The Difference Between Hunger and Cravings

Cravings are when your body says it needs sugar or food that it doesn’t.

Hunger is when your body says it needs food because it does.

These are two completely different things.

If we follow our cravings, then we add excess body fat instead of losing it.

But if we don’t follow hunger, then we not only don’t give our body what it needs to repair itself or operate properly, but we also set ourselves up to gain excess fat back again.

So before we change anything, we need you to be able to tell the difference between these two things to ensure we’ve made it.

Cravings come from:

• Addiction by the cells to sugars

• Cells that are not structured to use fat as fuel, and so require high levels of sugar in the diet

• Our hunger hormones not functioning properly, so our brain thinks we need more food — even when we’re stuffed

• Harmful bacteria in your small intestine that feed on sugars and so put pressure on you to eat more sugar (covered in the upcoming Gut Health Guide)

• An imbalance with the hormone insulin that causes your cells to scream for sugar, especially processed sugars, even when they don’t need it

These cravings demand that you eat more food than your body needs.

This extra food is then stored as body fat.

Hunger, on the other hand, is when your body needs more food and nutrition for energy, building muscle, making new cells, repairing itself, making hormones, and strengthening bones.

You’re not just losing body fat on this protocol. You’re also gaining muscle, creating more hormones, repairing cells, and much more.

This requires real nutrition to maintain and build all of this.

At the beginning of the protocol, we’re providing enough nutrition, while also burning fat.

But as we carry on, we get to the point where we need more nutrition to grow and continue burning fat. And that’s when we start to feel hungry if we don’t have enough food.

When you’re hungry you can easily eat until your body has had enough — and then have no desire to eat more. But you won’t feel hungry when you’ve already eaten.

This could even be a desire for a late-night snack if you’re very close to this point and have added on some real muscle.

Especially if the desire is for protein, that’s not cravings, but real hunger. And we need to feed it.

After you've been on the protocol for 1-3 weeks (for some it may be a bit longer), the cravings should be mostly or completely gone, and any hunger you experience is real.

This also ensures that after the protocol you don’t go back to eating junk food, as your desire for it will be gone, or mostly gone.

So that’s the first point — you start feeling actual hunger, not cravings.

Then Fat Loss starts to slow.

So when we’ve lost most of the body fat we wanted to lose, and we’re feeling actual hunger now, and fat loss has slowed or stopped… It’s time to cleanse the gut to keep making gains.