Seven Ways Your Body Tells You You're Hungry ... Even When You're Not

This interesting Time article details seven reasons why you may eat more food than your body really needs.

Factors involved in overeating can be subtle and unobvious.

Reasons for eating when you aren't hungry can include:

• Time of Day. Your body is conditioned to eat at certain intervals through routine. If you normally eat breakfast and find yourself in too much of a rush one day, your body will signal it's starving.
• Sight of Food. The body anticipates when food is about to enter the system. That's why your mouth starts watering at the sight of Mom's homemade pie.
• Alcohol. Drinking has a tendency to impair judgment, which can lead to indulging in more food than usual.
• Refined Carbs. Any meal or snack high in grain and sugar carbohydrates typically generates a rapid rise in blood glucose. To compensate for this, your pancreas secretes the hormone insulin into your bloodstream, which lowers your blood sugar. This "crashing" usually leads you right back to the fridge in search for more food.
  

You can check out the link below for the remaining items that can make you lose control over your eating.
Time.com

Dr. Mercola's Comment:

There are a variety of problems that lead to overeating. Some of them are familiar and widely publicized, such as stress and the holiday season (not to mention both of them combined!)

Others, however, are not -- although the judgment-impairing properties of alcohol are well-known, few people think about them in relation to food.

Carbohydrates, especially refined carbohydrates, but even whole wheat grains are perhaps the most important item on Time's list. They do their dastardly dead by raising your insulin levels. You may have noticed hunger setting in within just a few hours after a hefty pasta meal, this is due to elevated insulin levels.

We all need a certain amount of carbohydrates, but too many people are addicted to grains, potatoes and sweets, consuming far too many dangerous carbs that can lead to serious chronic health problems like diabetes and cancer.

Since your body's storage capacity for carbs is rather limited, when you consume more than you need they are converted (via insulin) into fat and stored as fat, thereby increasing both your waistline and your risk for nearly every chronic degenerative disease.

Currently, we face an obesity epidemic. If it is not reversed we will, for the first time in history, see children living shorter lives than their parents.

I am committed to helping as many as possible wake up long before that. That is one of the primary purposes of this newsletter -- to reverse this catastrophic trend by providing the tools to escape from the ravages of poor food choices and reliance on dangerous band-aid drugs.

Important steps you can take are:

• Retool your diet based on your body's unique nutritional type.
• Use the many resources on my Web site to start an exercise program that works best for you.
• If you need a boost you can use brown seaweed that help accelerate your metabolic rate and help you loose weight.
• Address emotional issues that contribute to your physical health by learning an effective energy psychology tool like the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).