Hunger Training: Eat to Your Meter for Weight Loss

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Do you ever feel like you’re constantly battling hunger, counting the minutes until your next meal?

Imagine a different approach where you listen to your body’s true hunger signals, eat in harmony with your metabolism, and finally break free from the cycle of cravings.

Welcome to hunger training—a revolutionary method that uses your glucose as a fuel gauge to go beyond calorie counting to help you achieve sustainable weight loss and optimal health.

Hunger training is an essential tool for appetite control and managing your hunger. By learning to recognize satiety signals, you can make better food choices, avoid overeating, and effectively practice intermittent fasting.

By understanding and managing your appetite with tools like a hunger meter, you can take control of your eating habits and transform your relationship with food.

BONUS: Download Free Data-Driven Fasting Book That Has Helped Thousands Of People Personalize Their Fasting Routine

Contents

How to Use a Hunger Meter for Effective Appetite Control

Have you ever wished that there was a precise fuel gauge to tell you if you:

  • needed to eat,
  • are just craving those yummy leftovers in the fridge,
  • are eating to soothe your emotions or because you are bored, 
  • are eating out of habit, or 
  • want to eat just because it’s ‘breakfast time’?

You may be surprised (and excited!) to learn that the humble blood glucose meter is as close as it gets to having an on-the-spot hunger meter to gauge appetite accurately and validate your hunger instantaneously.   

When you feel hungry and think about eating, test your blood sugar to validate your hunger. If your blood sugar is still above what is normal for you, you probably don’t need to eat, and you don’t need more carbs. 

The Evolution of Hunger Training

‘Hunger training’ or blood glucose training is an exciting approach to improving metabolic health that involves using your blood sugar as a fuel gauge.  In several recent studies, it has had some fantastic outcomes.  

I first came across the concept in Angela Ross’s book, The Glucometer (2012), which recommends simply putting your fork down if your blood sugar is above 5.0 mmol/L (90 mg/dL). 

Later, a 2016 study from the University of Otago in New Zealand, Adherence to hunger training using blood glucose monitoring, found that using a glucometer to guide when to eat was highly effective. 

In a subsequent randomised, control trial, performed by the same group from the University of Otago titled The Effect of Different Types of Monitoring Strategies on Weight Loss, researchers tested hunger training against:

  • daily weighing,
  • calorie tracking with MyFitnessPal and
  • counselling sessions.

Hunger training with a personalised blood sugar trigger was the only approach that ended in weight loss.  Everyone else gained weight!

Conversely, people who counted calories saw a more substantial weight increase than any other tested approach.  They lose touch with their hunger, satiety and food cues when they outsource them to a smartphone app! 

The study also found that participants using MyFitnessPal to balance their calories experienced the most depression, anxiety, and stress.  Meanwhile, hunger training had the best outcome for these factors. 

Why Hunger Training Works So Well

Tracking blood glucose provides immediate feedback and reassurance for your conscious neocortex and subconscious lizard brain that you don’t need to eat NOW if your blood sugar is elevated. Conversely, it also ensures that you give your body the food it needs when it needs it, which is critical to gaining appetite control. 

Unlike calorie restriction, hunger training teaches you to eat to your meter, understanding your need for food based on your blood sugar levels, thus equipping you with greater control. Choosing higher-protein, nutrient-dense foods can further help stabilize blood sugar levels and increase satiety.

When your blood sugars are high, you can immediately reflect on how your unique metabolism responded to your last meal.  From there, you can quickly see which meals keep your blood sugar higher for longer and learn portion control to avoid them in the future.  

  • Is your stomach rumbling because you’re hungry, or did the sandwich shop you just walked by smell good?  
  • Are you feeling fatigued and anxious from something else, or do you need to eat? 

Hunger training enables us to retrain our understanding of our hunger cues based on our body’s fuel needs.  

Tracking your progress also provides gamification and positive reinforcement to the process.  People start seeing progress as they chase a lower trigger, and they’re encouraged to maintain the process long-term. 

If they ‘fall off the wagon’ for a few days, they can use the same method to dial in their eating routine without feeling like a failure.  

While we tend to think that more is better, we have found that identifying the minimum effective dose of measurement and restriction is critical for sustainable and long-term success.  

Building on these studies, we designed Data-Driven Fasting to empower you to fine-tune your eating routine to achieve the desired results.

How Long Does It Take to Train Your Hunger?

People with elevated blood sugars and more weight to lose tend to have more dysregulated hunger signals and erratic blood sugars.  Thus, they usually find it harder to judge true hunger.  Hence, it’s more important for these people to tune into their blood sugars and train their hunger.  Several studies, like Training to estimate blood glucose and to form associations with initial hunger, have shown people can learn to predict their blood sugars quickly. 

After a few weeks, learn to recognise how they feel when their blood sugars and hunger cues align, indicating they need to eat.  This teaches them how to differentiate true hunger from habit.   

Summary

Hunger training isn’t just a strategy—it’s a transformative approach to understanding and mastering your body’s natural signals. Using tools like a blood glucose meter and focusing on real-time feedback can cultivate a more intuitive relationship with food, leading to sustainable weight loss and improved metabolic health.

Embrace this journey of self-discovery and empowerment, and experience the freedom from truly listening to your body. Ready to take control? Start your hunger training today and unlock a healthier, more balanced you.

Get Started with Hunger Training

To get started with hunger training and find your personalised glucose trigger,

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Home » Glucose & Insulin » Blood Sugar » Hunger Training: Eat to Your Meter for Weight Loss

9 thoughts on “Hunger Training: Eat to Your Meter for Weight Loss”

  1. Hi Mart
    Interesting, a few thoughts / claims if you please…

    a. The transient nature of fat loss. Reminds me of Phinney, who brought up the dynamics of loosing weight; the trick is to access your Calories Inside, which replaces calories In (thru mouth). Once you start loosing weigth and fat storages, you actually need to increase Cal in i.e. eating! Cunterintuitive at first, logical at second! The trick is to access the Calories Inside, which you cleverly do by fasting / measuring.
    b. Reminds me of eating carbs vs. fats vs. proteins; only carbs make the blood glucose go below starting point within 3h (the others do not; however, one never eats pure macros as in this trial), which in your world would be tricker to eat. It is also in real world; the nutritionists are correct to recommend 3-4 hour intervals to their carb laden customers… never considering the other alternatives for “hunger education”.
    c. The blood fatty acids in you infographics; did you only refer to FFAs, or also to VLDL and LDL, which merely represent the fat back flow to storages? Numerical range for it would be interesting, like 5g of glucose i.e. 20kCal in blood.
    JR

    • a. I am aware of Phinney’s induction, weight loss, premaintenance, maintenance phases. agree that absolute protein is fixed. as you approach maintenance you bring back dietary energy.
      b. the timeframe for BGs to return to baseline will depend on what you’re eating. glucose will rise and fall quickly, fat is slower while fat+carb will cause a long and large rise in glucose and insulin.
      c. eneryg in fats in the blood is about 150 calories as detailed in this article that went into a lot more depth on the topic. https://optimisingnutrition.com/oxidative-priority-the-secret-to-effective-fat-loss/

      • Thank you Marty for your comments. Apologies for some misspelled words…
        C. Yes, I saw it in your article, forgot though. Presume this is FFA, so VLDL/trigs should optimally approach 100mg/dl i.e. 5g in blood like glucose, caloric value 45 kcal. We would have (main fuels) energy reserves of 20 sugar to 200 fats, kcal in the blood. This I might remember, 1:10…
        JR

  2. Hi Marty,
    I have downloaded the spreadsheet for step 1, working out my baselines, etc. Thank you for providing that.
    There is a column for logging body fat percentage. Do you have a suggested method for this & do you really expect it to change over the baseline week?

      • Thanks for your reply. I don’t have biometric scales. I was under the impression that they are not very accurate if you’re on a ketogenic diet because of the reduced water retention, but I may be wrong. I will fill out what I can in the spreadsheet anyway.
        And now for my second question, I am already fasting from 7:00pm till 11:00am. Can I still do the training while already fasting?

      • a DEXA scan or an autopsy disection will be more accurate. but we’re not really looking for accuracy, just to track your changes against baseline to make sure you’re not losing excess lean mass over the long term (which is a common problem with long term fasting). water weight drops initially when you drop carbs and glycogen stores fall, then you get into burning the fat on your body. it’s fine if you start out with an 8 hours eating window in baselining, DDF will just help you refine it form there to ensure you keep moving forward.

  3. Can one continue with OMAD with hunger training where you have only one data point?

    Or is it better to eat three smaller meals todo hunger training but give up autophagy benefits?

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