If you are slim are you regularly hungry

[Spaghettihulahoops]

Prompted by a thread about weight training and weight loss. A poster stated that they are always hungry on the days they train. They said they put up with this to stay slim.
So if you are slim do you experience and ignore hunger on a regular basis?

Not really, but I try to make sure I'm not over portioning. I'd rather eat little and often and not get so hungry I want to eat loads

As someone who is really obese this is a revelation! I would assume that the aim is to not feel hungry. Clearly that is where i am going wrong

Thin and often ravenously hungry. I sometimes wake up in the night and will come down for buttered toast. I can’t ignore it- I go from hmm, I’m a bit peckish to homicidal in about two minutes.
I have a fast metabolism but also don’t feel hungry first thing so although I snack all the time it’s in an 8 hour window.

Is the hypothesis:

There are slim people who feel hungry but often chose to ignore it, and therefore stay slim.

or

There are slim people who are slim because they don’t often feel hungry and therefore don’t often eat.

OP are you saying you had assumed the second until you read this other thread earlier today?

Yes when I am at my ideal weight I often feel hungry. I have put a bit of weight on recently because I have been eating when hungry. The result is that I overeat and put on weight! Am trying hard now to loose it and that means accepting periods of feeling hungry. I stop eating each evening by 6pm as it helps weight loss. This means I often go to bed feeling hungry. The important element is that it’s just feeling hungry, not starving. It’s perfectly normal and manageable to feel hungry for periods of time. Most people don’t accept this which is one reason so many people are overweight.

I get hungry but eating feels like such a ballache/genuinely unpleasant that I prefer to be hungry than cook something and try and force myself to eat it.

It's also not massively noticeable. I regularly go the entire day without thinking about eating and only notice I'm ravenous when it's very late at night. So I have something around 11pm and then when I wake up in the morning, eating is the absolute last thing I want to do.

I literally eat whatever and whenever I like so there's no conscious decision to maintain a certain weight.

I have always drunk an absolute shitload of water every day so that might be taking the edge off.

Certainly not all the time - I train pretty hard and it's important for me to be well fuelled so I get the most out of my training. So yes, I'll come back from a tough workout hungry but I eat straight away. I'm a healthy weight (BMI 22), and while I wouldn't mind shifting my body fat percentage down a little, maintaining my strength and bone density is an absolute priority for me as I'm in peri-menopause. I don't diet or calorie count but I try to eat healthily with plenty of fruit, veg, protein and fibrous carbs and as little ultra-processed food as practical. The one time I do tend to get hungry is if I've had too much non-fibrous carbs at dinner time which makes me wake up super hungry at 3am!

No. But I rarely eat so much I feel stuffed.

I can ignore hunger for quite a while, if I'm busy or stressed, but my DH can't and has to eat.
Today I had breakfast at about 7am but then couldn't eat until 2pm, I was hungry but not desperately so.

@ReeseWitherfork i really struggle if I get hungry, will end up with bad headaches, feeling dizzy etc. It hadn’t occurred to me that some people are able to just ignore it.

For what it’s worth I’m not talking about the normal hunger that comes on an hour or two before meals. That seems normal and desirable. I mean being hungry for great swathes of the day and being able to put up with that.

I’m always hungry for breakfast in the morning and absolutely starving for lunch at around 1pm. I need a protein-filled lunch (usually omelette and salad).

Sometimes I get really hungry for tea or sometimes I get past hunger and it’s too late to eat.

Im relaxed about skipping dinner if I’m not going out but I would never skip breakfast or lunch.

i usually have hot drink and piece of fruit before bed as if I go to bed hungry, it’s hard to sleep.

So, yes, I get very hungry for my meals. I like to see it as a sign my metabolism is working the way it should. Sometimes I’ll shut down hunger with a coffee if it’s not convenient to eat but only for a short-time as it gets hard to focus

OP if you can’t tolerate hunger maybe you aren’t eating nutritious food and your snacking is throwing your blood sugar all over the place?

Ever since I started intermittent fasting (18:6) and ditched snacking and all UPF, my blood sugar has really stabilised and I can easily fast for 20hrs.

I last ate at 5pm - I can objectively feel slight hunger pangs now, but they are almost nice to feel and kind of in the background, if I’m doing something I won’t even register them.

Actually the opposite.
Can't work out if I've eaten, always feel weak and sluggish if I try it. Much better for me to work out when I've fasted since the night before.

After working out, the endorphins mean I don't feel hungry until hours later. So typically don't eat until dinner.

But that's also aligned with my natural metabolism - I actively prefer to eat one meal a day, at dinner, and not the rest of the time. That's how I best feel alert and high energy.

I think people need to understand and eat with their own metabolisms - have plenty of friends who get faint and shaky if they don't eat regularly, so obviously my preferred way wouldn't work for them.

What kind of meals do you eat?

I couldn't be hungry for great swathes of the day. I would be miserable and grumpy. I don't mind the feeling of being hungry before I eat a meal for an hour or so. If I feel hungry in between meals I do have a snack (try to make this nuts or fruit but sometimes it is unfortunately a packet of crisps, don't really like biscuits/cake much which is probably lucky for me).

Yes I do get hungry but that’s normal. Being hungry occasionally won’t kill you. I am not starving or malnourished just normal hungry. I eat 3 meals a day and I don’t snack.

Also, agree with @7Worfs - once I got rid of (most) sugary foods, feelings of hunger became a very small issue, and I do think it's down to blood sugar for me.

I’m regularly hungry but not starving as others have said - I know that if I get really hungry I’ll end up overeating so I do snack but I have quite set meal/snack times and will always be hungry for an hour or so before meals. I’ve never been very overweight but I was heavier than I wanted to be in my mid-30s and changed my diet/increased exercise to get to where I am now - around 9.5 stone and a size 8/10. I learnt that being hungry quite a lot of the time is the only way for me to stay slim but I’m rarely hungry to the level that it’s uncomfortable or distracting (I got really thin in the past by eating really low calorie and tolerating high levels of hunger - not worth it and impossible to maintain)

@UnaOfStormhold I experience the same 3am hunger if I’ve had too many starchy carbs/sugar at dinner. I didn’t make the connection until I did the Zoe study thing where you wear a blood sugar monitor for 14 days. Some nights you could see my blood sugar dip massively between 2am - 4am depending on what I’d eaten at around 7pm. I didn’t get a huge amount out of doing Zoe but I did find out that I have really poor sugar control which has helped me make some changes to my diet which mean I don’t experience hunger quite as much.

The aim of what, though?

I’m slim and before when I was moderately inactive, I didn’t eat because I didn’t feel hungry. I could easily be asked at 8PM what I had for lunch and think “crap I haven’t eaten today!”

Now I’m very active and I can’t even skip breakfast. At worst I’ll eat it at like 10am because i’m starving and sad that I’m losing all my muscle! TMI I have also since discovered that my partner was right and human beings are supposed to poop more than once a week.

Yeah I agree the headaches and shakiness is probably a sugar addiction.

Add dehydration in there and it's a recipe for disaster.

I do eat what I like, but I know if I started eating chocolate eclairs every day, I'd start feeling shit if I didn't get one. If I go on holiday and I'm on the sugary Monsters every day, it's a real effort to make myself stop craving them too. I get the most awful sluggish crash feeling, which is definitely different to hunger.

Yes always extremely hungry.

Yes, and I think it's normal to be hungry for an hour or so before meals, and late at night when the evening meal is a distant memory. I probably spend about four hours a day quite hungry.

No

I know the “hunger” I feel on the workout days is not the actual hunger - it’s my body tricking me into replacing the muscle stored glycogen lost during exercise, preferably with fast carbs like bread or sweets. So no, I am not going around hungry as 1700 calories for 57kg is not anywhere close to starvation but yes I do think about food a lot.