Why We Get Hungry

The New Yorker dives into a recent study about what makes people hungry and discovered that hunger has very little to due with our need for food. The main takeaway is that hunger is often triggered by our environment. We see a commercial for food, or a bag of chips on the counter. We eat snacks while watching TV, so watching TV makes us want a snack. Also interesting is the diminishing returns we get from pleasurable food.

"The first few times people eat a new, pleasurable food, their brain’s reward systems light up" "over days, what starts to happen is the strength of the reward response to the actual consumption of the food slowly diminishes, but the reward response to the signal, the cue predicting the food, grows stronger,”
 
So basically the new food is exciting and gets less exciting with every subsequent consumption of it but our brain still seeks the same level of excitement as the first time. Then there's this..

"Making this worse, if we break down and have a snack—and if it happens to be something that we like—we not only become slightly more hungry in the first minutes of eating but we will grow hungry again sooner."