I have been struggling with hunger for the last month or so. I wake up hungry, after I eat I want more food, and I am hungry in between meals. That makes it a real struggle to stick to a calorie deficit! That has not been my experience of weight loss so far, and it's been hard.

I posted about it in my daily posts some in February and some kind people offered suggestions. I thought I'd carry that forward to here so maybe other people could also benefit from the suggestions or add their own.

I will say yesterday I was not ridiculously hungry all day, so maybe it is something that is passing? It made me very hopeful.

@Mrs_Hoffer suggested cutting out grains. I have so far in weight loss journey been unwilling to cut anything out completely. But in an effort to help with the hunger I upped my fiber which meant upping my carbs, including grains. So maybe that unintentionally has had the opposite effect.

@Jana_2020 suggested modified fasting. I think I definitely couldn't do full fasting but maybe I could try some kind of modified fasting. I have always been a person who eats a lot of small meals and I get hungry between meals. I wake up hungry and if I don't eat breakfast soon after waking I feel sick. And I do eat a bedtime snack/treat, which I know is not recommended. It's been a thing I think since having kids (my oldest is almost 10). Once I am done with them for the day I relax and eat a cookie. I know it's a bad idea, but when I try cutting out I get so sad about it! But maybe I should at least try that. We eat dinner at 5:30 and I eat breakfast at 7, so that would be a decent window of not eating if I tried that.

@MadisonMolly2017 Offered some suggestions of things she has done towards a healthy diet. And then asked some questions to try to troubleshoot.

1. How much you’ve lost total - As of Jan 1, 25 pounds.
2. How much you’ve lost since Jan 1 -
As of this morning I am actually exactly the same weight I was on Jan 1. But I have mostly been trending higher.
3. Your current BMI & weight
weight 148.6, BMI 24.7. This hunger problem started right around when I started hovering around the top edge of the "healthy" BMI, and it does make me wonder if maybe that's just as good as it gets? But I would like to be more in the middle of the range.
4. When you track EVERYTHING, how many calories do you eat?
That's a hard one to answer because I usually stop tracking when i start to go over my target. I was going for a while with 1200 M-Th, 2000 calories F, 1350 Sat and Sun, and sticking to that and losing. Now I am aiming for 1350 a day but have not succeeded. Monday I maybe for the first time completely tracked a day where my nibbling was out of control and it amounted to an extra ~500 calories, for 1850 calories.
5. What’s your exercise look like?
I aim for 15 minutes of MommaStrong (HIIT program) and 30 minutes of walking a day.
6. Height
5' 4 3/4'' The BMI calculations above are with rounding up to 5'5'. I never know if that is fair. If I do 5'4'', I am not in the healthy range.
7. How often are you hungry?
For the last month, ALL THE TIME. Except for yesterday. Yesterday for some reason I was not super hungry all day, so maybe I am finally on a good road?

Im at a bit of an impass. Ive been sticking to my calories carefully but I got extremely dizzy and numb this evening and incredibly hungry. Ive been hungry for days but I dont remember being this hungry before. I thought I would faint. I ate and after an hour I felt better. my new medication is affecting insulin and I didnt know that. I guess Im wondering how to proceed with calorie restriction and exercising if my medication can be so tempermental.

@Caroline_slowandsteady What you're mentioning about small meals and getting hungry reminds me of the process of becoming "fat adapted" vs being a "sugar burner" that a physician and weight loss coach has spoken about on a podcast I follow. Have you ever heard of Katrina Ubell (physician and weight loss/life coach)? Here is a link to free resources on her site. Her free e-books talk about becoming fat adapted and she talks a LOT about this topic (small meals, snacking, getting hungry) in her podcasts (here's a link to her podcasts and there's a podcast roadmap in the above link, too - you can also just listen to her on whatever podcast app you use). Her "niche audience" is other physicians (busy schedules, often restricted on when you can eat, etc) but of course the concepts apply to all busy people. Just thought I'd mention this because her podcasts have helped me change so much of my mindset/habits!

Wow, I just sat down at my laptop after being away from home for a day and a half and there are so many posts and so many questions.

First one: @donna25trinity asked me a question about averaging calories. First, let me remind everyone that I am a little old lady so my calorie requirements are quite low, yours may be higher.
I am maintaining now but when I was actively losing weight at a reasonable rate (22.5 kg in 9 months ie just over 1lb per week average) I used to reckon on keeping my normal intake at about 1,000 calories a day plus a small part of my exercise calories*. You get a lot of criticism here on MFP if you go that low but I needed to average about 1,200 per day and holidays and days out are bound to be higher. I took several holidays, days out, family celebrations. You can nearly always plan ahead for these occasions and “bank” calories in the same way you might save up for something special. “banking” beforehand is much more effective than going into “debt”.
Saving 100 calories per day for 5 days is only the equivalent of a dessert or a glass of wine and a chocolate on each of those weekend days. You can’t just indulge without counting.
If you are going to be very restrictive you have to make every food choice “work” – you need your protein, fibre, vitamins, whatever is important to you.

*I agree with @SummerSkier that “exercise calories” are a mixed blessing, try not to get too hung up on it.

Exercise calories are a nightmare for me. How do I ever know my efforts were enough?

Caroline_slowandsteady wrote: »

I have been struggling with hunger for the last month or so. I wake up hungry, after I eat I want more food, and I am hungry in between meals. That makes it a real struggle to stick to a calorie deficit! That has not been my experience of weight loss so far, and it's been hard.

I posted about it in my daily posts some in February and some kind people offered suggestions. I thought I'd carry that forward to here so maybe other people could also benefit from the suggestions or add their own.

I will say yesterday I was not ridiculously hungry all day, so maybe it is something that is passing? It made me very hopeful.

@Mrs_Hoffer suggested cutting out grains. I have so far in weight loss journey been unwilling to cut anything out completely. But in an effort to help with the hunger I upped my fiber which meant upping my carbs, including grains. So maybe that unintentionally has had the opposite effect.

@Jana_2020 suggested modified fasting. I think I definitely couldn't do full fasting but maybe I could try some kind of modified fasting. I have always been a person who eats a lot of small meals and I get hungry between meals. I wake up hungry and if I don't eat breakfast soon after waking I feel sick. And I do eat a bedtime snack/treat, which I know is not recommended. It's been a thing I think since having kids (my oldest is almost 10). Once I am done with them for the day I relax and eat a cookie. I know it's a bad idea, but when I try cutting out I get so sad about it! But maybe I should at least try that. We eat dinner at 5:30 and I eat breakfast at 7, so that would be a decent window of not eating if I tried that.

@MadisonMolly2017 Offered some suggestions of things she has done towards a healthy diet. And then asked some questions to try to troubleshoot.

1. How much you’ve lost total - As of Jan 1, 25 pounds.
2. How much you’ve lost since Jan 1 -
As of this morning I am actually exactly the same weight I was on Jan 1. But I have mostly been trending higher.
3. Your current BMI & weight
weight 148.6, BMI 24.7. This hunger problem started right around when I started hovering around the top edge of the "healthy" BMI, and it does make me wonder if maybe that's just as good as it gets? But I would like to be more in the middle of the range.
4. When you track EVERYTHING, how many calories do you eat?
That's a hard one to answer because I usually stop tracking when i start to go over my target. I was going for a while with 1200 M-Th, 2000 calories F, 1350 Sat and Sun, and sticking to that and losing. Now I am aiming for 1350 a day but have not succeeded. Monday I maybe for the first time completely tracked a day where my nibbling was out of control and it amounted to an extra ~500 calories, for 1850 calories.
5. What’s your exercise look like?
I aim for 15 minutes of MommaStrong (HIIT program) and 30 minutes of walking a day.
6. Height
5' 4 3/4'' The BMI calculations above are with rounding up to 5'5'. I never know if that is fair. If I do 5'4'', I am not in the healthy range.
7. How often are you hungry?
For the last month, ALL THE TIME. Except for yesterday. Yesterday for some reason I was not super hungry all day, so maybe I am finally on a good road?

What does a meal or a snack for you look like? I agree with your approach not to cut anything out completely, and have found that lean proteins and whole grains do fill me up. I find that a lot of packaged foods don't fill me up or make me more hungry. So, like, a bowl of cereal will only keep me occupied while I am eating it but the second I am done, I am hungry for more. And don't get me started on those "just 100 calories" packaged snacks because I will eat all of them and not even register. Breakfast for me now is something like oatmeal with fruit and almond butter (or peanut butter), or an egg on toast. To a certain extent, by cutting calories, you will feel hungry. But if you wake up hungry and you're hungry all day long, and you go to bed hungry, I think there are some changes you can make. So give us an idea of what a day of food looks like for you and we can go from there.

Thank you to everyone for your responses! I am going to write back in a few posts.

@makattack220 that podcast looks interesting. I looked around her website a bit and couldn't find anything about the fat adapted vs. sugar burning issue. Can you summarize it for me? I do think that sounds like me, potentially.

@LazyBlondeChef that's an interesting idea of switching up my way of eating. The only times in my life that I have had only 3 meals a day have been on vacations where I am eating out and eating a lot and just not feeling hungry between meals. Those times have always resulted in weight gain. I've been a snacker my whole life.

@TerriRichardson112 I do that checklist - or just checking in with myself - but this has felt like real, true body hunger.

@MadisonMolly2017 Thank you so much for your kind response. I was really expecting you to lay down the law and tell me to get more serious about eating less! I think your answer to "Really lock in recording every nibble. ... You realize it’s just data & will work to your advantage to record all you eat !!" is exactly what I need to focus on now.

I am not going to give up on pre-tracking my days or having a goal of 1350. But when I want to eat something that is over the goal, I am going to think about why I am eating it and if those reasons seem good enough, I will eat it and record it. For this month. And see what I learn.

I am frustrated by this extra hunger because I have been losing weight - slow and steady - for almost 3 years now - and I have never been this hungry. And my diet has not really changed. (To answer your question @MadisonMolly2017, I am losing "baby weight" from my about-to-be 10 year old. I am not counting from my high weight when I was pregnant with her or immediately post-partum, but a few months in I pretty much stabilized around 170, and I am counting from the point at which I decided to work on losing weight (which was actually rather a high point in that stable range).)

I think what happened was:
1. This has been getting steadily harder for a while, as I look back at my records. Really since getting within the healthy BMI range. Which is why I joined UAC, but I haven't really seen much of a loss with UAC - still in that top of the healthy BMI range. @MadisonMolly2017 I love that you call them "vanity pounds" - I guess they are. I want to lose more because I weighed less pre-pregnancy, and because these extra pounds are almost all in my belly, which I think is bad for me and also - yeah, vanity.
2. Then in January I had my covid booster which resulted in a flare of my autoimmune thyroid condition, with some weird hormone blips. I backed off trying to track or eat to a pattern while that was active. But I think I maybe tried to get back into it too soon. I do think some of the hunger initially was hormonal.
3. Several weeks (a month?) ago I decided to tackle the hunger and also the constipation I was experiencing (which were both probably due to reason #2) by eating more fiber. I was noticing I was not usually that close to the recommended 25. I upped the fiber by adding more carbs and reducing fat to fit them in. I think that may have been counter productive? I do still think it seems like a good idea to eat fiber. But I think that is one of the things I need to collect more data on. I think I am definitely seeing a difference between adding in chia seeds, which does not seem to affect me much, vs. having a snack of oatmeal, which I tried, which left me starving and shaky. Oatmeal has never been a great snack for me. Also kashi cereal, which we have in the cabinet for my kids which I tried adding in because it has so much fiber but it also has so much sugar and salt and I don't think it's a great choice.

@MadisonMolly2017 I love your idea that the choice is not between giving up and fighting harder. But I could just take a pause for data collection and then decide what to do next. I think that's my goal for March.