Stop the raging hunger

[mamahanji]

I'm not terribly overweight. I do eat too much thought but I'm maintaining it because I walk an awful lot. My main issue is I seem to need to eat little and often.

I want to lose some weight and I have a goal in mind and I'm going to up my exercise to cycling and weight training and I'm trying to lower my food intake. The problem is I think I'm hungry even when I probably shouldn't be.

If I drink too much water I throw up so that doesn't really work for me.

Any tips on how to keep the beast at bay? I'm in no way trying to eat too few calories, I'm just trying to eat a normal amount.

You're seeking satiety, that feeling of being full. Hunger is a perfectly natural drive, we're evolved to have a good sense of hunger so we seek out nutritious foods. It's just in 2018 there is so much nutritious and not-so-nutritious food everywhere, it's hard to override the drive!

Some people might advocate trying to "retrain" your stomach/brain, or going full cold turkey embracing the whole intermittent fasting thing but none of that ever appealed to me. A fairly basic answer would be to seek out less calorie dense foods. There have been studies of groups of people eating as they would "normally" not on specific diets, and the amount of calories they were consuming could vary a lot but they all ate about the same sort of raw bulk of food. It's just a lot easier to overeat in calorie terms when you're dealing with calorie dense foods. A spoonful of oil has more calories in it than a pound of broccoli - easy to get that extra oil from fried foods, difficult to distractedly munch a pound of broccoli!

So if you want to feel full and satisfied but not be consuming too many extra calories, look for those low caloric density foods - things like thick vegetable and bean soups, whole grains. High fibre and low processed products are your friend. In terms of practical snacks air popped popcorn is a great filling your stomach snack without any oil or anything upping those calories.

I think we all must be very different. I feel I'm the opposite to the PP who talks of filling up on broccoli or bean soup, popcorn and other low calorie foods. I find when my stomach is actually growling with hunger, I can stave it off completely by eating a small sliver of very cold butter or cheese, or a tablespoon of double cream. That can keep me feeling fine for an hour at least. A tiny amount of something fatty stops me eating anything else or even wanting anything else.

thenightsky - I think that's definitely a thing as well, there's the two different sides where you can either seek out bulky low-caloric-density food that promote satiety through volume, or a small amount of a "satiety activator" which would usually be a high fat content food. Since that's high in calories you would only want a very small amount.

I read an interesting overview of it here www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/healthy-satiety/ - essentially a satisfying meal is usually a combination of a large quantity of low density foods like veg and whole grains, then a small amount of a satiety activator. It also suggests you can eat a small amount before a meal and it will help you to eat less overall, so e.g. a half teaspoon of peanut butter on some celery.