How hungry are you, most days? Are you comfortable being hungry?

Dofflin

Well I think there is a difference between hunger, appetite and low blood sugar/dehydration.

Hunger:
your body is burning too much muscle, eat more.

Appetite:
Craving something specific (sometimes you actually need it though), emotional eating, or stimulated by the taste or smell of another food. Just try to pay attention to how your body reacts to each meal so you know better next time

Low blood sugar/ dehydration:
You feel dizzy, grumpy and can't concentrate. Drink more water, eat more frequently, change your macros, etc

ohmscheeks

If you went that long without eating, you probably know what true hunger feels like. At 1200 cal, my "hunger" feelings are really just me wanting the taste of my favorite foods. Lately, I end up indulging myself if I feel "hungry"(smh). When I was more on the wagon, I would test the feeling by grabbing a food that was healthy, but not a favorite (e.g. raw carrots). I usually ended up putting it back, lol (wasn't hungry, just wanted chocolate).

judiness101

Dofflin wrote: »

Hunger:
your body is burning too much muscle, eat more.

What?

FlyingMolly

I've been hungry every day since I started tracking again, but I'm not that bothered by it. Like you, I interpret it to mean that my body wants more calories in order to maintain its current weight, so I must be eating at a deficit to be hungry.

Filling foods help--I'm a big believer in a high-fat diet--but I tend to eat too much when I "snack," so I've never done well with frequent small meals. I prefer to eat three times per day and make friends with the hunger I feel in between. It's not severe or problematic, and if that changes it's not like I don't know how to find the kitchen.

Kalikel

Eat more healthy food. You'd be hard-pressed to go hungry eating only fruits and veggies. You can fill up quite nicely on fruits and veggies for precious few calories.

Nobody ever has to be hungry to lose weight.

That said, a little hunger is not the end of the world. It's OK to be hungry sometimes when you're losing weight.

Hunger is not much of a problem for me, generally. Resisting the temptation to eat what is shouldn't was a much harder thing than waiting 20-30 minutes for a wave of hunger to pass.

I kind of think of it as a sign that my body wants more energy and am like, "Well, if you need energy, please use up some of the fat. Thanks and have a nice day."

leica0000

Sometimes when I'm in a bad mood I like feeling hungry, I'm not sure why. Other times it aggravates me. I guess going for food is such an innate primitive instinct what it will never go away.

I drink a sparkling water called Badoit when I feel hungry, or have a cup of rooibos tea. That works pretty well I find. Especially drinking the sparkling water. I guess the theory is that the bubbles expand in your tummy as they get warmer and that makes your stomach feel full.

SergeantSausage

When I run, I'm tired.

When I lift, I'm weak (lift to muscle failure) and sore

When I eat for health, diet fatigue (where's my donuts and pizza!?)

When I eat for weight loss, I'm hungry.


These are the facts of my life... and yet I do all four simultaneously.

If it were comfortable, everyone would be doing it, right?

The more, uncomfortable you can be, the farther ahead of the Average Schmo you will be. In everything. Everything.

Kalikel

SergeantSausage wrote: »

When I run, I'm tired.

When I lift, I'm weak (lift to muscle failure) and sore

When I eat for health, diet fatigue (where's my donuts and pizza!?)

When I eat for weight loss, I'm hungry.


These are the facts of my life... and yet I do all four simultaneously.

If it were comfortable, everyone would be doing it, right?

The more, uncomfortable you can be, the farther ahead of the Average Schmo you will be. In everything. Everything.

Soopatt

"If it were comfortable, everyone would be doing it, right?"

Yep, yep and yep. The easy path was getting fat in the first place. It certainly should be more challenging to get rid of it. Not because we deserve to be punished or anything like that, but because we need to eat less than our bodies would like.

I agree about exercise too. I love how it feels - AFTER. During? It is hard work and it often hurts.

When I have gotten rid of it, in about September or October of this year by my calculations (I tell my friends that they must excuse my choices, I have a "temporary case of the fats") I will shove a hot poker up the nose of the first person who tells me "I wish it was as easy for me to lose weight as it was for you"

Then I will start the challenge of keeping it off.

TimothyFish

I tend to be hungry in the mornings, even after eating breakfast. It makes it difficult to focus. After dinner, things get better.

liftlovelunge

FlyingMolly wrote: »

I've been hungry every day since I started tracking again, but I'm not that bothered by it. Like you, I interpret it to mean that my body wants more calories in order to maintain its current weight, so I must be eating at a deficit to be hungry.

Filling foods help--I'm a big believer in a high-fat diet--but I tend to eat too much when I "snack," so I've never done well with frequent small meals. I prefer to eat three times per day and make friends with the hunger I feel in between. It's not severe or problematic, and if that changes it's not like I don't know how to find the kitchen.

I have the same problem when I snack - especially at work. I don't think it would be a bad idea for me to eat three times a day! How do you distribute your calories throughout the day?

To respond to the initial topic, hunger is only a problem for me if I'm about to do some resistance training. I work out at 5am and a couple weeks back I had a small salad for dinner around 6pm and nothing else. I was pretty hungry when I went to bed, which I felt fine with, but come 5am and my arms were nearly falling out from under me by the time I was doing my second or third set of push-ups.

I'm also guilty of eating when I'm bored/confusing hunger with boredom which is something I'm working on.

iLoveMyPitbull1225

Well, for me, there's a huge difference between being a little hungry and being so ravenous that I feel like I could eat an entire Chinese buffet, because when I get to feeling that way, that's usually exactly what happens and I feel terrible about letting myself get to that point. It's a delicate balance for me, as I'm sure it is for everyone, and we all handle it a bit differently.

I agree with a previous poster that said filling foods help, like fruits, veggies, proteins and fats. I am also a fan of smaller more frequent meals, including breakfast, morning snack, lunch, pre work out snack and then (most of my calories for the day) dinner post workout. Planning and meal prepping are such great tricks to staying on track and not letting myself get too hungry without a snack.

Then there is the post dinner before bed hunger, which I usually just ignore. I ALWAYS feel fine in the morning when I wake up, and glad I didn't give in.

Gska17

Dofflin wrote: »

Well I think there is a difference between hunger, appetite and low blood sugar/dehydration.

Hunger:
your body is burning too much muscle, eat more.

Appetite:
Craving something specific (sometimes you actually need it though), emotional eating, or stimulated by the taste or smell of another food. Just try to pay attention to how your body reacts to each meal so you know better next time

Low blood sugar/ dehydration:
You feel dizzy, grumpy and can't concentrate. Drink more water, eat more frequently, change your macros, etc

I like this! It makes sense to me.

unrelentingminx

iLoveMyPitbull1225 wrote: »

Then there is the post dinner before bed hunger, which I usually just ignore. I ALWAYS feel fine in the morning when I wake up, and glad I didn't give in.

I get this. Most nights around 10pm I'm looking for something sweet even though I'm not hungry as such. Some nights I'll give in to it, some nights I ignore it, and on other nights I'm so tired from the gym I've fallen asleep on the sofa before making it to the fridge.

LisaTcan

I used to be hungry all the time. However I made a couple of changes that work for me.

- I began lifting in addition to cardio
- I use the TDEE method and eat 1700 calories everyday (before I was eating like 1400)
- I eat three substantial healthy meals and maybe one not so healthy snack

This pretty much feels like a "lifestyle" to me and I could live this way forever. Granted I only had about 20lbs to lose and have been losing very slowly over the past year.

FlyingMolly

liftlovelunge wrote: »

I have the same problem when I snack - especially at work. I don't think it would be a bad idea for me to eat three times a day! How do you distribute your calories throughout the day?

Usually about 300 for breakfast, 500 for lunch, and then 600 for dinner is my baseline. But I'm pretty active (I didn't think I was that active, but my FitBit begs to differ), so I usually have extra calories to add to a bigger dinner, or to use as an afternoon snack.

I know a lot of people do really well on 6-8 meals a day, but the thing I like about only eating 3-4 is that I'm less prone to lie to myself. Like, if I'm hungry at 11am and eat a handful of nuts, I tell myself I'll deduct those calories from my "real" lunch but that part never seems to actually happen. This way, when I'm hungry at 11, I can just shrug and remind myself that it isn't lunchtime yet, but it will be soon, and I can wait.

Plus, I like big meals. I just do. Eating a bunch of 250-calorie "meals" throughout the day depresses me to no end.

burak213

I wake up hungry, my day is filled with thoughts of shoving food in my mouth. When I do have my meal I'm still hungry. It's a never ending battle with food and me.
Oh yeah, I go to bed hungry too, ha!

cavia

I wasn't hungry the first 6 weeks but I attribute that to dramatically upping my protein intake. After that, if I was awake, I was hungry. My deficit was not extreme and I quickly figured out I was a volume eater so geared my eating around foods I could eat a lot of for relatively few calories.

Dieting is about successfully managing hunger, imho. What that looks like will be very specific to the individual.

I had resigned myself to feeling hungry forever as I had daily hunger even during my bulks. I've been maintaining the last few months and noticed my hunger has really subsided with the exception of really heavy lifting days. Even if it hadn't, it was a tradeoff I was willing to make. Experiencing hunger most days was vastly superior to suffering heart palpitations and GERD after eating when I was obese.

SingRunTing

It usually takes me a few weeks of being consistent for the hunger to go away. If I have a "no counting" day (like a holiday or vacation), I know that I'll have to deal with some hunger when I get back to my deficit. But, for me, it does decrease after the first week or so.

But it never really goes away. However, that's not a bad thing.

Hunger is not an emergency. It's your body saying "hey, at some point you're going to have to fuel me again". It's not "OMG FEED ME NOW". Most of us who have regular access to the internet have never been on the brink of starvation. We don't know true hunger. (I know some people experience low blood sugar issues, but that's not the same thing as starvation)

I actually like getting a little hungry before meals. It makes the meals taste better. I've found that it increases my enjoyment of food to let my stomach empty in between meals.

Also keep in mind that your appetite is "trainable". Meaning that if you're used to eating at certain times, your appetite expects to eat at those times. This is why people who normally snack in the afternoon (or whatever) will get hungry in the afternoon even if they've eaten sufficient food. You can retrain your appetite. Really interesting book that talks about appetite and habit: https://experiencelife.com/article/the-power-of-habit/

Obviously, all of this comes with the disclaimer that I'm not telling you to starve yourself. You should be eating sufficient calories and try to find foods that make you feel satisfied. But its ok to get a little hungry once in a while.