Eat When Not Hungry? Yes OR No?

If I'm at work, I eat lunch whether I'm hungry or not (I usually am). I'm a teacher, and that 20 minutes they schedule for me to shove food down my throat is the only chance I'll get.

When I'm not at work, I only eat when I feel hungry.

I try to eat around the same time. I'm usually hungry but I find that if I don't go ahead and have my meal I am later over hungry and tend to want to eat more than I should.

Annie_01 wrote: »

CattOfTheGarage wrote: »

endlessfall16 wrote: »

The whole darn challenge of losing weight comes from keeping from not eating too much. It's never eating too little anyway.

That isn't true. The number of posts we see on here saying "help me, I keep binging and I don't know why!" and on questioning, we find the person is consistently undereating which is triggering a binge cycle - there are just so many of these.

Many people - so many - are stuck in an unhealthy cycle of restriction and binging and cannot lose weight effectively until they learn to feed themselves adequately and consistently. In those cases, eating too little is absolutely a problem.

And when I see a post about "do I have to eat if I'm not hungry?" I see someone who is consistently underfeeding themselves and has a jacked up appetite, looking for others to validate their self-starving ways.

Sure, very occasionally that will be someone who averages a good amount of calories and wants to go under once in a while (which is of course fine, it's the average that matters) - but usually it's not.

If you need to lose weight, you know your appetite is not 100% reliable as a guide. So if your numbers say you need to eat, eat.

The OP was not talking about someone who restricts their eating to very low calorie levels. It is about if it gets to be meal time and you just aren't hungry yet. I don't think the question was about starving yourself and then binging.

My appetite varies especially in the mornings. Sometimes within an hour of getting up I am hungry...so I eat. Most of the time however I don't get hungry until almost lunch time. Actually it works better for me to eat "brunch". I am not as snacky in the afternoons.

Some days I might end up not eating all my calorie allotment...other days I eat slightly above my allotment. It all works out in the end.

I want to live the life of a healthy normal weight person...do you think that all thin people force themselves to eat when they aren't hungry?

This is precisely why I let the situation dictate if I'm eating while not hungry or not. Naturally thin people (and by that I mean people who consume an amount of calories that keeps them at a healthy weight without paying any attention or making any weight related food decisions outside of preference) will and often do eat when not hungry, but it's mostly in social situations or if they are craving something in particular. On the flip side they sometimes don't eat despite being hungry because they're "too lazy to eat" (I've heard that) or too busy. They also can, and do, gorge until they're overfull in some situations, or barely eat anything for the whole day in others. It's just normal eating. Adapting to life as it goes. No rules regarding hunger or meal time, at least no conscious rules outside of habitual behaviors.

I know I will always have to keep an eye on my calories because I lack many of the natural balancing mechanisms these people have, but I can mimic the flexibility and the stress-free spontaneity, consciously adjusting the other parameters to fit.

No, you should never eat when you are not hungry - whatever you are eating will turn into fat because your metabolism has slowed down and it will not burn up the fat. I went through a program called Naturally Slim (www.naturallyslim.com) and they say you can eat a snack between meals. Very good program and it works if you follow it.

I usually don't eat if I'm not hungry. If it's a special occasion or we having guests or going to a friend's house for dinner then yes, I will eat because I don't want to be weird or rude. But usually if that is the case I will be pretty hungry because I'll skip the previous meal so I can indulge more at the shared meal.

I don't always make great decisions when I'm hungry and I've found that eating my pre-selected, pre-logged meals and snacks at set intervals throughout the day keeps me from getting hungry in the first place, so almost all of my meals are eaten when I'm not hungry.

I'm always hungry RIP
Jk
No I just wait until I'm hungry, I'm in a deficit so that time will certainly always come xD

Yup all the time. Less so when I am cutting but definitely when I am bulking

I really try to listen to my hunger cues now because I used to not have them due to overeating. So no, I don't usually eat if I'm not hungry.

Look_Its_Kriss wrote: »

goldthistime wrote: »

I still eat to hunger levels and track alongside. Often when I'm full but have calories left I wake up in the middle of the night remembering some snack I'd forgotten to log. IOW, my appetite is often better than my memory.

This is why prelogging your diary is usually better.
Its been proven that people under estimate how much they eat if they log the food at the end of the day, or even after they ate it. People forget the little things.. often forgetting conditments or cooking methods used, or in your case, snacks they ate..

I can see the benefits of prelogging for some people and have seen lots of success stories where people used prelogging, but I would say it's "better" only in certain circumstances.

If my appetite/satiety signal isn't broken, why not use it? Using it now, in conjunction with the info that logging gives me, IMO, gives me a better chance at continuing to maintain without logging at some later date. And if you're curious as to how I gained weight without having a broken appetite, I gained it by choosing to ignore my appetite signals.

But really I came back to this thread because I was thinking that I answered the thread title, but not really the first post itself.

It's rare for me to not be hungry at all when mealtime comes along. If I switch to a lower carb diet on a particular day (which I do on occasion), I can get to dinner time and not want to eat. Let's say that if I don't eat, I'll be under in calories for that day. Personally, I'd go with appetite and not eat dinner. But I have no recent history of consistent undereating, I generally aim for a small deficit, and my seven day average wouldn't be off by much.

madair801 wrote: »

No, you should never eat when you are not hungry - whatever you are eating will turn into fat because your metabolism has slowed down and it will not burn up the fat. I went through a program called Naturally Slim (www.naturallyslim.com) and they say you can eat a snack between meals. Very good program and it works if you follow it.

No.

Sometimes I think that I am ravenous and could eat a whole lot, so I plan for a lot of food (within my caloric budget.) But, sometimes when I sit down to eat, I feel full before I've finished the meal. I don't force myself to finish the meal just because I've weighed/measured/logged it, or just because it's there and I've got the calories. I stop when I'm full. Sometimes I will come back and eat some more of it later, sometimes I'll just save it and eat the rest as another meal the next day.

As others have mentioned, if I found myself feeling really full on too few calories, on a regular basis, I would look at the matter differently.

I always eat to my calorie goal. If I didn't, and waited until I was hungry I would never eat dinner. My worry is that I wouldn't eat enough calories and my body would get used to a low calorie restriction every day.

Yes. I believe in structured eating. 3 meals and 3 snacks a day.

Sometimes I'm still full from a previous meal because it was either large, full of protein, or both. In that case, if snack/meal time comes and goes, I won't eat if I'm not hungry yet, but in most cases like that, I treat it as banking those calories for a larger dinner or after-dinner snack, so it all evens out.

I also prefer to skip breakfast and first eat around noon or 1pm. I'm usually not very hungry before 11, and I push it a couple more hrs to condense my calories into a smaller timeframe (IF). If I eat breakfast I end up getting hungry again sooner, so why eat breakfast if I'm not hungry for it and it will increase my appetite anyway?

I rarely go under my daily calorie goal by more than 50 calories, but if you're consistently under eating, then eating when not hungry is probably a good idea.