This is very interesting. When I was dieting I noticed that a taste of food (but not diet coke which I drink tons of) was often enough to give me more physical and mental energy, but that it also made me feel more hungry, possibly because it set off the stomach acids ready for digestion. I wondered at the time if it could be explained by glycogen. Glycogen as I understand it is how the body stores readily available sugars that are not in the blood but where they’re a lot more easily broken down than in fat. (It’s also heavier than fat per calorie so it explains a lot of high early weight loss effects). I thought that maybe tasting food prompted the body to release some glycogen into blood sugar so it had the energy for digestion.
Of course this doesn’t mean that distractibility isn’t a Thing too. Will power is almost certainly one of those things that’s ‘a bit more complicated than that’…
This is very interesting. When I was dieting I noticed that a taste of food (but not diet coke which I drink tons of) was often enough to give me more physical and mental energy, but that it also made me feel more hungry, possibly because it set off the stomach acids ready for digestion. I wondered at the time if it could be explained by glycogen. Glycogen as I understand it is how the body stores readily available sugars that are not in the blood but where they’re a lot more easily broken down than in fat. (It’s also heavier than fat per calorie so it explains a lot of high early weight loss effects). I thought that maybe tasting food prompted the body to release some glycogen into blood sugar so it had the energy for digestion.
Of course this doesn’t mean that distractibility isn’t a Thing too. Will power is almost certainly one of those things that’s ‘a bit more complicated than that’…