Does a growling stomach/hunger actually means you SHOULD still eat more??

pumpkinpocalypse

lemurcat12 wrote: »

What is your goal? If to maintain, then yes, it would have been a good idea, or simply working in more calories during the day if you prefer not to eat at night. But you aren't trying to lose more and are trying to find you maintenance, right? You want to figure out a way to eat where you are able to eat your calories and also aren't feeling hungry.
Hunger can be misleading for some of us, both thinking we are hungry when we likely are not and thinking we aren't hungry when we need food. If you've not been eating normally for a while--overrestricting or dieting or gaining or losing weight--it's very common to not be in touch with what is hunger and what isn't, and it would likely be good to try and figure out what your maintenance is, how many calories you need, and then eat in a way that gets in those calories and makes you feel satisfied.

IME, the rumbling stomach often is not really a sign of hunger (although I can be for people), so if I'd just eaten and eaten plenty during the day I'd ignore it. BUT you said you'd only had 1400 calories and that's quite low for maintenance at your age even at your size, so I think eating more would have been smart, or maybe simply trying to work it into your day. Your post made me worry a bit that you are having trouble convincing yourself that it's a good idea to raise the calories.

I'm in the process of transitionning to maintenance, so i'm upping my calories by 100 a week or so. This week's goal is 1500. I'm going very gradually even though i'm on the edge because I find it hard to hit a high number of calories in one day so suddenly so I'm being realistic, meaning that it stays a bit low for now, so i have a chance to reach my goal.

But yes, you're right in your second paragraph, it has gotten a bit harder to tell appart when I'm hungry or not actually hungry! I had been on low 1200 calories for several months (around 6 or more) so now i can feel hungry almost all the time...But there are times, like at my scheduled eating hours, where I KNOW that *that* particular hunger signal is ''real''. Other ones during the day are mostly just ''eh i could use a snack since i thought of food a second ago/saw a food pic/etc''. I think the whole intuitive eating part of maintenance is gonna be the hardest to manage when it will have been a long time (thinking months/years on maintenance), hopefully without needing to track precisely haha.

punkrockgoth

In my experience, I have found that I am happier and healthier if I let myself eat when I am hungry. I have a tendency to get boredom munchies and I combat that with water and sugar free gum, but sometimes I am hungry. So I eat something small. I try to lean towards a low calorie clean snack, but sometimes I do reach for the 100 calories of chocolate. If I go over my calories, it's not the end of the world. Everything is going to be just fine. Some days, I'm just hungrier than others.

If I find that I am hungry a lot, tired and cranky, then I readjust my calorie goal, bumping it up by 50 or 100 calories until I am not feeling starving, but still losing weight.

pumpkinpocalypse

chelsy0587 wrote: »

Maybe your goals on MFP should be adjusted... do you know your LBM %?? If you do they you should be able to figure out how much protein your body really does need rather than a goal set by an "average".

My BF% is 18.73... so that brings LBM to 81.27%. Any recs on how much protein that requires?

lemurcat12

Multiply .81 with your weight and that's your protein goal in grams.

You probably don't need that much, but many people find protein satiating, and if you want to build/maintain muscle it certainly can't hurt.

shaumom

pumpkinpocalypse wrote: »

Does anyone have tips and tricks on how to make tracking easier, simpler and faster? So it can be intuitive enough and not require a constant access to a phone/notebook? I already write often enough in my food diary...
OR in that case would it be fine to just track macros ''on average'' without being especially precise, while still improving the surprise hunger pans problem?
Thanks a bunch!!

This is something I did that I found helpful. There is a site called http://nutritiondata.self.com
If you get a free account there, you can enter your own recipes and if you enter the foods in them (you can write them AND log the foods), the site will tell you the entire nutritional make up of your recipe for you.

What I did, instead, was to get typical meals I eat, or even sometimes a day's worth of meals that I might typically eat, and I entered the entire thing in as one 'recipe' and checked to see how it stacked up.

It was really useful to see what I was low in, or high in. And pretty quickly, I could look at the meals I was eating a day and I'd know what extra foods I should add in that day, to make up for whatever shortfalls there were, you know?

shiftynj

I used to use Daily Burn's tracker and I found it was more accurate/reliable and had fewer entries with wildly disparate amounts for the same food. However, there was not the community aspect of MFP. Maybe I should food and exercise track over there, and just copy the aggregate numbers here.