You know – well, most of the time – when you are hungry. You know when your stomach is empty, and you can feel it and hear it churning and you may feel that your stomach is either tight or empty. If you don’t eat or don’t eat well for a certain amount of time, you become cranky, irritable and have a hard time concentrating. Your blood sugar may drop and you could even get the shakes, which aren’t fun at all. Hunger is a really interesting sensation that is divided into several different parts and you can read all about it here.
You feel hunger in lots of different ways, so why is that when you are thirsty, you mostly feel the thirst in your throat?
It’s because of your kidneys.
It’s not true that you can just drink water to make your hunger go away, although you can replace some drinks that are high in calories with water to control your diet. However, the mechanisms that control your hunger and your thirst in your body are different to each other.
What happens is that when you don’t drink anything, after a while your kidneys release two things. These are called renin and angiotensin.. Together, they are a hormone-system and they regulate both blood pressure and the balance of fluid in your body.
These two do several things to make sure that the water in your kidneys gets retained and reduces the production of saliva. Your brain immediately thinks that you are thirsty and you go get a glass of water or something to drink.
That is why you don’t feel thirst in your stomach. Ideally, you should keep yourself hydrated to the point where you can perform well at the gym and maybe even improve your reaction times. You never know what drinking your eight glasses of water a day can do for you until you do it.
