5 ms·

I think the hungry bit is often under-discussed. I lost 75kg over 3 years, then put exactly 75kg back on over the 4 years after that. While losing weight, and

I think the hungry bit is often under-discussed. I lost 75kg over 3 years, then put exactly 75kg back on over the 4 years after that. While losing weight, and keeping it off (for about 6 months), I was hungry all the time, every day. I hoped that my body would eventually "get used" to the new standard, but in the end (not conciously), I gave up -- it was too mentally tiring to be hungry whenever I was awake. I'm sure lots of it was a combination of physical and psycological -- I could eat lots of raw vegetables and not want to eat another carrot -- that wouldn't stop me eating something fatty/sugary.

ripply 4y ago
When I lost 13kg I had the same problem, I put it all back on immediately - I had an insatiable hunger after losing the weight. I ended up losing it all over again 6ish months later but this time I was able to keep it off because I didn’t have the hunger. The only difference was I lost it doing keto for the last month and I ate way healthier. I also run very hot and have a normal BMI now.
- time0ut 4y ago
  I lost 16kg by being more active and careful with eating then got stuck. Then I switched to keto and lost another 14kg. Sticking to a keto diet was very hard. I quit after a few months and slowly gained 15kg back.
jacamera 4y ago
Did you ever try fasting for an extended period of time during any of that? I've never gone more than ~48 hours but from what I've watched and read, people seem to stop feeling hungry after say four or five days. I wonder if that could maybe act as a sort of hard reset for the constant feeling of hunger you experienced.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Not a hard reset but my experience with a 72 hour fast has definitely been not feeling hungry, and the moment of eating a lot again restarted the entire thing. Feels like it is much easier to learn to eat a lot rather than eat very little.
stonemetal12 4y ago
It is my understanding is it takes a year before that reset happens.
bxji 4y ago
Your description of always feeling hungry after keeping it off is rather worrying to me, since I’m getting close to my target weight after a 1 year+ journey of diet and exercise. I do remember reading before that the fat cells that get created when you gain weight never really go away, they just “deflate”. So after you lose weight, you are more likely to gain the weight back than someone who is at the same weight now but who has never been bigger than that. I also recall seeing a study that your body sends you extra hunger pangs to gain the weight that you lost back, because it assumes that losing weight means you’re in fight-or-flight mode, so it wants to make sure you survive. That’s why a weight loss drug where an extra 300-400 calories per day were excreted via urine did not show significant results. I couldn’t find the exact study for the second part. So I’ll just leave a general reference from Northwestern alluding to the same results. 1. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/your-fat-cells-never-disappear-making-future-weight-gain-more-likely https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/your-fat-cells-never... 2. https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/how-your-body-fights-weight-loss https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/how-your-body-fig...
- jimmaswell 4y ago
  I've lost 130lbs through calorie counting. I was hungry in the very beginning, maybe the first few weeks. After that my hunger adapted to my diet and I have no issues with it now. I was worried about all that stuff about the body never adapting back after being used to eating a certain amount but it just hasn't come up. Maybe that's more likely to happen if you go too fast. I've been keeping a steady pace of ~1.3lbs/week which is slow but easily sustainable. It also helps hunger to eat more protein, not avoid fat too much, and avoid simple carbs.
- CJefferson 4y ago
  The best advice I can give is to keep weighing yourself by your current schedule, and plan on doing so forever. I definately give up at some point, then lived in denial for 6 months or so, by which point a lot of the damage was done (certainly psycologically). I don't know if I would have controlled it better if I saw the weight coming back on, but at least I wouldn't have been pretending otherwise. I'm not losing weight again, and I've set a reminder to weigh myself (I've set it to weekly, I know some people do daily or whatever). I'm planning on that being active forever.
SoftTalker 4y ago
You don't say what your diet was, but "lots of raw vegetables" is not a formula for a sated appetite. Sure, if you eat enough of them you will eventually feel "full" for a while in a bloated sort of way, but fatty foods such as meat, eggs, and nuts will stop the "hungry" feeling without stuffing yourself. Or so it is for me.
hutrdvnj 4y ago
I have the same problem with raw vegetables, but there's different types of food, some food stops your hunger for like 30-60 minutes (e.g. ice cream) whereas other food can last for several hours, both having the same amount of calories. The "trick" is in my case to find food that satisfies my brain and makes me full for many hours, then eat such food in 95% of times.
slothtrop 4y ago
It's possible you're conflating hunger/satiety with craving. If you couldn't eat another carrot, you're not hungry. Sugar (and anticipation of) gives you a dopamine boost, and we tend to crave when we have low circulating levels. Sugar consumption also increases levels of ghrelin (i.e. it makes you hungrier), and cravings. Notwithstanding that there's more to a healthy diet than vegetables. According to research, high protein intake can improve satiety on a caloric deficit. Some level of fat intake goes a ways too; some vitamins are fat-soluble. Potato is the most satiating vegetable there is, gram per gram. It's not well understood how nutrient deficiency influences hunger, but it's possible your diet didn't hit nutrient targets.
gspencley 4y ago
This is a common pattern and one of the reasons that crash diets don't work in the long run. I've struggled with the same issue as you and started really digging into the science of food and nutrition because I've had enough of yo-yo'ing. Fat storage is regulated by various hormones. The most significant are insulin, cortisol, testosterone, estrogen and hormone-sensitive lipase. Hunger is caused by the release of the hormone gherelin. The way to lose weight and keep it off permanently is to make permanent lifestyle changes that hack these hormones. The first part is to drastically lower the production of hormones that trigger fat storage. Insulin seems to be by far the most significant. The best way to drastically lower insulin is to not eat, but the next best thing you can do (because not eating isn't really all that practical for most people) is to severely restrict carbohydrates. This means all carbohydrates, including those from fruits and vegetables. You mentioned lots of vegetables, including carrots - well, carrots are an extremely high-carbohydrate vegetable, they're almost like eating sugar. They'll give you an insulin boost and you'll feel hungry again very shortly after eating them. We've been duped by being told that "fruits and vegetables are good for us." The reality is way more complicated than that. Cortisol is the stress hormone. While I don't buy claims that exercise results in weight loss (because I used to jog for an hour every single day, never ate junk food and was on a "well balanced" diet recommended by all the leading authorities and was still obese and couldn't lose weight) but exercise is great at reducing stress, and so it can help with weight loss ... just not as much as diet. Other ways to keep cortisol low are to make sure you're getting enough sleep and obviously reduce stressors in your life. Testosterone and estrogen can also be regulated somewhat by exercise, as well as nutrition. As for gherelin, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that gherlin is released by your fat cells when they start to deplete. It's your body's way of saying "I'm using stored energy, we better find some more." But the good news is that it seems to be temporary and insulin seems to be a factor here too. When you eat, your body releases insulin to moderate the influx of new blood sugar. Your fat cells get a boost of new fat storage and the release of gherelin is suppressed. But as soon as your blood sugar levels come down and those fat cells start to empty rather than fill you get a new release of gherelin which makes you want to eat so you rinse and repeat. And people who get into a cycle of weight gain become resistant to both insulin and gherelin ... so your pancreas and your fat cells keep releasing more and more just to produce the same effect and a vicious cycle ensues and this is how people become morbidly obese. So by drastically reducing your insulin levels by cutting carbs, intermittent fasting and filling up healthy fats ("unhealthy fats" like poly-unsaturated fatty acids; PUFAs have their own health problems associated with them) you cut off the production fat-storing hormones and you limit hunger hormone. Then you can restrict calories and not torture yourself. This doesn't mean that you won't ever feel hungry, gherelin production won't stop ... but it will lower and become temporary. You'll find yourself feeling hungry at certain points in the day but it goes away after a few minutes without eating anything. Long term, once you've cut the weight, you can go back to eating more calories, but by changing your diet to consume very few carbs and to eat less in general (typically by eating once or twice per day) you keep insulin levels very low. The result is that you get the energy your body requires but it's using it rather than storing it as fat and you're not feeling hungry all the time. And you're much more likely to make a change permanently if it's comfortable and not torturing you.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
FullStackAda 4y ago
I lost 25kg and kept it off for 10+ years, I think the key was that I kept exercising even after relaxing my diet. Solid 3-4 hours a week kept me less hungry for whatever reason. As soon as I dropped the exercise, because, well, life happened - the weight started creeping up, diet restrictions and IF didn't bulge it.

ripply 4y ago

When I lost 13kg I had the same problem, I put it all back on immediately - I had an insatiable hunger after losing the weight. I ended up losing it all over again 6ish months later but this time I was able to keep it off because I didn’t have the hunger. The only difference was I lost it doing keto for the last month and I ate way healthier. I also run very hot and have a normal BMI now.

time0ut 4y ago
I lost 16kg by being more active and careful with eating then got stuck. Then I switched to keto and lost another 14kg. Sticking to a keto diet was very hard. I quit after a few months and slowly gained 15kg back.

jacamera 4y ago

Did you ever try fasting for an extended period of time during any of that? I've never gone more than ~48 hours but from what I've watched and read, people seem to stop feeling hungry after say four or five days. I wonder if that could maybe act as a sort of hard reset for the constant feeling of hunger you experienced.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Not a hard reset but my experience with a 72 hour fast has definitely been not feeling hungry, and the moment of eating a lot again restarted the entire thing. Feels like it is much easier to learn to eat a lot rather than eat very little.

stonemetal12 4y ago

It is my understanding is it takes a year before that reset happens.

bxji 4y ago

Your description of always feeling hungry after keeping it off is rather worrying to me, since I’m getting close to my target weight after a 1 year+ journey of diet and exercise. I do remember reading before that the fat cells that get created when you gain weight never really go away, they just “deflate”. So after you lose weight, you are more likely to gain the weight back than someone who is at the same weight now but who has never been bigger than that. I also recall seeing a study that your body sends you extra hunger pangs to gain the weight that you lost back, because it assumes that losing weight means you’re in fight-or-flight mode, so it wants to make sure you survive. That’s why a weight loss drug where an extra 300-400 calories per day were excreted via urine did not show significant results. I couldn’t find the exact study for the second part. So I’ll just leave a general reference from Northwestern alluding to the same results. 1. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/your-fat-cells-never-disappear-making-future-weight-gain-more-likely https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/your-fat-cells-never... 2. https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/how-your-body-fights-weight-loss https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/how-your-body-fig...

jimmaswell 4y ago
I've lost 130lbs through calorie counting. I was hungry in the very beginning, maybe the first few weeks. After that my hunger adapted to my diet and I have no issues with it now. I was worried about all that stuff about the body never adapting back after being used to eating a certain amount but it just hasn't come up. Maybe that's more likely to happen if you go too fast. I've been keeping a steady pace of ~1.3lbs/week which is slow but easily sustainable. It also helps hunger to eat more protein, not avoid fat too much, and avoid simple carbs.
CJefferson 4y ago
The best advice I can give is to keep weighing yourself by your current schedule, and plan on doing so forever. I definately give up at some point, then lived in denial for 6 months or so, by which point a lot of the damage was done (certainly psycologically). I don't know if I would have controlled it better if I saw the weight coming back on, but at least I wouldn't have been pretending otherwise. I'm not losing weight again, and I've set a reminder to weigh myself (I've set it to weekly, I know some people do daily or whatever). I'm planning on that being active forever.

SoftTalker 4y ago

You don't say what your diet was, but "lots of raw vegetables" is not a formula for a sated appetite. Sure, if you eat enough of them you will eventually feel "full" for a while in a bloated sort of way, but fatty foods such as meat, eggs, and nuts will stop the "hungry" feeling without stuffing yourself. Or so it is for me.

hutrdvnj 4y ago

I have the same problem with raw vegetables, but there's different types of food, some food stops your hunger for like 30-60 minutes (e.g. ice cream) whereas other food can last for several hours, both having the same amount of calories. The "trick" is in my case to find food that satisfies my brain and makes me full for many hours, then eat such food in 95% of times.

slothtrop 4y ago

It's possible you're conflating hunger/satiety with craving. If you couldn't eat another carrot, you're not hungry. Sugar (and anticipation of) gives you a dopamine boost, and we tend to crave when we have low circulating levels. Sugar consumption also increases levels of ghrelin (i.e. it makes you hungrier), and cravings. Notwithstanding that there's more to a healthy diet than vegetables. According to research, high protein intake can improve satiety on a caloric deficit. Some level of fat intake goes a ways too; some vitamins are fat-soluble. Potato is the most satiating vegetable there is, gram per gram. It's not well understood how nutrient deficiency influences hunger, but it's possible your diet didn't hit nutrient targets.

gspencley 4y ago

This is a common pattern and one of the reasons that crash diets don't work in the long run. I've struggled with the same issue as you and started really digging into the science of food and nutrition because I've had enough of yo-yo'ing. Fat storage is regulated by various hormones. The most significant are insulin, cortisol, testosterone, estrogen and hormone-sensitive lipase. Hunger is caused by the release of the hormone gherelin. The way to lose weight and keep it off permanently is to make permanent lifestyle changes that hack these hormones. The first part is to drastically lower the production of hormones that trigger fat storage. Insulin seems to be by far the most significant. The best way to drastically lower insulin is to not eat, but the next best thing you can do (because not eating isn't really all that practical for most people) is to severely restrict carbohydrates. This means all carbohydrates, including those from fruits and vegetables. You mentioned lots of vegetables, including carrots - well, carrots are an extremely high-carbohydrate vegetable, they're almost like eating sugar. They'll give you an insulin boost and you'll feel hungry again very shortly after eating them. We've been duped by being told that "fruits and vegetables are good for us." The reality is way more complicated than that. Cortisol is the stress hormone. While I don't buy claims that exercise results in weight loss (because I used to jog for an hour every single day, never ate junk food and was on a "well balanced" diet recommended by all the leading authorities and was still obese and couldn't lose weight) but exercise is great at reducing stress, and so it can help with weight loss ... just not as much as diet. Other ways to keep cortisol low are to make sure you're getting enough sleep and obviously reduce stressors in your life. Testosterone and estrogen can also be regulated somewhat by exercise, as well as nutrition. As for gherelin, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that gherlin is released by your fat cells when they start to deplete. It's your body's way of saying "I'm using stored energy, we better find some more." But the good news is that it seems to be temporary and insulin seems to be a factor here too. When you eat, your body releases insulin to moderate the influx of new blood sugar. Your fat cells get a boost of new fat storage and the release of gherelin is suppressed. But as soon as your blood sugar levels come down and those fat cells start to empty rather than fill you get a new release of gherelin which makes you want to eat so you rinse and repeat. And people who get into a cycle of weight gain become resistant to both insulin and gherelin ... so your pancreas and your fat cells keep releasing more and more just to produce the same effect and a vicious cycle ensues and this is how people become morbidly obese. So by drastically reducing your insulin levels by cutting carbs, intermittent fasting and filling up healthy fats ("unhealthy fats" like poly-unsaturated fatty acids; PUFAs have their own health problems associated with them) you cut off the production fat-storing hormones and you limit hunger hormone. Then you can restrict calories and not torture yourself. This doesn't mean that you won't ever feel hungry, gherelin production won't stop ... but it will lower and become temporary. You'll find yourself feeling hungry at certain points in the day but it goes away after a few minutes without eating anything. Long term, once you've cut the weight, you can go back to eating more calories, but by changing your diet to consume very few carbs and to eat less in general (typically by eating once or twice per day) you keep insulin levels very low. The result is that you get the energy your body requires but it's using it rather than storing it as fat and you're not feeling hungry all the time. And you're much more likely to make a change permanently if it's comfortable and not torturing you.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

FullStackAda 4y ago

I lost 25kg and kept it off for 10+ years, I think the key was that I kept exercising even after relaxing my diet. Solid 3-4 hours a week kept me less hungry for whatever reason. As soon as I dropped the exercise, because, well, life happened - the weight started creeping up, diet restrictions and IF didn't bulge it.