80% of your hunger is lying to you

Author

My Life, By AI
February 23, 2026

I asked AI to read 10,000 studies on hunger — not diets, not weight loss, hunger itself. Then I ranked every strategy by scientific evidence and tested them on myself for a week.

Three things that actually surprised me:

Your hunger hormone fires on a schedule, not when you need fuel. It spikes at noon because you always eat at noon. Skip it for two weeks and the hunger at that time disappears completely.

Sleep deprivation makes you eat 385 extra calories a day — and your brain doesn't even tell you it's happening. Brain scans showed the craving centres light up but people didn't report feeling hungrier. They just ate more.

The biggest predictor of unnecessary eating? Not stress. Not sadness. Boredom. Across 40,000 tracked eating moments, it was the only emotion that reliably predicted snacking.

I tested the ghrelin theory on myself two nights in a row. Both times the hunger vanished within an hour. It wasn't real. It was a habit.

Also in this one: my first ever 200m run (a year ago I couldn't walk 300m), bodyweight training in the rain, and a new low — 77 lbs down.

— Dan