Any swimmers out there?

It's more about how you feel and your health rather than what a pesky measuring device tells you, surely? Some of us are never destined to be skinny but we can out-fit our skinny counterparts and be in much better proportion making our clothes look better. Calorie counting will stop you overeating and you can't fail to lose if you keep it up. Most important thing is to grow to enjoy the process.

I love swimming; like OP used to swim competitively as a kid, but not so fast these days! Firstly, I tend to have a low calorie instant hot chocolate after a swim, as I find that warms me up (especially in winter) and I feel like a lot if hunger is a sort of coldness/emptiness thing. Secondly, I invested a Polar heart rate monitor a month or so ago which has changed my life as I can wear it underwater while I swim and it tracks my calorie burn. It's then easier to know if how much I can afford to eat back accurately.

Hope that helps, and happy swimming everyone! :-)

Maybe swim and eat more foods that don't make you spend the rest of the day craving high calorie foods, but cure the hunger quickly. I haven't done a lot of research on that. I find that carbs from bread or sugar take away the hunger for an hour or so, but then I crave them the rest of the day. So I'm playing with things that have more protein and fat - like nuts and legumes and so far it's working. I also don't crave sugar stuff when I eat a lot of protein.

According to this article, swimming makes you hungry because you get cold. They suggest taking a brisk, short walk after swimming, to warm you up.
http://www.fitnessmagazine.com/workout/tips/expert-advice/why-am-i-always-hungry-after-swimming/

This is a more scientific article, which suggests that hunger after swimming is a real phenomenon. It also lends some support to the idea that getting cold has something to do with it. From the conclusion section: "Collectively, these findings suggest that water temperature and possibly subsequent core body temperature are important determinants of feeding responses after exercise in water." So that brisk walk might be worth a try!
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jobes/2011/351628/abs/

Another swimmer here. Most times, probably because I swim for so long, I wind up going past the hungry stage into what ever it is when you don't remember your hungry until the smell of food hits you in the face. Especially when I put in one of my "marathon" swims - 1600 m split into 400 m medleys followed by 800 m in each stroke except butterfly and side stroke.

I have finally "trained" MFP to give me back almost accurate calorie burns according to this site:

http://caloriesburnedhq.com/calories-burned-swimming/

I've asked in other threads about how accurate it is from people who have HRMs, and it's been a pretty positive response.

When my calorie goals were set for MFP plus exercise calories to eat, I wouldn't feel the hunger the day I swam. But, the day AFTER I swam, I could not stay out of the fridge. Mostly because I was still netting negative numbers by the end of the day. Finally had to change the way I approached the calorie goal, which helped. Now, if I'm not throwing a snit fit over the gym management being sharks, I'm swimming every other day for at least an hour alternated with every other day "marathon swims", and I rarely get the day-after-ravenous-munchies.