Hey guys, I just have some questions about my hunger levels. So I have been Keto for almost 2 months. I have coffee with HWC in the morning and I’m not usually hungry until about noon. Lunch is usually just protein and veggie, sometimes just protein and avocado. Lunch is usually leftovers from the dinner the night before and like I said…always about 1/2 of an avocado. Love, love, love avocados.
Anyhow, what worries me is that come dinner time, I’m not really hungry. I do eat because I feel like one meal a day is probably not sufficient enough to meet my macros. Lately when I eat dinner I usually feel stuffed instead of just satiated. What do you guys recommend?
OldDog
(Gregory - You can teach an old dog new tricks.)
#2
Is losing weight a goal?
If you are not hungry, don’t eat …
Hunger, is your body telling you you need nourishment.
Don’t worry about meeting arbitrary numbers… ( macros )
Hi Gregory, I am trying to lose weight but my weight loss has pretty much stayed the same. I lose a pound or two and then gain them back. Within the almost 2 months keto, I have lost 4 pounds. It has just been a neverending up and down situation. I haven’t been able to lose much more. If I do, it is back the next day…it seems.
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#4
My n=1. I have always considered food to be fuel even while I ate SAD. I feel nothing emotional about it and don’t use it for anything other than fuel. In my SAD life, I could ignore food unless I felt hungry. Even then, my goal was to get the eating over with as quickly as possible and get back to my life. I often jokingly describe my attitude towards food as like a driver who’s running out of gas on the highway views an upcoming service station. I want to get in, get refueled and back on the road again. The service station is not my destination.
Now, well post-SAD, I usually feel very little to no hunger. I do not have reliable hunger and satiety signals. They can come and go quickly and virtually unnoticed. So I count calories and have determined by trial error how much to eat to gain, lose, or maintain weight. In fact, before I feel hungry I will usually feel cold or weak. Those two signals are very strong. If I undershoot my daily macros and/or calorie target for 2 or 3 days in a row, I will feel slight hunger in the morning. Or, if I consistently miss my daily targets I will start to feel cold, although during the warm months even this seems less noticeable. ‘Weak’ is more noticeable in warm weather, ‘cold’ during the colder months. This works for me, and I don’t find it onerous to track/record everything I eat daily. Some folks, however, say they would never have even tried keto if they had to do this. So maybe it wouldn’t work for you.
I should also note that I am a 6’0" male who weighs 145 pounds with 14% body fat. So I am very lean and face a greater challenge to maintain my weight rather than lose it! I am 75 years old. And although I ate SAD for the first 71 years of my life, I did not suffer any serious metabolic consequences from it.
Generally, as noted by @OldDog, if your hunger signalling is normal then you can use it to determine whether or not you’re eating enough. Many folks on this forum do so quite successfully. But you have to determine whether or not you have useful signalling. For example, if you have a lot of fat to lose you can eat a lot less before feeling hungry simply because your metabolism can recruit stored body fat to make up the slack from plate energy. This is what ‘losing weight’ means, after all.
On the other hand, if you don’t have reliable hunger signalling you can consume less energy than your metabolism can make up from stored fat. AND you will not notice! You can only recruit a given amount of body fat daily to make up for reduced energy intake, and this amount is a moving target which can be anything from a few hundred to a thousand or more calories per day. It depends a lot on how much body fat you have to begin with and how long you maintain the energy deficit.
If you consistently under eat, you may start to feel tired, cold, weak, fatigued, dull, listless and generally lackadaisical. These are signals that you’re not eating enough. Even if you do not feel hungry! Even if you get plenty of sleep, liquids and electrolytes! Your metabolism is trying to slow down your voluntary activities to reduce overall energy requirements. If you fail to heed these signals, the only alternative left for your metabolism is to slow down all the autonomous physical activities that keep you alive - ie, slow your metabolism overall. You do not want to get to this point. In the followup to the Biggest Loser, the participants slowed their metabolism by an average of 500 calories per day, for 5+ years after they stopped dieting!
Keto also enables a so-called ‘metabolic advantage’ not available to folks trying to lose body fat on calorie restricted low fat high/normal carb diets.
I’m in the camp of “if you’re not hungry, you probably don’t need to eat”. However, you should be sure to focus on getting enough proteins. If you get too few proteins over an extended period, the body has to satisfy its needs itself. That usually means breakdown of muscle tissue.
OTOH, too few of the other macros is typically not a problem. There are no essential carbs. If you get too few fats other than the essential fatty acids, the body can get what it needs for fuel from stored body fats.
So today I ate a homeade broccoli and cheese soup I made last night. I added a little diced chicken breast and a few homeade croutons I also made, with Sola bread.
It was a very filling meal and I am going to really monitor my hunger at dinner. If I don’t feel hungry I won’t definitely won’t eat. I am curious how it will go. I try to make sure I eat dinner because when I don’t my husband makes comments about starving myself. He is also on Keto, he eats breakfast, lunch and dinner with a couple snacks so I don’t think he grabs the concept of “only eat when you are hungry.”
OldDog
(Gregory - You can teach an old dog new tricks.)
#7
Have you and your husband discussed the symptoms of starvation?
PaulL
(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?)
#8
When I was a carb-burner, one of them was, “Oh my God! I haven’t eaten in at least seven minutes!”
And I don’t want to admit how long it took me to lose that mindset on keto!
amwassil
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.)
#9
That is very true. I already don’t eat breakfast so when all I eat is lunch, I start to worry that I haven’t eaten enough. I would guess its kind of like OMAD then?
OldDog
(Gregory - You can teach an old dog new tricks.)
#12
According to Megan Ramos this is not the best way to lose weight, It is fine to maintain. I am in maintenance and often do OMAD, but the majority of my days are TMAD. When I was losing, I would do intermittent fasting most days, then a couple of times a month fast for 3-5 days. After I lost I did TMAD.
Avocado is great for curbing hunger, you might want to do a 1/4 avo for lunch and see if you have slightly more hunger at dinner time.
Maybe he does eat when he is hungry? People may get hungry many times per day. Even I managed to do it 3 times when I couldn’t eat bigger meals… It’s very inconvenient, no matter how I love eat. I love fasting too
I would talk with the husband… Starving has nothing to do with eating or not eating dinner and it’s not a joking matter to me. Maybe he is worrying because you do eat very low-cal without dinner? Not like that is necessarily wrong but one should be careful then. Not everyone of us has reliable hunger and satiation signs, at least not on every style of keto, focusing on not satiating or very satiating food may trigger over- or undereating while we feel perfect satiation.
OMAD is fine but you need to eat enough, whatever it means for you. I couldn’t do it when I had small meals for a while, now that I went back to bigger meals, I can do it and I need it to lose fat anyway, I can’t lose while eating too much. But if I follow my hunger and other signs, OMAD is what I get nowadays anyway. But one can mix OMAD with TMAD, sometimes I do something in-between, “OMAD with a few extra bites” as it comes naturally that time… Sometimes my 2 meals are super close and feels like OMAD with an afterthought… There are various styles.
I think, do whatever feels right but very low calorie for a long time isn’t good. Not like I can have any idea what is very low for you, of course.
I know that my husband does not mean to be ugly. I do know that if he doesn’t see me eat he gets worried. I’m not sure why but he does.
Also, I don’t really count my calories. I think for the most part my calories are pretty high. I haven’t been tracking my macros for the last few days but I guess I should. The problem with tracking my macros is that I become obsessive about it and it put me in a bad mood.
I’m thinking of just trying to eat a smaller lunch or adding in a small breakfast just to switch things up a little.
