Your Cravings: SOLVED

Do you ever wish there was a pill that would duplicate the full, satisfied feeling you get after eating a hearty meal? That Jetsons-like technology doesn't exist yet, but a new study in Cell Metabolism suggests that a pair of gut hormones may hold the keys to feeling full—and they could someday come in capsule form.

Researchers at Imperial College London and GlaxoSmithKline used magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see how peptide YY (PYY) and glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) affected participants' brain centers associated with appetite.

When the researchers administered the hormones—which your gut naturally releases into the bloodstream after a meal—to people who had fasted, they saw brain activity in the appetite centers diminish.

More from MensHealth.com: Why You're Still Hungry—After You Just Ate!

"These findings suggest that the gut hormones PYY and GLP-1 could be used to reduce the amount of food we eat by tricking the brain into thinking we have just eaten,” says co-author Waljit Dhillo, Ph.D., an endocrinology professor at Imperial College.

The findings could lead to new obesity treatments—a variant of  GLP-1 is already used to treat diabetes—but both hormones are short-acting. A successful pill would need to offer a long-lasting option, meaning more time and research, Dhillo says.

More from MensHealth.com: 8 Ways to Tame a Raging Appetite

In the meantime, control your appetite by eating regularly. This prevents your blood glucose from falling too low in between meals, which also activates the brain's hunger centers, Dhillo says.

And being less hungry not only means you're likely to eat less, but that you'll also eat better: Dhillo's team found that even seeing pictures of high-calorie food activated ravenous participants' hunger centers. But people who didn't feel hungry were less tempted by the pictures.

Here's another quick way to trick your body into feeling full: Keep chewing. A 2009 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that people who took smaller bites and chewed for an average of 9 seconds before swallowing ate significantly less food than those who chewed for an average of 3 seconds. That's because your body believes you've eaten enough based on how long you've had food in your mouth, not the amount of food in your belly, according to the study.

More from MensHealth.com: 7 Strategies to Satisfy Hunger

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