Recently at friends' place. We were grilling. Pork neck, chops, Berner sausages — the ones stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon. Everything sat there and you could help yourself. And it was damn good. So I helped myself. And again. And again.
I knew I was full. At some point something somewhere in the back started speaking up. But the next plate was already loaded before the signal arrived.
In a restaurant it's different, but not better. There I order two dishes instead of one. Not always, but often enough. Because the menu sounds good and I can't decide. Or won't.
It also depends on how fast you eat
When I eat with people I rarely see, I eat slowly. We talk, I put the fork down, there are pauses. At some point I notice that I've had enough. But with my sister — even in a restaurant — we eat fast. Very fast. Satiety isn't a switch that flips, it's a relay race through the whole body — from chewing to stomach distension to hormones that are only released in the small intestine. Anyone who eats fast overruns the first group of runners before the second can even take the baton.
The dessert stomach
Stuffed from the main course. Not another bite. Then dessert arrives and suddenly there's room again. The brain reacts to the new flavor — sweet after salty — and the reward system kicks back in. Science calls it sensory-specific satiety. I call it cheating.
What really annoys me
The body has a whole arsenal of satiety signals — stomach receptors that report to the brain via the vagus nerve, hormones like CCK that get released in the small intestine when fat and protein arrive. Sounds very well thought out.
It isn't.
Because the body is optimized for storing, not for throwing away. Yes, part of the excess energy is lost as heat, with protein even a considerable amount. But the bulk of it is hoarded. There is no switch that says: That was too much, won't be stored, will pass through.
Our body isn't built for this world. It comes from a time when food was scarce and unpredictable. The fact that everything is available around the clock today — full fridge, supermarket around the corner, delivery service on the phone — it can't handle that. Not because it's stupid, but because the world has changed faster than biology can keep up.
Today I stand in front of a grill at friends' place and something inside me thinks: Take everything, who knows when there'll be food again.
There will be food again tomorrow morning. But it doesn't know that.