Question about hunger hormones and satiety…I usually fast for at least 18 hours a day, sometimes longer. When I go to eat for the first time later in the day, it seems I can eat a ton of food/calories and still not feel satiated. For example, last night we went to dinner and I had a huge burger with two patties that probably totaled almost a pound topped w chesse, bacon, and an egg. I also had a big salad with lettuce, chesse, olives, cukes, avocado, olive oil…I felt reasonably satisfied afterwards but came home and about an hour later felt pretty hungry. I had to eat some steak fried in butter, cheese, almonds, some Lily’s chocolate…and then I finally felt satiated. So my question is why am I still so hungry after eating that first big meal? If you know my background I have recovered from anorexia and started back on keto a couple of months ago. I am wondering if my body going through starvation during my illness affected my hunger hormones…like maybe I am very sensitive to hunger? I cannot ignore the hunger I feel because I have to work hard to keep my illness in remission. So when I feel hungry, I eat. For those with metabolic issues I understand that their hunger hormones have to be “reset” from being insulin resistant. But maybe mine have been compromised as well from having had anorexia. I don’t train excessively, I lift weights and do some running and hiking but nothing like the volume of exercise I engaged in during my illness. I went through six months of recovery from my eating disorder during which I ate massive amounts of food to regain weight. So maybe my body got used to that large volume of food coming in…I guess what I want to understand more about is how hunger hormones work and the ways in which they become compromised and how they get “normalized”.
WHY do we still feel hungry sometimes after eating a lot?
It’s probably more of a brain question than a hormone question. I’m sure stress messes the whole system up
I don’t know why it happens, but I wanted to make sure you knew that you’re not alone in this. I’ve never suffered from anorexia, but I do suffer from the “why the hell am I hungry, I JUST ATE” thing. It annoys me to no end. It doesn’t seem to matter if I eat to satiety or till I’m in pain from the amount I’ve eaten. For me, it’s particularly bad with lunch. I’ll have a couple cups of coffee in the morning, but no solid food till lunch. Then I’m hungry all afternoon unless I eat again. It’s not the little “oh, I’m a little hungry”, no, it’s the PAINFUL “EAT NOW” kind of hungry.
I finally made an appointment to see a functional medicine doctor for Friday this week. I’m hoping that’s one of the things he can help me out with.
You think? Surely all the changes my body has been through this past year had to have affected my physiology…starting off underweight then eating many thousands of calories a day to gain weight, and then adjusting back to keto. What I find curious is that I ate this big, fatty meal and then felt genuinely hungry, so I ate again and then finally felt the sense of satiety I thought I’d have after eating the burgers. I wonder, if we have adequate body fat stores to draw on why would we get the message that we’re hungry still after we eat?
Yes…I am definitely referring to true hunger, not boredom hunger or “mental” hunger. I think after having an eating disorder feeling satiated is particularly important to me, like my body will not tolerate going to bed hungry. So I guess I’m not complaining about having to eat a lot, I’m more curious from a biological perspective…
I’m guessing here (I am not a doctor/researcher and I don’t play one on TV… I probably have just enough understanding to be dangerous)… that even though I’m in ketosis (yes, I test), I think my switch hasn’t flipped to allow me access to the decades old Krispy Kreme that Carl and Richard mention in the beginning of each podcast. It’s sort of “keto purgatory”. Where we’re in ketosis, we feel relatively well, but the whole idea of a “natural” EF is completely foreign because we just can’t get to the energy stores, so we have to eat to keep from crashing.
I have no insight or answers for your questions and I expect quite a few of us wonder about this too.
My hunger/satiety signaling is also erratic. I’ve tried repeatedly “eat fat to satiety” and it doesn’t work out too well for me, each time I gain weight. I’m able to control/lose weight through fasting and when I fast my hunger is often quite low and manageable. But when I’m eating my hunger sometimes goes up instead of down.
I’ve been trying to learn how to “listen to my body” but I feel like it’s more like learning how to listen to a chronic liar and learning to sort out what’s true from the lies.
Ha! That is funny @brownfat…I find too that while I’m fasting my hunger is low. I have noticed that if I eat around 2 and then have dinner with my family I don’t have the ravenous hunger I feel when I wait until about 5 to eat. But then doesn’t this lessen the effects of things like autophagy if I eat earlier in the day?
I am a bit the same way. When I alternate day fast, if I wait until I get home from work around 3, I eat ALL the things. If I eat around lunch around 12-1 I can be satisfied with lunch and then dinner. I think the key is to eat meals and not snack.
I have two root causes
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Extra ghrelin (hormone) SNP. Comes out to play, sometimes
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Stress (brain thing)
I use My Fitness Pal and a Fitbit to monitor my intake and my activity. I’m keeping 70+ pounds off, 5.75 years. If I try to go off satiety, all I get are fat pants back again.
Good luck and experiment around. Tracking is easy and the data is GOLD!! Adjust from there.
I too sometimes become hungry after eating, but I might have found a pattern. It usually happens after a period of calorie deprivation (extended fasting), a period where I’ve been more active than usual or I have had poor sleep for some time. I tend to stick to one meal a day, and while that’s still doable during these periods of extra stress I find the hunger becomes persistent throughout the day. It’s not something I can’t ignore, but usually I can’t feel it even if I’m trying to until it’s time to eat. It also becomes much harder to try extended fasting again during these periods of increased huger, where the hunger actually starts to become irritating by day two.
The best solution I’ve found is to eat a lot. It’s not something I’ve had the opportunity to test much but the couple times I’ve tried it I’ve been so satiated I’ve had trouble eating the next day. Much preferable to spending a week being lazy, hungry and unable to sleep properly. Because of this, as well as my other experiences with eating, hunger, energy levels and stress, I’m starting to think that at least for me the best pattern is periods of fasting interspersed with periods of overeating almost to the point where I hate food.
I see autophagy as a secondary consideration. I don’t know how to measure it, neither how much I’m getting or how much I need. I’d guess that when one is anorexic they get a lot of autophagy and as is common, too much of a good thing can be harmful.
Maybe fasting for such long time is counterproductive for you. Maybe you should have smaller periods of fasting, like you skip lunch and than have dinner. Another factor that could make you hungry is the size of your stomach. If you eat a large volume of food at one point (which is what you probably do after a long fast) your stomach bloats and when if shrinks again it creates the sensation of hunger…consuming smaller amounts of food that are nutrient dense will make your stomach smaller. Hope this helps.
This has been happening to me the last few nights. I’ll start the day with BPC and then have lunch approx 6 hours later, then dinner with the kiddos. Usually about 8:30 every night (when I would feed the Ben & Jerry’s gremlin) I am STARVING. Not mentally hungry, but physical hunger pangs. The last few nights I’ve had a small cheese plate and then some HWC and that’s been helping. I’m not fat adapted yet, so I have no access to all of those pints of Ben and Jerry’s that are sitting on my hips, haha. This is not my first major change in WOE but is my only Keto experience- the mentality of “drink a glass of water” always has me drinking water to “fill up” (which doesn’t work which leads me to believe that I am actually physically hungry).
I am truly interested in the science behind all of this.
@brownfat I have been recovered from my eating disorder for over 6 months now, so I am no longer dealing with the restrictive eating patterns I engaged in during my illness. I could not fast for long periods when i was underweight but I think I still experienced autophagy. But now it seems like I can eat an incredible amount of energy dense food and still be hungry. I don’t track, but I imagine I eat over 200 grams of fat, and I eat a slightly higher level of carbs, maybe up to 40 grams, and sufficient protein. I think, I just ate a TON of food, thousands of calories no doubt, and still, I’m hungry! I’m in ketosis so my body has access to energy stores, so why does it still send me the signal that it needs me to eat more? And then when I listen to that signal, and I eat more, i feel satiated, not overly full. It’s crazy!
IThis started happening to me after I lost 35 pounds, with still plenty more weight to lose my appetite returned full force! I’m fully fat adapted (which is separate from being in ketosis), I’ve been Keto since March.
I don’t know if it’s my body trying to gain back the weight or if I now can’t access enough energy from the body fat I have left. But it’s sort of upsetting! Like you described, I’ll eat a beautiful giant Keto dinner, but then later, I’ll basically be in the cheese/butter/bacon drawer desperately trying to get the satiety signals I used to have. I’m not gaining lots of weight or anything so it’s only distressing right now as a control issue. Sometimes I feel like I’m overeating. But maybe not? I’m not losing as fast as I used to either though, so maybe I should learn to ignore the hunger? That feels wrong too.
A lot of folks say to trust your hunger/satiety signals on Keto but I’m still not sure I 100% do. Or if that’s even accurate advice for a woman.
I tried eating 3 times a day, twice a day, thinking maybe I was binging after holding off all day but the more times I eat, the more food I eat overall. Meanwhile, extended fasting is not a problem.
I hope we can get some insights, thanks for posting this topic!
@LizinLowell weight loss will definitely ramp up hunger signals. The body does not like to lose weight and fights against it. Keto has the strange effect of liberating fat stores for energy while simultaneously preventing the symptoms of starvation that most “diets” produce. In other words, with keto you lose weight while keeping your body adequately fueled unlike hypocaloric diets. So I think to some degree that by eating keto, which lowers insulin levels dramatically thereby allowing our bodies to utilize fat stores, we experience hunger like this because our bodies’ energy stores are being depleted. Despite how satiating keto foods can be, we still tend to lose body fat eating this way, which sends the signal to ramp up hunger signals. Also I remember reading somewhere that carbohydrates trigger the relapse of a particular satiety hormine. So that might also contribute to the feeling of being ravenous after having eaten a big meal comprised of keto foods.
So should I ignore these increased hunger signals if I’m still trying to lose weight? What’s your opinion?
It depends I think. This is very subjective…for myself I know the difference between being genuinely hungry and feeling like i want to eat because I’m lonely or some other reason. So you have to decide what kind of hunger you’re experiencing. I personally don’t think it’s helpful to push that real hunger down, because I think if done repeatedly it can backfire and your body might fight back and send you even stronger hunger signals. So if you are still trying to lose weight I’d say to at least eat something that will take the edge off so your brain is not thinking it’s being deprived. So maybe some cheese, or pepperoni or nut butter, something that tastes good and is satisfying.
Right on, I appreciate your perspective. That’s what I’ve been doing. Also, paired with fasting, I think it could be beneficial to me to get my calories up a little higher than they were the first 6 months to potentially rev up my metabolism a bit when I do eat. Anyway I try to balance figuring out what my body really needs and what my head really wants lol. If after a full meal I’m feeling snacky I eat some salt. If that doesn’t work in a half hour I try the other trick I saw on here which is to imagine eating a hard boiled egg and if that sounds appetizing it’s real hunger.
Love this conversation because the body’s response to Keto seems to morph over time and it’s helpful to find others at similar stages having similar experiences.