Putting my leg behind my head makes me very hungry

It's true. I didn't really realize this until about half an hour ago. I was teaching class, standing at the front of the classroom leading a discussion. Somebody brought up the example of eating food at a buffet (I can't even remember what the example was supposed to illustrate; shows how hungry I am), and my stomach began to growl involuntarily. Gosh, I hope nobody else in the room heard it. At any rate, this is the image that immediately formed in my mind:

Given that I am not usually this hungry at this time of the day (I generally have a light lunch, which sees me through pretty much the whole afternoon), and given the addition of Ekapada Sirsasana to my practice the last couple of days, the most viable explanation for my increased hunger would be that doing leg-behind-the-head postures stimulates the appetite much more than usual. Actually, I've also written about the effects of LBH postures on the appetite before in the past, come to think of it (see, for example, this post).  So I guess none of this is really news.

But still, it's an interesting phenomenon. I don't have any yoga books on hand right now to look up, to pinpoint the exact explanation for this phenomenon; I'm guessing that being very deep forward bends, LBH postures stimulate the digestive fire more than ordinary forward bends, which results in greater appetites and greater hunger.

But then I hear stories about yogis of old who could live on just one fistful of food a day. How's that possible? Well, either (a) they have attained the siddhi of being able to survive on very little food while putting forth great exertion (as a result of their yogic practices, their bodies can metabolize/extract nutrients from food much more efficiently than those of common mortals), or (b) they simply don't do LBH postures!

I wonder which it is? Any of you out there have similar experiences with LBH postures and your digestive fires? Did you find yourself gaining significant amounts of weight after beginning to practice LBH postures? If you have anything to say about these matters, I would love to hear from you. In the meantime, I think I'm going to go get some food...   

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