Appestat

Appestat is a brain control system involved in optimizing appetite for foods. Healthy appestat is the key to a healthy weight, healthy fat levels, healthy nutrition, etc.

The term appestat can be best understood by an analogy to a thermostat. When the brain choses a specific level of fat as its optimum target, no amount of dieting can prevent that quest. Any form of weight loss diet is bound to result in perpetual misery and/or the ultimate failure. The degree of misery is proportional to the difference between the setting of the appestat and the dream target weight or target level of fat.

The term body set weight (BSW) is used to denote the target weight aimed at by the appestat.

See: Optimum diet

This glossary entry is used to explain texts in SuperMemo Guru series on memory, learning, creativity, and problem solving