I’m on a diet, so I’m hungry more often than usual. But that’s getting better as I get more used to being on the diet.
I’ve read somewhere that hunger is the feeling you get if you’re losing weight. Does that mean that, if I’m less hungry now that I’m getting used to my diet, that I will stop losing weight? Does the amount of hunger that someone feels while on a diet correlate to the rate or amount of weight loss?
Googling hunger and weight loss didn’t do me much good. There was too much about the Weight Watchers hunger monster and diet plans that promise to make you lose weight without being hungry.
Hunger is your body telling you to feed it. Being on a “diet” doesn’t mean starving yourself. It simply means lose weight=eat less calories then I burn. When you reach your target weight you will probably be eating more then you did that made you a fat slob. But you’ll be exercising your body more and taking less elevators. And not living at <insert your favorite fat food place here>.
Not for me, no. My weight has been very consistent for several years (I step on a scale each morning and my weight has stayed within a very narrow range - about 169-172lbs) and I’m only hungry if I don’t eat. Missing a meal makes me hungry.
There’s no direct correlation between hunger and weight loss. There are many triggers for hunger and only some of them are related to losing weight.
Some triggers are “real” and probably related to weight loss, like low blood sugar.
Some of them are cues of physical fullness that is not directly related to weight loss - eating foods higher in fiber and drinking more water may make you feel full. For that matter the people I’ve known with Lap Bands report feeling physical full just because their stomach is effectively smaller. Eating more slowly lets your body issue a fullness cue to your brain that makes you stop feeling hungry - if you wolf down your food, you’ve probably overdone it before that cue arrives.
Some cues for hunger are basically psychological, such craving food after watching an hour of commercials on TV.
I noticed years ago that if I keep busy and don’t think about it, the early morning hunger goes away and then I can cruise thru to 2pm without being hungry at all. I eventually eat just because it seems like a good idea, not because I am the least bit hungry. (And then I have little interest in eating the rest of the day.) I.e., hunger of this sort is transitory and is affected by what else one is doing. Burning of calories (and therefore losing weight) is still happening.
I’ve been on a very low calorie diet for 2 weeks under my doctor’s care. My BMR is 2340 calories and I’m eating about 960 calories per day. I haven’t been particularly hungry and I’ve lost about 14 pounds. I’ve been eating almost entirely protein with lots of vitamin and other nutrients packed in. So I would say you certainly don’t have to be hungry to lose weight and it’s probably non-conducive to it.
From experience, it’s not so much a case of having to keep feeling hungry to keep losing weight, but that you adjust to a new baseline. For a lot of my life, my idea of “hungry” was much too close to “could eat something now without actually feeling stuffed” and “not hungry any more” was likewise too close to “would feel ill if I ate much more”.
I’ve been counting calories for a year now and lost 22 pounds, and if I was hungry, I went and ate something. Come to think of it, I’m hungry now. I’m going to go have a snack.
Short answer - keep track of your calories eaten and your exercise, more than your hunger.
Sorry! lol… guess it takes one to say it… I went from 335 to 230… and hopefully 220 soon…one thing i learned was that eating right and being more active is the only way to real weight control and health.
I’m another current dieter, having lost around 16lbs in the last 6 weeks. Initially I felt hungry in between meals but as the body gets used to the new eating schedule it goes away.
I find that I don’t feel hungry if i’m busy with work and can easily not eat until early evening without feeling too hungry at all but if i’m at home I feel hungry almost all the time. It seems like there is a correlation between boredom and hunger for me.
Either way I would say the answer to your question is ‘no’. Losing weight is about introducing a daily calorie deficit and hunger is just the body expecting food, which in my case doesn’t happen if i’m busy.
Hunger is an actual PAIN, what most people feel when they say is hunger is not. What your feeling is an urge to eat. That is your body is complaining about the change from routine.
This applies to everything from sleeping patterns to exercise patters, to pretty much any variation from your normal routine.
Try this and you’ll see.
Go on a two day water fast. You will find after 24 hours you will HURT from hunger. This will be very different from anything most people feel.
But here is the really weird thing. The longer this goes on the less it bothers you. By then end of 48 hours you won’t feel as nearly bad as the first 24 hours. This is due to your body adjusting
Note: DO NOT try this if you have any sort of long term illness like diabetes or heart conditons.
But if your otherwise healthy a two day water fast ain’t gonna kill you.
My mum and I did this in the 70s, (I was a teen) because it was one of the “in things” back then.
I have never fasted like that but I have heard that after the first couple of days you stop feeling hungry. But you are certainly losing weight, so this bolsters the argument against hunger=weight loss.
Maybe you like humusbut not for eating. Maybe you like to eat hummus.
If you are “on a diet” and feeling hungry a lot, you’re doing it wrong.
The idea is to make permanent changes to your lifestyle and eating habits. To go “on a diet” implies that you are going to go off of it at some point, and you’ll end up back at square 1.
The idea is that this is a permanent change. Specifically, it is the No S Diet, where you don’t eat snacks, sweets, or second helpings at mealtimes, except on weekends (slightly modified in my case, in that Friday night is a weekend and Sunday night is not, so I can have a nice Shabbat dinner). I find the fact that the restrictions aren’t every day for the rest of my life quite helpful.
I don’t like counting calories or measuring portions. I also dislike keeping food journals and am scared of the idea of going to any kind of meeting like Weight Watchers does. Low-carb diets make me stabby (don’t worry, this isn’t a low-carb diet), and low-fat diets don’t work that well. I like food, and don’t want to eat flavorless “diet” food. I dislike all of those things more than I dislike being hungry.
Last year a coworker told me he was going on a diet. I asked him, “What is the name of this diet?”
He told me the name. I forget what it was. But it had a name. The fact that he read about the it somewhere on the web, and it had a name, virtually guarantees it won’t work.
I then asked him, “How long do you plan on being on the diet?”
“Oh, probably 3 months.”
In other words, he failed before he even began.
Not surprisingly, he is now 50 pounds heavier. He simply did not have the right mindset.
