I guess i am about 5 or so weeks in and feeling really good generally. A lot of the initial things like the odd headache or sick feeling has passed. For the first time on the weekend i did have 2 glasses of white wine so a little bit of sugar. One thing though that i cant seem to conquer or achieve is not feeling hungry as i often hear people saying is a major benefit of the keto diet. I am still generally hungry and yesterday was just starving all day and trying not to eat so much. Im still craving butter like a fiend and am wondering if my hunger will ever subside? I have lost a lot of the bloat i was hoping to with this diet and am loving all the different foods i have been eating.
Just wondering what your experiences are with hunger and do you eat if you feel hungry or only do meal times etc?
Hunger
So…eat butter like a fiend.
And maybe nix the booze until the hunger is under control, just so you know it’s not the Chardonnay that’s messing with your keto zen. You can always introduce it back in later. (Tip: Clear liquors are zero carb, so consider upping your cocktail game, instead.)
I’ve been doing LCHF for about 8 months now, trying to eat < 20 g of carbs per day. I notice that I seem to be satiated for longer periods of time, but when I get hungry, I get HUNGRY. It seems to come on a little quicker than it did back in my low fat days, but that’s very hard to quantify. I am eating 3 meals a day and have rarely been able to eat only two. You should try to eat until you’re satisfied and it should probably last a few hours. Fat is the key to satisfaction and I suspect you may not be eating enough fat. After gaining an understanding of the science involved with a LCHF diet and trying it out, it is for me a fairly easy diet (I really think of it as a way of life now) to do, I can eat to satisfaction, feel great, lose weight, and pretty easily keep track of carb intake and not much else.
mmm butter
Last week I did one meal a day which was ok, but hunger was starting to be an issue. So on the weekend I decided to eat to satiety. I ate cheese, salami, buttery omelet, steak, coconut oil … just made sure I wasn’t hungry.
Earlier on, I realised I had been craving a sugar high - that takes a while to get past, but it’s different to being hungry. I used to get to ‘satiety’ but still crave sugar. I’m glad to be past that stage.
Anyway because I was topping up on non-carbs, I was still at my low weight ready for more OMAD
Hunger doesn’t trouble me on this diet, but that’s because I make sure to get enough fat. I also eat whenever I’m hungry. I notice that sometimes I go nine to sixteen hours between meals without even thinking about it, and other times it’s only three or four hours. The part that confuses me is telling the difference between real hunger and carb cravings (I never met a doughnut I didn’t like, lol!). But as I go on, the signals are getting more distinct. When I’m not hungry, the thought of food leaves me uninterested, whereas a carb craving seems to have very little to do with whether I’m hungry or not. And, as people on the forum point out, sometimes I think I’m hungry when I’m really thirsty.
Eat. More. Fat. I go through this from time to time. Don’t know why. My body just wants more. And early on with Keto I really needed a lot of fat. For me it was cheese. So I just had lots of cheese snacks. It eventually subsided and now I just get the occasional ravenous day and when I do I eat more. Glad to hear you’re feeling better in general!
Check your macros. If you’re hungry all the time you may be eating too much protein and not enough fat. If you douse your protein meals in fat, you’ll tend to eat less before feeling full.