By 
You have just finished a meal and soon after you feel:
- Dizzy
- stomach growling
- Headache
- stomach cramps
- Tremors, tiredness, weakness
- Irritability
- esophageal spasms
- inability to concentrate
These symptoms are generally the sensations that we interpret as hunger. These uncomfortable symptoms can be experienced to different degrees by different people.
And for many people, these uncomfortable symptoms are the downfall of all their attempts to lose weight by eating less food.
- Since eating eliminates the symptoms, they are mistakenly believed to be those of hunger.
- These symptoms constantly lead people to consume more calories than necessary, and this widespread behavior of overeating has led to an epidemic of obesity and a continued rise in preventable chronic diseases.
Are these sensations really signs of hunger?
Conventional wisdom, and even medical textbooks, would suggest that they are. But many doctors and scientists now disagree.
According to Dr. Fuhrman, it’s about Toxic Hunger: “The typical Western diet is characterized by high-calorie processed foods, oils, sweeteners, and animal products and is low in phytochemicals and other micronutrients. There is evidence that such diet, low in micronutrients and phytochemicals, results in inflammation, oxidative stress, and accumulation of toxic metabolites. When digestion is complete, the body begins to mobilize and eliminate waste products, causing uncomfortable symptoms. If we allow waste metabolites to build up from eating unhealthy foods, you will feel discomfort as your body tries to move and eliminate this waste. I propose that these feelings are actually detoxification and withdrawal symptoms from an unhealthy diet, which is lacking in crucial micronutrients. Scientists now know that food unhealthy have effects on the brain similar to those of addictive drugs” .
What is Toxic Hunger?
Toxic hunger is a physical addiction to an unhealthy, low-nutrient diet. Those symptoms associated with hunger are actually signs of toxicity in your body.
Our bodies are so contaminated with heavy metals, GMOs, antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, herbicides, high fructose corn syrup, and chemicals that many Americans don’t even know what real hunger feels like.
It may not be wrong to compare the American diet to drugs; both are toxic, addictive, and harmful to the body.
- Processed foods full of ingredients that sound like a science experiment with a shelf life of a decade.
- Plus our so-called healthy fruits and vegetables, sprayed with a chemical mix of pesticides and herbicides that add to the chemicals your body ingests.
What happens when you eat this chemical concoction called food?
- Your body starts playing 20 questions.
- your body doesn’t recognize it
- Your body’s internal organs and digestive system have no idea what to do with these mysterious “foods” and chemicals.
When these chemicals enter your body, your body protects itself by storing the foreign toxins in your lovely fat cells, away from your vital organs. This is a necessary survival mechanism that occurs naturally within your body.
- Can you imagine what happens to your fat cells every day after eating all these toxins?… They get bigger and bigger!
What happens after these chemicals enter the body?
- Your blood sugar rises rapidly to an extremely high level, releasing insulin to bring your blood sugar down to a safe range ~60-100, releasing too much.
When too much insulin is released in your body:
- It makes you fat by causing you to store fat.
- Causes your blood sugar to drop too low
- Making you toxic hungry irritable
- And then wish for more of these chemicals
The cycle of toxic hunger continues over and over again, throughout the day.
So what does real or true hunger feel like?
Sensations of real hunger (“true hunger”) are felt primarily in the mouth and throat. Not in the head and stomach.
By eliminating toxic hunger and getting back in touch with real hunger, you make eating more enjoyable and you can maintain your ideal weight without crash dieting.
It’s always hard to break a bad habit at first, but once you get past the toxic starvation phase, your body can recover and repair itself.
- Imagine you are addicted to cigarettes and you smoke 5 cigarettes a day and suddenly you quit, of course it feels horrible at first. But if you can get past the detox phase, you’ll really start to feel better.
It’s the same with getting over the toxic starvation phase.
- And, by improving the quality of your diet and increasing your intake of nutrient-dense foods, this can lead to a reduction in uncomfortable symptoms associated with toxic hunger despite lower caloric intake.