Minecraft wiki entry for Hunger_management, associated text: There are three hunger variables you need to worry about: The visible hunger bar, and two hidden values which are called "saturation" and "exhaustion". Hunger and saturation range from 0 to 20 (hunger is shown as ), but saturation cannot exceed your hunger (for example, if you have 17 ( × 8.5) hunger, you can have at most 17 saturation). Exhaustion ranges from 0 to 4. As you move about, fight, mine, etc, exhaustion accumulates. In order, common activities that will exhaust you the most are: Healing damage (most of a food point per health point), a "sprint jump", sprinting any distance, attacking monsters or receiving damage (from any source), and jumping. More specific values can be found in the table.