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If you get a chance, check out the latest edition of Time Magazine, featuring a special health report on The Science of Appetite.

The special online section features a bevy of fascinating reads, including:

The Science of Appetite: Why we’re hardwired to crave the wrong things and why chalking obesity up to a simple case of a lack of willpower isn’t the answer.

Just why is our appetite so powerful a driver of our behavior, and, more important, how can we bring it to heel? If that question has long defied easy answers, it’s no wonder. Understanding a single biological unit—the heart, the lungs—is hard enough. Understanding a process as complex as appetite—one that involves taste, smell, sight, texture, brain chemistry, gut chemistry, metabolism and, most confounding of all, psychology—is exponentially harder. But science is trying.

What the World Eats: What’s on family dinner tables in fifteen different homes around the globe? Photographs by Peter Menzel from the book “Hungry Planet”

Fat Chance: Why the reality show The Biggest Loser can’t be called The Longest Maintainer

Ryan Benson, 38, an actor who works for a DVD distributor in Los Angeles, lost 55 kg to win the first season [of The Biggest Loser] in January 2005 but says he regained 14.5 kg within five days simply by drinking water. Matt Hoover, 31, a motivational speaker based in Seattle, had a 7-kg rebound within a day of winning Season 2. Last season’s runner-up, Kai Hibbard, 28, an aerobics instructor in Alaska who says she spent the night before her final weigh-in hopping in and out of a sauna for six hours, consumed only sugar-free Jell-O for several days and wolfed down asparagus, which is a natural diuretic. “It’s amazing the things you learn in a weight-loss competition,” she says.

What Makes You Eat More Food?: Seven ways our bodies tell us we’re hungry–even when we’re not

Notes on a Food-Free Diet: An intrepid reporter’s firsthand account of how he survived for 48 hours on nothing but a liquid mixture of lemons, cayenne pepper and maple syrup

I’ll tell you what happens: I get hungry. And cranky. And cold and light-headed. My back hurts, and I’m still light-headed. I’m far too aware of my tongue—like its taste buds are so desperate for stimulation it might slither out of my mouth and find something itself.