There is no better time clock than your own body. Have you noticed how efficient your body is at letting you know if it is time for breakfast, snack, lunch or dinner?

It must be understood, however, that people generally have two reasons for eating. The first is hunger and the second is appetite. Please note the emphasis that these two are not one and the same. Hunger is completely different from appetite.

Let’s take hunger first. Hunger is defined as the ‘need for food’. Your body lets you know that you are running low on fuel and that a meal is needed to help the body provide the necessary energy it requires to perform an activity. Hunger instinctively protects the body from depleting energy reserves.

Furthermore, hunger is a sensation produced by your body as a result of chemical changes in your body. When your body has reached a low level of glucose in the blood stream which is a natural fluctuation several hours after eating, the body reacts in terms of ‘hunger pangs’ to let you know that it is time to ingest food to regain the balance of glucose level in the blood.

Appetite, on the other hand, is defined as the ‘desire for food’.

Have you ever heard of the term ‘respondent conditioning’? A Russian physiologist named Iven Petrovich Pavlov who won the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1904 coined this term. Through an experiment done with his dogs, Pavlov proved that a person can be trained to respond emotionally or physically to a thing or stimulus that is plainly reminiscent to them of something that they love or hate. In the experiment, Pavolv created the strong association of food and the sound of a ringing bell among his dogs. He proved that once the correlation is established, even an absence of food after the ringing of the bells still resulted to the dogs salivating in anticipation of the food.

In the same way, appetite may be explained as a conditioned response to food. Imagine seeing a sumptuous photograph of a juicy steak or smelling the smoky scent of barbecues on the grill. These stimuli easily result to salivation and a tingling sensation in the pit of your stomach that aggressively urges you to grab a bite. That is appetite.

They say a practical example of the difference between hunger and appetite is this. If you are hungry, you eat one hamburger. It is appetite that can trigger another order of a hamburger just because they look delicious or smell scrumptious.