Dr. Jason Fung

And we know that

Eating is pleasurable.

It's one of life's great pleasures.

It releases dopamine and stimulates our brain reward systems, all these sort of things.

This is the whole idea of dessert.

You're not eating it because of the physical hunger.

You're eating it because of the pleasure of eating, the emotional side of things.

That's important because a lot of the reasons we eat can be tied back to this sort of hedonic hunger, particularly for ultra-processed foods, which have been sort of engineered to maximize the pleasure of food while minimizing the sort of satiety.

And that's actually not even the whole of it because there's a third type of hunger, which is called conditioned hunger.

That is, certain things can stimulate hunger just because you associate them with food all the time.

So for example, like it's breakfast time, you eat, it's lunchtime, you eat, it's snack time, you eat, you go get a coffee, you eat, you go to a sporting event, you eat.

But it's not the physical hunger, it's the conditioned hunger that's causing this food noise, which is what a lot of people feel.

They walk around and they don't understand why they have to eat all the time.

Well, it's because you've been trained to eat all the time.

And that's the thing.

This is the story that we've been sold is that weight loss, weight gain is all about willpower and discipline.

So therefore, if we are fatter now in 2026 than we are in, you know, 1966, it's because we have less willpower.

But that's not true.

If you think about the types of hunger, you have the homeostatic hunger, which hasn't changed too much.

But think about the hedonic hunger.