What if hunger does not arise only in the stomach?
Overweight is usually understood as the result of diet, lack of exercise, habits, and predisposition. Cravings are often considered a problem of discipline, metabolism, or the psyche. But what if that explanation is not always enough? What if environmental factors interfere with hunger, satiety, and weight more strongly than we realize? In Dicke Luft, we therefore ask a question that at first sounds unusual: could indoor air be an underestimated amplifying factor in overweight and disturbed hunger regulation?
When the Body No Longer Knows Satiety
In the book, we describe how Monika suffered early on from severe disturbances in eating behavior. As a child, she felt too fat even though she was objectively underweight. Later this developed into a constant feeling of hunger that no longer felt like normal appetite, but like the sense of starving despite a full stomach. It was not uncommon for her to eat so much that she felt sick and then vomit, not in order to lose weight, but in order to be able to keep eating.
This is one of the most disturbing points in the book: it was not about enjoyment, convenience, or a lack of willpower. It was about a body that apparently no longer knew a reliable boundary between hunger and satiety.
What if It Is Not Only Food That Is Involved?
This is exactly where the basic idea of the book begins. Air usually appears to us as mere background. Yet it is the most important component of our metabolism. Numerous gaseous or aerosol-bound substances from indoor air can enter the body through the respiratory tract. These include substances that are known to interfere with the hormonal system and can disturb the feeling of hunger in a wide variety of ways.
The book does not draw a quick conclusion from this, but follows a search for clues. The idea is not that nutrition is unimportant. It is that there may be other influencing factors affecting hunger, satiety, and weight. This is exactly what the corresponding info box takes up: several epidemiological and experimental studies suggest that chronic exposure to air pollutants could be associated with an increased risk of overweight and metabolic disorders.
If that is true, then air would not only be something we breathe, but also a possible pathway through which substances intervene in hormonal, metabolic, and neural regulatory systems.
Why This Topic Occupies Us So Much
Overweight is publicly visible and therefore especially quickly becomes morally charged. Anyone who gains weight is told to move more. Anyone who is constantly hungry is told to learn self-control. Anyone who does not lose weight is easily seen as undisciplined. The book does not contradict that simplification with a new simple answer, but with an uncomfortable question: what if under certain conditions the body no longer regulates itself the way it should? And what if we have so far overlooked a relevant part of those conditions?
Why We Are Writing About This
Dicke Luft is not a diet guide and not an attempt to reinterpret overweight across the board. It is a personal search for clues. A story about hunger, despair, false explanations, and the gradual realization that the body may be responding to more than calories and movement alone.
The book connects personal experience with scientific indications that air pollutants, endocrine disruptors, and indoor exposures may be linked to metabolic disorders. It invites readers to view overweight and cravings not only as a question of eating, but also to think about the room in which a person lives, sleeps, and breathes.
Perhaps Part of the Answer Lies Not Only on the Plate
Perhaps in many cases overweight is exactly what medicine currently understands it to be: a complex disorder of bodily regulation whose specific causes often cannot be clearly determined. Perhaps hunger disorders and cravings are often shaped above all by diet, genetics, the psyche, and lifestyle. But perhaps there are also cases in which polluted indoor spaces and certain environmental substances play a larger part than previously assumed.
