Am I hungry?

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #1

Seems a strange question right?
Do I have an issue with Ghrelin? I’ve always been able to eat crazy amounts without feeling full!
Berry etc will say eat until full, I’m never sure when that is! I normally stop when I think ‘That must be enough food’.
Also recently I eat when my stomach makes growling noises, only then can I be sure.
This all goes back to my stubborn 2 or 3 kg of fat tummy … any thoughts?

(Chuck) #2

I don’t count calories or micronutrients but over the 14 years of trying to control my weight and my blood pressure I have learned, what I can eat, when to eat, and how much to eat. It is a process that in the early days of the 14 years was time consuming, and it seemed I was always hungry. Now I am never hungry and I only eat because my body says to. My solution is simple, I only eat real food from mother earth. Nothing man made.

(Joey) #3

For most of my adult life I assumed that a grumbling stomach meant I was hungry - a strong association.

Turns out, I was wrong. Especially in the mornings.

A swig of electrolytes (salt water), walking briefly, stretching, or a few jumping jacks all seem to make those grumbling noises stop.

I began to understand that being genuinely hungry had little to do with those noises after all. They’re fleeting sounds.

On the flipside, I’ve been truly hungry without my stomach making any sounds at all. The hunger sensation is a feeling unto itself, and need not have anything to do with abdominal noises of one kind or another.

Give all this a closer look in your situation and see what you might discover about old assumptions.

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #4

Now that’s interesting. And it is morning I’m talking about. I’ll go into tomorrow with a different approach.
Oh BTW I’m 95% carnivore now so I’d expect less hunger.

(Joey) #5

Yup - it’s likely you’re operating on old associations that worked in the past but might no longer be relevant for you.

FWIW, I wake up and read in bed for a short while and my stomach often makes some grumbling noises. For decades I assumed this meant it was telling me to eat breakfast. And so I would.

But for the past 5 yrs after going low-carb, I don’t feel the need to eat breakfast, just a mug of coffee/cacao. And any grumbling quickly stops. That’s when I realized I wasn’t really hungry at all.

These days, 1st daily meal (of 2) is typically around “lunch time” - and many days I’m often not especially hungry even by then. Regardless, there are no growling sounds at that point anyhow. Which made me realize that the “noises” were independent of any hunger.

I’m not telling you whether you are hungry or not … am just suggesting that the stomach noises we often associate with hunger can be very misleading as useful “need-to-eat” signals once genuine hunger patterns are altered by low-carb/carnivore WOE.

Food for thought.

#6

I don’t get full either, I think I have the Labrador gene! I do feel hungry alot, I did keto for a couple of years a while back, & gave up, now back on again. I thought before I didn’t ever get the not so hungry benefit from keto, but when I went back onto carbs I realised it was better on keto!
I do get what some of you are saying about morning hunger- if I just have a cuppa I find it goes for a while…

(Bob M) #7

Not sure that will work for everyone. I am not carnivore, though often close. I still have the problem that, even if I’m not hungry when I start eating dinner, I can eat a normal dinner most times. Sometimes, not (I’ll eat less or significantly less), but most times, I eat the same.

I think it’s hormonal. The problem is that there are so many hormones, ghrelin, leptin, something like yk++ (can’t remember), GLP-1, etc. As an electrical engineer, I think of it as a feedback loop, meaning we eat and something (I’m assuming hormones, though don’t know if that describes everything) isn’t getting fed back the way it used to or the way it is for other folks. We’ve broken something in our feedback loop.

And if we’re new to eating carnivore or keto, sometimes I think the body is trying to get all the nutrition we’ve been lacking for years, so we “overeat” to get that done.

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #8

Yes, the 1st thought is food is medicine where sometimes NO food might be a better medicine.

Or in my case the ‘thought of food’ lol

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #9

I’ve always been like that Jules. I used to enter food eating competitions and normally won!
I actually remember the first time I became aware of this. I asked the waitress in a restaurant if that was their normal portion size, I then ordered and ate 6 more of the same dinners!

(Geoffrey) #10

I eat when I get hungry but I don’t really get hungry until about 11:00 am and sometimes not till 3 or 4 pm. If I’m busy and don’t want to stop and eat it’s real easy to ignore it.
My hunger signals are nothing like they were before. When I are the SAD I would get ravenous and just had to eat and then when I did I had a hard time getting satisfied. I could binge eat even though I was no longer hunger. It was an addiction. A carb hunger. I now have a keto or carnivore hunger that just simply reminds me that my energy levels need to be restored. It’s simple and mild and never feels like I’m going to starve to death if I don’t get something right now. Like I said, it’s easy to ignore.
When I do eat I follow Dr. Chaffee’s guidelines and I eat until it stop tasting good. I may have two bites left is a steak or hamburger patty but all of a sudden my satiety kicks in and the hunger turns off and I just don’t want those last two bites. That meat I was enjoying so much is suddenly not appetizing anymore. My pup likes it when I quit with food on my plate.
I only eat animal fats and animal proteins so maybe that makes a difference.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #11

The stomach noises are called “borborygmus,” I’m sure you needed to know that, lol! :smile:

They are the noise of gas bubbles going around corners in your intestines. That is unrelated to being hungry. Sooner or later, the gas will find its way out either end (unlike cows, we not only burp, but we pass gas out the other end, as well :smile:)

My experience, which I’ve told many times on these forums, was that I needed to eat a lot after going keto, but one day my body decided it was safe to cut back. In the middle of a meal, I suddenly didn’t want any more food. I was about halfway through the plate, and there was nothing to do but put the meal away for later.

It was a powerful experience, learning what satiety feels like. As a carb burner, I could pack away the pasta until it felt as though my stomach were literally about to burst, not just figuratively, and I would still be hungry. Nowadays, I don’t get “full” and stop, I stop when satisfied, which usually occurs when my stomach is no more than about half-full, or so I figure. I know I could eat a log more, I just don’t want more. The difference is between “I’m stuffed” and “I’ve had enough.” This is why Dr. Phinney speaks of eating to satiety. The word “satiety” is derived from the Latin satis, which means “enough.”

You may be over-producing ghrelin, your fat cells may not be producing enough leptin, who knows? The other possibility is that insulin is still blocking the receptors in the ventromedial hypothalamus that are supposed to register the leptin produced by your fat cells.

You might need to retrain your thinking and try to listen to your body. Try fasting; it may help you reset your hormones and your mental responses. Your body will never let you starve to death, but it is also satisfiable, so once you get yourself sorted out, you will find yourself eating and enjoying food, but will also know more clearly when to stop.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #12

That, I think, was what happened to me. And once the body finally trusts that there is enough, it can relax and adjust our appetite.

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #13

Oh I like the idea though I can’t even manage OMAD … too painful. What a baby lol

(Chuck) #14

You don’t have to go that drastic. Just cut your eating windows down. My eating window is from 11am until 6 pm max. Some days I make ax small as 1pm to 6pm, some days noon to 5pm. The key is limit the time you have to eat. During my fasting time I only have water or unsweetened green tea.

#16

Nice topic :slight_smile: With lots of highly individual things. We should figure out how we should do it, when to eat, when to stop… It’s not always straightforward. And not always doable to wait until hunger, I usually can’t last until then. Sometimes I do try but basically always fail… And it’s not nice, I do hate staying hungry (unless it’s my best cute lovely hunger I actually like because now I have that kind too… and the other kind that is a stronger hunger but quickly passes… before fat adaptation, I hadn’t these) BUT I dislike not getting hungry for weeks too.

The stomach/guts grumbling isn’t hunger at all, I have read so it’s so super weird to me that it always gets interpreted as hunger in anime and fanfics (probably elsewhere too but I don’t know people and my family isn’t prone to that)… My hunger has little to do with it for sure. I have grumbling… IDK, a few times per month? Often while being perfectly satiated and basically unable to eat (I could eat but I definitely don’t want to so it would be a little forceful and it’s hard to do as a hedonist). When I did OMAD for a while, I still barely ever got it, the first 24 hours when I fast is rarely enough for it to happen. IDK why. But sometimes I get is super early, like at 16 hours. But it’s a few seconds and that’s it, never got that annoying loud thing people are complaining about (not ketoers, it was long ago I have read about it).

It’s not being a baby not to force things that isn’t good for you… Though sometimes OMAD sounds good but it’s still unrealistic, I often feel that in my life.
Why is it painful? You can’t eat a big enough meal? It happens to me too especially on/close but carnivore, it’s good that I can afford 2 meals when I eat little - but they last not long and I may end up with 3-5… Oh well, one day I will figure out how to skip lunch repeatedly. It’s mental (if I do get hungry early, like at 3pm, it’s okay for me to eat - even if I typically clearly could wait until dinner in most cases without feeling starving or weak - but I usually just can’t resist).
Do whatever works for you, it’s fine to eat multiple times if you can eat small enough meals (but one may be bigger than the other(s) too if that works best)…

I hate feeling full so it’s good I have a hard time to reach that myself :smiley: I just want perfect satiation and a nice sized carni meal (focus on my satiating items as I can eat a ton without satiation on carnivore too if I choose my food unwell. harder than with carbs but doable, at least sometimes) does the trick. (Red) meat may or may not have a stop sign, it varies in my life. So I think I know what are you talking about. But it was so much worse on high-carb where I easily could eat 1000 kcal extra even after reaching satiation and I must say that was a hard task already…
And IDK if you are like that but I have Unsatiable Hunger days sometimes. Very rarely but no matter what I eat then, I never get satiated. I had that on carnivore too. I stop when I get bored of the eating or feel I ate a too big amount of food despite I am not satiated and could eat some more (as it’s nearly impossible for me to reach maximum stomach capacity, I need a lot of extra water for that and that leaves my stomach very quickly so I can eat more).
It’s me but other people have some very interesting other things or different stomach capacity etc. And satiation is extremely individual. Or the ideal timing. Most of the advice about when to eat, how much to eat, when to stop fails when it comes to me so I had to figure out my own guidelines (that I often fail to follow too but at least I have some idea what I should do).
I am pretty sure our old diets matter a lot (maybe not for everyone). Even if they are in the distant past. I strongly feel the effect of my old overeating to this day and my old very high fat intake (due to very fatty food here and how my body and mind works) probably had many cons and pros alike.

(Bob M) #17

I wonder if even though we did eat some crap when we were younger, we ate enough nutrient-dense stuff to still be okay? I remember living at my grandmother’s and eating liver a lot. I HATED liver for the longest time, because my grandmother always overcooked it, and overcooked liver is…bad. Tough But she also was making chicken broth and the like. I was probably eating some satiating food without knowing it.

#18

Of course it matters if our old high-carb diet is nutritious and half-full with great food! I am pretty sure I had no significant nutrition problems in my whole life! But it had a cost on high-carb: I ate way, way too much, people with normal genetics would have gotten very obese with my amounts (I just got to 80kg after decades of constant overeating on HCHF. with fat as my main fuel because I have priorities and tastes :smiley: and nearly every food is high-fat anyway. now I maintain this weight on my low-carb woe, sadly, I got older or something?). It still has lingering effects and probably always will. But I was very satiated nearly all the time, enjoyed my food and got plenty of nutrients. There’s that. The high amount of sugar and seed oil was a problem, good thing I changed it when I was still young and healthy even though I wish it would have happened way, way earlier. And it wasn’t as much sugar as it would have been without my very high fat and high protein intake… Some people eat like 800g carbs, I know my body is sturdy but that probably would have been a serious problem for me… (But no way I wouldn’t have noticed and change it. My poor body didn’t know it needed very low-carb but it surely pointed me to lots of fatty animal protein sources.)

I always liked liver but I only am willing to eat it if it’s cooked very, very well. It’s soft and lovely then. Except beef, that requires a ridiculously little time but even I noticed it the first time so give it just that and it turned out good. I suppose it’s possible to overdo liver but it requires some huge patience or forgetting about the food for an hour or something. But it matters which animal, chicken liver is soft, almost no matter what, pork liver is what many places and people manage to make hard (when I was a kid, I thought pork liver IS hard) and I figured out it’s soft and so much better when I cook it especially when it’s still fresh…

My childhood had great food but that usually wasn’t the very little meat we ate. No wonder I went vegetarian… I do have fond memories of pork ribs, it was part of the Christmas food when I was little.
I am glad I have found my way back to meat, it’s easier for someone who prefers very low-carb and almost no plants. Well my body does, my mind have different phases and quirks and vices… Still, it’s better with meat but I don’t think it matters so much nutritionally. I guess it’s a tad better this way but I eat meat because I like it and because it helps avoiding plants. And meat is more satiating that my other carni food… So it has its uses. And it’s so quick and effortless to cook :slight_smile: (Quick regarding the work I need to put in, not necessarily the whole cooking time. But I can make a meat dish in 30 minutes tops too, of course. It’s never more urgent for me.)