When you eat hoodia, the saying goes, your hunger will simply be gone, gone for around six hours. During those six hours, you won't crave anything. You really won't want to eat at all. The food still smells good, as usual, and they taste the same if you eat them, but you don't want to eat them! At least that's what the hoodia advocates claim will happen.



To understand how all this works, you have to understand what "hunger" really is in the first place. Hunger is just an illusion. It's a signal in your brain, a chemical message that causes you to feel certain feelings and, ultimately, act on them.

Your body creates the illusion of hunger even when you're not really needing calories. And your body, like mine, doesn't know when to turn it off.

The hunger signal is only turned off when your hypothalamus thinks you've eaten enough food. Your hypothalamus, part of your body's endocrine system, decides this by sensing the rise of sugar (glucose) in your blood. Eat enough carbohydrates, and your blood sugar rises, which convinces your hypothalamus to tell your brain that you're no longer hungry. This is why eating an apple is such an effective appetite suppressant.

Normally, to get your hypothalamus to turn off the hunger switch, you'd have to eat a moderate amount of food. And your hypothalamus isn't very quick on the draw either: it takes around 20 minutes to figure out what you've eaten, and by that time, you've probably eaten another 800 calories. So by the time your hunger signal gets turned off, you've already overeaten yet again.

Hoodia, however, contains a chemical that gets picked up by your hypothalamus which thinks it's glucose. And as it turns out, this chemical is reportedly 10,000 times more potent than glucose in triggering the chemical receptors in your hypothalamus, and so it only takes a tiny bit of this chemical to trigger the cancellation of your hunger signals.

Let me say this another way: eat this chemical, and your hypothalamus thinks you've just wolfed down three plates of food at the local buffet. Your hunger is abruptly cancelled. You just don't feel hungry anymore. Everything else is fine: there are no known side effects. But you simply don't feel like eating. At least that's what the hoodia companies explain you should experience.

Consuming hoodia is surprisingly simple: slice off a piece of the succulent, peel off the thorns, and just start chewing on it. You don't even need to swallow it. The taste is rather bitter by most Americans' palettes, but after several minutes of chewing, you've already started absorbing the chemical. Guess what? Your hunger is vanishing with each passing moment. Of course the Hoodia available to the western consumer is in the preferred from of tablets, capsules or liquid.

The San Tribesmen, the original discovers of the plant, also say it makes you feel stronger, more energetic, and more focused. Nobody complains of any side effects whatsoever, and the plant has been chewed for literally thousand of years by various generations of the San, with no ill effects known whatsoever.

For most people, that's the whole solution right there. Turn off the hunger and almost anybody can lose weight. If you have absolutely no craving for food, and your body isn't tricking you into eating another tub of ice cream by creating the illusion of hunger, then you've got the problem solved.

If you add in a bit of exercise, say, 30 minutes of walking each day, suddenly you're boosting your metabolism naturally and you're not stuffing your face with twice as many calories as you burned during the walk.

If you could turn off your hunger, you could lose weight without needing military discipline. I hate to say the word "automatically," because I think you still have to be responsible in how you approach your diet, but turning off the hunger is as close to automatic weight loss as you can get.