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To Eat or Not to Eat

In: Philosophy and Psychology

Submitted By rlandry82
Words 1202
Pages 5
To Eat or Not To Eat?
Rachel Landry
PSY/240
March 24, 2013

To Eat or Not To Eat Welcome to our group session today, I am Rachel Landry and I will be the counselor leading this group. My background is working with people who have issues with food, all different types of issues. During today’s group I will be addressing some of the facts and myths around what causes people to eat or not to eat. We will address some of the misconceptions about hunger and satiety. The first thing I want to say to everyone is that eating is a behavior. We eat because we have to but we do it because we enjoy eating and it makes us happy, however some people eat and it becomes unhealthy after a certain point. Some people do not eat because they fear it becoming unhealthy and that in turn is also unhealthy. It is important that you all understand the physiological factors and how all of the research that has been done and is currently being done is making headway for new discoveries about hunger and health. Some of the most common misconceptions about hunger and satiety is the belief that hunger is caused by an empty stomach. An empty stomach does not constitute the feeling of hunger, the feeling of hunger more than likely comes from fact that your body is trained to tell you that you are hungry at certain points. The idea that satiety is caused by feeling full is also a common misconception, reasonably the gastrointestinal tract is where these feelings come from. The hypothalamus is what controls the energy metabolism; it does not control your eating but there is a chemical that is released that are called peptides. There is a peptide that is solely responsible for increasing the appetite. Peptides are small chains of amino acids that function as neurotransmitters and hormones. The food that you ingest works with the receptors in the gastrointestinal tract and causes

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