Elena Christofides, MD, an endocrinologist, explains the difference between lifestyle hunger and hyperphagia in aHO.
Transcript
So the way to think about lifestyle hunger is, it is tied to events in your lifestyle. It is tied to events surrounding your day-to-day activity. So, if you frequently go out to lunch with your coworkers or family or friends, lifestyle hunger is the hunger you might get in anticipation of a known event or a frequent event.
So, for example, you maybe go to brunch on a regular basis with family or friends, and so you might wake up hungry on that day, and you are excited to go have that meal, or you frequently have a bedtime snack. And that is an anticipation hunger or a lifestyle hunger.
But hyperphagia, especially if something like acquired hypothalamic obesity — hyperphagia is kind of a never-ending gnawing hunger where you’re never satisfied. So you might wake up hungry, but it’s a different kind of hungry than someone who has regular hunger, lifestyle hunger, caloric need hunger.
I usually describe it as kind of a gnawing hunger, a gnawing pain, sort of in the center or the pit of your stomach, and it feels like it’s eating away at you on the inside.
And the worst part about hyperphagia is you never feel a difference between when you first start eating, or maybe in the middle of a meal or the end of a meal, and it’s often completely silent to you, or completely outside of your frame of mind.
And what I usually hear described, someone will say, “You know, I’ll go out to eat or we’ll be eating at home, and I will fill my plate with food, and others will look at me because I have so much food on my plate, and it will look like a much larger volume than what everybody else has put on their plate. And I will finish it, not even recognizing that I’ve eaten it. Like the time passes without me recognizing it. And I still feel that gnawing pit in my stomach even after I finished, when it is absolutely true that I should have been full and satisfied with certainly the volume that I put on my plate.”
So the way to think of hyperphagia is, eating without thought, and lifestyle hunger is, “I’m eating because I’m having an event or it’s timed.”
And you are happy and satisfied when you complete that meal, and you stop thinking about food for another few hours.
Whereas a hyperphagia patient or someone with hyperphagia never stops thinking about food, where their next meal is coming from, and how to solve and resolve that gnawing hunger.
Because it’s not willpower. It’s not a matter of being able to just push away from the plate. You physically cannot see what you’re doing and tell what you’re doing because it’s almost blind to you.
