translates roughly to fast foods - and what causes a person to eat more calories than they actually need.
First things first. Why did I read it? There are several reasons, and one of them is that I'm currently trying to lose another 5kg of weight in order to get to a weight where I don't have to worry about what/how much of what I can eat not to gain too much/to stay at a stable weight. It's basically an attempt to live and eat healthily (in addition to getting that BIKINI BODY!) without having to be as careful about my diet when I'm trying to lose weight. It's also a fun experiment. The results of that experiment will also allow me to recommend certain strategies and share my weight maintenance tips in the long term.
All right. Let's get started with The Hungry Brain.
The first thing you should know is that it's short. It says 304 pages on Amazon but it felt more like around 150-200. It was easy to read and even the science was not really challenging until it got to the to me less interesting part of the book about how sleep and stress affect weight gain/loss in the last chapters. I read it in two days with little effort (about three hours a day). The shortness in turn means this scientific book is highly accessible to all sorts of people and if you're really interest in the subject of weight management then it's definitely something you should (and can!) read.
The second most relevant piece of information about this book is (obviously) it's content. I've already stated that it was short and quite easy to read despite the science it describes. It's written very comprehensively and even if you didn't pay attention in chemistry in school (like me) you can easily understand the information involved.
In the first few chapters Guyenet talks about the most important regions in the brain and hormones/neurons that affect how hungry you feel, when you feel hungry, and why you feel hungry. I won't go into detail here, but suffice to say that everything has been tested and tested again on various kinds of rats and monkeys. As such, it has a truly scientific background, and is backed up by plenty of research. At the same time, everything described is also highly intuitive, and the connections between the brain, neurons, and hormones that trigger neurons and decision making (especially of course the decision to eat/acquire food) are clear once you start to read.
In the middle chapters Guyenet deepens the reader's understanding of the above processes. There are chapters on how environment (the foods easily available to you - for example in the holiday period between Thanksgiving and New Years) can cause overeating and over time raise our tolerance for the chemical that regulates hunger. This translates into something like: rising chemical tolerance = more food to produce more chemical to feel full = overeating. Another chapter deals with genetic predisposition to overeat (spoiler: it's still not an excuse).
The last few chapters are the weakest. These deal with how sleep and stress affect food consumption and were neither set up as well as the first 7 chapters of the book nor as descriptive and detailed. The chapter on sleep literally had me almost dozing off (but to be fair, that might have been because of the 2 hour hike and the late hour at which I read it), and the chapter on stress wasn't any more engaging either. The basic formula there was stress causes overeating and weight gain more easily if highly palatable foods (usually fast foods) are available but doesn't have the same effect if there's only healthy foods in the environment.
In total I would definitely recommend this book if you're at all interested in nutrition. It's short enough to read in a few days and highly informative despite being very light compared to other scientific reads. It gives you a great overview of how the brain makes decisions on when and what to eat and at the same time gives plenty of scientific evidence on why it can be difficult to make good/healthy food decisions even when your willpower is behind losing weight.
I'd rate it 8/10 and recommend it 10/10. There is a lot to learn from this book if you want to lose weight and also if you're just interested in how the food industry works and why people generally prefer fast foods/foods high in calories to lean unprocessed foods.
Do you think this book is something for you? Try to find it at your local bookstore or simply buy an ebook copy on Amazon!
Have a good night/day! WriteBot.
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