Have you ever experienced a situation where, after not eating for a day, you surprisingly find yourself lacking the usual appetite? Perhaps you had to skip a meal at work, expecting hunger to strike later in the day, only to discover that your desire for food has diminished, and you could go even longer without eating. This intriguing phenomenon can leave you wondering about the underlying reasons behind this loss of appetite.
In this article, we will delve into the causes of not feeling hungry after not eating all day and explore the various factors that can contribute to this phenomenon such as stress, illness, medication, aging, or stomach disorders. These factors can affect your appetite and disrupt normal hunger signals in the body. There are multiple elements that can disrupt your usual hunger signals and dampen your appetite. We will also discuss the symptoms to watch out for when it comes to hunger and provide insights on how to navigate this situation effectively.
What Causes Loss of Appetite After Not Eating All Day?
Loss of appetite can occur after not eating for an extended period of time, even if you would typically feel famished. There are several reasons why you may experience a lack of appetite in such situations. Here are some common causes and related information to consider:
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Stress
Adrenaline serves several purposes in the human body. The one most know about is the “fight or flight” response. When you get stressed, your body reacts as if it’s in danger, which as a result, causes your brain to release chemicals, including adrenaline, which makes your heart beat faster and slow your digestion. This in turn can curb your appetite, but typically only lasts for a short period of time. If you’re stressed over a longer period of time, your body releases cortisol, which makes you hungrier, especially for high-calorie foods.
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Cold or Flu
When you aren’t feeling well, your immune system gets put into overdrive, releasing chemicals called cytokines that can make you feel tired and not hungry. Your body is telling you that you need to simply rest so that you can restore your energy levels to fight whatever is making you ill.
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Medication
There are many medications on the market today that contain the side effect of appetite loss. This is common when medications pass through a person’s stomach and digestive tract.
The most common medications and treatments often cause a low appetite:
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Antibiotics
- Muscle relaxants
- Drugs that treat anxiety
- Drugs that treat high blood pressure
- Sedatives
- Immunotherapy
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Hunger as Fatigue
An additional cause for a loss of appetite is that you actually are hungry, you just do not realize it. You most likely are not hungry in your stomach. But have you ever felt tired, grumpy, cranky, scatterbrained, lightheaded or irritable and notice these problems improve as soon as you eat?
In this case, your body is telling you that it needs food– just for whatever reason, the signal is not coming through your stomach. Instead of waiting for hunger pangs, start paying close attention to your overall mood. Are you quick to snap at someone? Are you finding it hard to concentrate at work? It may just be that it’s been a little too long since your last meal.
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Aging
A lack of appetite can be more common in older adults. In fact, between 15% and 30% of older people have less of an appetite than they used to. This can happen for a number of reasons.
- As you age, your digestion slows down, leading you to have a full stomach for longer periods of time.
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Your sense of smell, taste and vision gets weaker, making food less appealing.
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Hormonal changes or chronic illness can curb your appetite.
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Increased or decreased use of medications can contribute to a decreased appetite.
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Stomach Disorders
If you’ve recently noticed diarrhea, nausea, stomach pains or bloating after eating a meal, you may experience a loss of appetite. This is often associated with stomach disorders. Some stomach disorders that may have these as symptoms are:
- Irritable bowel syndrome
- Gallstones
- Constipation
- Food poisoning
- Giardiasis
- Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
- Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD)
- Food intolerances, such as lactose or gluten
- Colitis
- Crohn’s disease
How Does Adrenaline and The Process of Lipolysis Affect Your Appetite After Not Eating?
What adrenaline does is drive a process called lipolysis. This is the process your body undertakes when it wants to break down your fat reserves to give itself some energy. Lipolysis also prevents you from burning through your muscle when you don’t eat for a while.
Lipolysis likely occurs as an evolutionary function. Early humans did not have what we have today. There was no intense agriculture. People didn’t have easy access to food. Instead, we were hunter/gatherers, which means there would be periods where earlier humans just couldn’t access food.
That’s where lipolysis probably started kicking in for those early humans. Their bodies would burn through their fat reserves so that they could keep going during long periods. The elimination of hunger pangs that comes from this would distract from the issue and ensure the humans could focus on getting food rather than how much he or she needed food.
This is something most of us don’t experience today. You probably have access to food even if you don’t eat for a while. Even so, not eating triggers the same sort of response and your body goes into a sort of survival mode if it does not receive food over a
