After the hunger fades you just feel sorta empty/light but eventually that fades too and you stop noticing it. Atleast in my experience

pretty cool, i highly recommend.

all the people saying"hungry" are incorrect, your body locks into new eating patterns pretty quickly.

if you start OMAD, one meal a day, after a couple days you don’t get hungry until the food window you normally eat at.

fasting gave me a sense of control over my body that I hadn’t really accessed before.

I also just felt a little high after a few days, so things are a lot more interesting in general while fasting.

I like fasting, I do omad everyday, 2 days every now and then and I’ll fast 4 days to a week occasionally.

you know what else is really cool about fasting, my runny nose and all the little itches and all that stuff are gone.

I should stop talking, I can talk about this forever.

give it a whirl, fasting is fun.

saves a ton of time too, once you realize how much time you spend commuting to/from or consuming food or using the bathroom because you eat three or five or seven times a day.

Time that could be spent on lemmy answering questions about not eating hahaha.

After retiring early at 62 I found I don’t eat nearly as often as when I was working. Bowl of cereal in the morning and nothing until around 3pm, then either a small snack and dinner later or something bigger and just a bite later. Definitely no 3 meals a day routine. I didn’t have a physically strenuous job, just software development, but it seems like I needed to eat more. Stress maybe. Used to be when I got hungry I also felt slightly unsteady, like low blood sugar or something. But now if I get hungry I’m just hungry. I’ve learned that if I ignore it nothing bad happens - which almost feels like a superpower. I was never all that heavy but I’ve lost about 15 lbs and am stable within about 5 lbs of my high school weight, and I feel great.

Hunger

I did a 1000-calorie daily deficit for a few months, in order to lose two pounds a week. I got used to being hungry all the time after a couple of weeks, but having a lot less energy and being sleepy during the day were harder to deal with. My body was trying to conserve calories that way, but pushing through it was possible.

The hardest part was actually accurately counting the calories. It was relatively simple for off-the-shelf food, but a lot more annoying for things someone else home-cooked for me. I had to ask for the recipe every time, weigh how much I ate, and then track the calories per ingredient on a spreadsheet. Restaurant food was effectively impossible to count, but that didn’t matter much because I was so focused on filling food that I wouldn’t have eaten it anyway. I’m a vegetarian, so I ended up eating mostly beans, tofu (which is also beans, now that I think about it), and vegetables. Other things weren’t as filling per calorie as those foods.

For me:

If it comes from exercise and I can eat what feels like enough, I don’t notice. Like, literally lost 30lb when I started Jazzercise after having my last kid and had no idea, thought I’d just ‘toned up’ and was confused I needed new clothes, I was underweight by the time I realized, because I was not eating enough to fund the workouts. Appetite did not adjust.

If it comes from diet or fasting, I feel fine in the daytime but it is a migraine trigger. I feel so good going to bed kinda hungry but it makes wake up feeling crappy and also messes up my sleep.

If it comes from anxiety or emotional upset, well, it feels better than eating (I get stress anorexia definitely cannot eat when upset).

My husband said bulking, gaining weight and working out, was the best he has ever felt, physically.

It depends. If you eat frequently, regardless of how much you eat, you’re going to feel hungry relatively soon at any given point. So, eating at a deficit just amplifies that. It’s hard to ignore.

However, I’m a big fan of fasting (though I haven’t been very consistent with it lately). Once my body eventually gets used to not eating multiple times per day and instead, say, eating one big meal once per day, I don’t feel hungry at all until dinner time.

Even if you do eat at a reasonable deficit, and your daily meal is healthy/has enough fiber/protein, it’s way more likely to satiate you.

Not really related to the post, but if I’m doing OMAD (one meal a day) consistently, fasting also makes me feel great. I get a noticeable increase in energy and mental clarity.

Deficits are a funny thing.

How are you doing it? How long for? How big a deficit?

Previously its been hard, but I did a lot of research about macros, meals, using fat content to slow digestion etc… Once I got my diet dialed it was easy, because I figured out a few meals that were FUCKING HUGE and still low enough in calories that I got to be “full” at least once a day and hit all my nutrients.

That being said I’m on the last 2 weeks of a 750 cal deficit for 12 weeks and yeah, its starting to get real. Ive had a couple of days this week where Ive said “Fuck it” and had a second protein bar after dinner taking my deficit to only 500. After this I’ll be transitioning back to maintenance cals for 8 weeks although I have promised myself a “Mega blowout” meal of a whole costco pizza and I can eat until I dont want any more pizza in 1 sitting.

Its not so much that you feel “hungry” but you learn to love the feeling of not existing on a sugar and fat cocktail 24 hours a day. I think I’m actually going to have trouble readjusting to an extra 750 cals a day, let alone going onto bulking cals at some point.

I get cold easier and my clothes keep getting looser but that’s about it. I don’t count calories so I’m not sure when exactly I’m running a deficit or for how long but I have been steadily losing weight. I was a few pounds into the overweight range when I decided to start losing weight, now I’m down at least 14% from my peak and basically right in the middle of the healthy weight range for my height. About a year ago I started eating less, and started only eating until I didn’t feel hungry, and significantly reduced my alcohol intake. Its about the laziest diet possible because I still eat whatever whenever and still drink regularly but the net result is I’m running a calorie deficit often enough to lose a fair amount of weight. It doesn’t really feel like anything, or it feels about the same as running a calorie surplus. I imagine if I was running a larger or more sustained deficit it might be unpleasant and feel like starving but a minor irregular deficit isn’t something I really notice.