Ghrelin is colloquially known as the "hunger hormone", it's a hormone that tells our brain that we're hungry and we need to find food. It increases our appetite, bringing us to overeat and consume more calories than energy expenditure from our [[Basal-Metabolic-Rate]] and exercise, making us store fat. As ghrelin increases, hunger becomes more difficult to handle, and you feel this "pain" that feels like it's impossible to control. The better we control ghrelin, the better our fat loss ¹.

What's also interesting is that ghrelin, or the feeling of hunger comes in waves. We've all had those days where we're too busy and we just skip lunch or dinner. After a couple of hours, the hunger dissipates and it's as if we've had our meal. The reason is that, we've trained our body to eat at particular times and ghrelin spikes during it. So we have to "ride the wave" and ghrelin will eventually lower. One of the key things I've observed about eating is that there also might be a psychological aspect where the next meal that we have (after missing one), we have this feeling to compensate. We do this by saying "I haven't had lunch/dinner and I'm starving", and we overeat because our brain decides that we haven't eaten and so we feel like we need to compensate for our "lost meal". It's a vicious cycle and we need to fight that psychological battle, ride that wave, and enjoy the journey.

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