The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat Hardcover – February 7, 2017

We live in bodies that are complex with intricate, interactive systems. We fool ourselves when we want a simple pill to fix our problem so we can keep eating as much of the high-palatable, highly processed food we want to eat. Dr. Guyenet explains in great detail how our brain is key in our overeating and gives us very practical means to, as he says, outsmart it. Yes, the book is VERY technical, very scientific.... but it's also very helpful and very interesting. AND he breaks down into laymen's terms all the basic info that we need to understand ourselves better.By becoming more aware of my overeating and learning more about being satisfied with lower-palatable foods (in addition to the changes I was already implementing in balancing hormones, drinking more water and being consistent with walking and yoga), I began to drop weight. It was significant enough that people were noticing and asking what I was doing, even before I saw it myself. (I had stopped constantly looking in the mirror.) Six months in and I'm still implementing and tweaking things as I pay more attention to how my body responds to what I eat.If you're looking for an easy read or an easy answer, keep going. Don't buy the book. BUT if you are looking for serious answers and willing to make changes as you read and understand more, buy this book! Digest it (pun intended) thoughtfully and change yourself.

I am a long-time fan of Stephan’s blog, Whole Health Source, so I was super excited about this book. And, if we’re being completely honest, I wondered how he was going to top his already thorough, engaging, and meticulously crafted blog posts. Well, let’s just say it did not disappoint!If Whole Health Source is a little treasure trove of ancestrally-motivated diet and lifestyle advice built on nuggets of rigorous science, then this book is the full gold mine. It also brings neuroscience front and center, whereas on the blog I feel like the inner workings of the brain make important but only occasional appearances. And the material goes deep. For a neuroscience beginner like me, the amount of information borders on overwhelming, mitigated only by the fact that our author writes in almost obsessively clear prose. I am looking forward to digging through the book again, this time with Wikipedia open in the next tab. For those not already familiar with the material, it definitely gives you enough for a few pass-throughs.As for the inevitable question: Will this book help you lose weight? It is not a diet book. That said, it does contain a lot of advice for weight control that is rather different than the usual stuff out there. In particular, it focuses on “neural quirks” that persuade your body to naturally want less food, no willpower required. Best of all, you’ll know exactly why each tip works.Absolutely recommend! Please write more stuff, Stephan! :)

This book is super informative if you want to learn about what mainstream scientific research says about weight loss. I really learned a lot. I wouldn’t say that there are a ton of great tips on how to lose weight or keep weight off. But, just better understanding the brains role in weight management is probably helpful along the journey. While scientific in nature, it was a relatively easy read (not too technical or medical jargon).

This is a ground breaking work. Guyenet has taken dynamite and blown up the simplistic paradigm of “calories in/calories out.” He shows that why we are fat is a much more complicated and nuanced process than previously thought and yet the solution might be incredibly simple. So simple, in fact, most people won’t believe it. He clearly shows that fatness is caused by a “set point” in the core of our brain and any attempt to reduce weight thru simple calorie restriction will most likely fail. Part of the problem is that this “set point” is influenced by how “rewarding” the food is. The better the food tastes the more the “set point” will rise. Which is why diets that focus on “great tasting/low calorie” foods ultimately fail. “Great tasting” foods don’t lower the “set point” and therefore fail in the long run. The solution is to switch to simple, whole (intact fiber), natural foods. Like fruit, vegetables, rice and beans, minimally processed without added sugar, salt and fat. Eating relatively simple, plain, bland food improves your overall health and allows your “set point” to slowly drop. One problem I had with the text was when he talked about “protein” and how it helps people feel “full”. He does not differentiate between plant protein (beans) and animal protein (which is usually loaded with saturated fat). Studies have clearly shown that vegan populations tend to be leaner on balance than meat populations (an issue he does not address). This is a thought provoking book that is fresh, insightful and relevant. This book read along with: The Starch Solution (McDougall), The China Study and Whole (Campbell). The Pleasure Trap (Goldhammer) and How Not to Die (Greger) finally provides us with a clear, practical solution to the puzzle of obesity.

I'm not sure why there are mixed reviews on this book. It is hands down the best book on how to lose weight - and why - that I've ever read. I've read all the popular authors on keto, paleo, primal etc. and this book gives a much bigger picture of what's going on in your brain and body. It put all the pieces together for me. I found it fascinating and have reread it a few times, going back to my favorite experiments that the author talks about. I had never heard anyone talking about the reward value of food or highly palatable vs less palatable foods in such a way before. These ideas changed the way I see food. Although weight loss is about calories, if you give your body simple foods, not just small portions of highly palatable foods, you'll see much better weight loss results. The experiment where the participants eat bland food and drop weight effortlessly should be shouted from the rooftops. If you've struggled with losing weight, this book will open your eyes.

As a psychologist I appreciate the depth of Dr. Guyenet"s scholarship. But the breath is even more impressive. He masterfully outlines the effects of biology, evolution, ecology (environment) and psychology to explain why 2 out 3 North Americans are overweight . And what to do about that problem!!!Topics covered include:- Genetics-Sleep.-Uncontrollable daily hassles (consideider traffic jams or a boss who dumps work on you or emails you at midnight. In other words the stress of modern life.-Exercise which is is more important that has often been noted.Please note these are all interconnected.The only one missing are the effects of the gut biome.Warning: this is high density writing, so don't try to absorb I in big doses. I suggest reading the final chapter first because there are doable steps and the rest of the book will give you the details.In the 1970s I weighed as high as 310. I applied psychological principles to lose weight over the next 30 years until I reached 210 which I have maintained for several years. I ishe I had this book as a guide back then, but most of the research has been done in the last 30 years. However it will guide me to the final 20 pounds of my journey.

Everyone trying to lose weight knows the drill. You need to eat less and exercise more. But yet doing just that does not work for the majority of us. How can that be?Then we turn to the Oracle of our ages, the Internet, and ask for guidance. And we find out, annoyingly, that people claiming to know the right answer to our problem are Legion, and most of them provide inconsistent advices. You learn that pretty much any claim regarding nutrition, physical activity and weight loss will be contested by someone somewhere with a blog. You learn about countless diets, workouts and other lifestyle changes. You even learn that some people are skeptical about the mere possibility of persistant and significant weight loss. Yet you cannot see the big picture, because you lack something very important to see it: knowledge. You get a bunch of information and people telling you that there's a study somewhere supporting their claims. But you are not told, in a coherent and global way, how all of this advices adds up.Fear not my child, for Stephan Guyenet book is an island of sound knowlege in the vast sea of information.His book starts from the very beginning, establishing to you some very basic facts, for instance, that weight loss is really about a caloric deficit. That might seem obvious, but again you might get confused and uncertain if you start reading around the internet. But he does more than merely telling you that, he tells you how in world do we know that, writting about researchers and their experiments in their quest to test this idea. He also talks about the obesity epidemics, a major US problem but a problem that is starting to affect other affluents nations relentlessly.The core part of the book is written to make you understand why it is so hard to simply follow the good advices of eating healthy food and doing physical exercise. In order to explain that, he gives you a fantastic ammount of knowledge from his field of expertise, neuroscience, and tells you about your reward system in the basal ganglia, how it is a very powerful and primitive part of your brain that responds to high density caloric content, fat, sugar and starch. He tells you of your economic choice evaluator, centered in your orbitofrontal cortex, and how things such as calorie density and convinience increases the odds that it will tell you that overeating is a good deal. He also tells you about the lipostat, a system centered in the hypotalamus that was discovered to regulate your lower bound adiposity with the help of leptin, a hormone secreted by fat tissue. He tells you what increases the set point addiposity of the lipostat and what may help you turn it down. Finally, he discusses other factors that are known to increase overeating, going in a substantial ammount of detail about the research done to figure it out. Disruption of your sleep cycle and stress control, to mention two examples.The lesson is that your brain is hardwired by many primitive, nonconscious processes to value food which makes you fat. In the enviroment of our hunter-gathers ancestors, it was a useful tool to prevent starvation. Sadly, in the enviroment of our affluent nations, it is a liability that makes us fat and sick. So you are not lacking will power when you break your New Year's resolutions, you're losing a battle uphill against powerful nonconscious agents. To quote a quote in the book:"Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that althought one can hold one's breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breath. The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty. This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight."Knowing this enables us to be more compassionate and mindful about people suffering with obesity.Of course it would not be such a good book if it ended with such a fatalistic note, without providing any way out of this conundrum. The books gives you hints along the way about some things you can do to turn the tides in the favor of the rational, conscious part of your brain which understand the correlation of type 2 diabetes and weight gain. But it ends with a very nice big picture of how your brain works and providing many advices of how you can fight it.As a person who suffers from overweight and in my personal battle to leaness, I find this book very empowering and enlightening. It is a good book for any scientifically oriented mind, and a fantastic book for any scientifically oriented mind that wants to lose weight.

Viene descritto in maniera completa ma non eccessivamente complessa la regolazione della fame-sazietà, dagli animali all'uomo preistorico fino ai giorni nostri. Una prospettiva che integra aspetti bio-psico-sociali del cibo, scritto da S. Guyenet un eccellente ricercatore americano autore e coautore di numerose pubblicazioni sulle neuroscienze

Excellent ouvrage, un must read sur la gestion de la faim et des "pulsions" alimentaires. Très bien ecrit, sourcé.

The Hungry Brain is overall a great book. It clearifys how everything in our body is influenced by our brain and how it decides about our food choice. Our todays enviroment is full of high palatable and calorie dense food. You'll need to aggravate your access to these type of foods. Combine this approach with more protein, and of course excercising, and you'll see some positive changes in your overall health!