If you are thin and watch intake, do you get hungry?

[flowersintheatticus]

I need to lose weight, I like the wrong things but get so incredibly hungry when I limit calories. Looking on instagram at fitness experts their portions are so tiny and I wonder if they are genuinely satisified or ravenous and just have great willpower to carry on until the next meal.
I need high fat foods such as yoghurt, hummus, cream cheese, read meat and so on, but I'm no where near satisfied when I restrict to the calorific ration. Salads/green veg does absolutely nothing for me, neither does pasta/rice/bread, so although my stomach is full I'm still hungry, if that makes sense?
I see these yoga women who eat a tiny chicken breast for dinner and 3 cashews as a snack and just cannot relate at all. I used saxenda back in the day and it's the only time I ever lost weight, but don't want to continue on injections as I know as soon as I stop it will be straight back on.
Any advice?

Haven't rtft but, recently I've started having half a bag of kale, lightly cooked in the ninja with a little oil/salt. I've noticed when I have this for lunch, I don't even think about food until we'll later on. Not sure if it's just a comfortable full stomach or it's stopping cravings etc but it's definitely working to stop cravings/snacking. One day I ran out and accidentally ate a bowl of cereal, crisps and three bits of toast before dinner time.

There seems do be an almost pathological avoidance of ever feeling even a bit peckish nowadays. Constant snacking is the result. It’s ok to feel peckish. It’s ok to be hungry when you sit down to eat. I think this is a big part of the obesity problem in the uk - constant snacking.

I am BMI 22.5. I watch what I eat a little bit, not much, mainly not snacking too much and not absentmindedly eating the same portion size as much larger DH.

I wouldn’t say I feel hunger tbh. Hunger to me is when you haven’t eaten all day. I do feel peckish quite often and that is when I need to remind myself that it won’t kill me to wait for the next meal. If you ignore the peckish feeling it often goes away anyway.

It’s ok to be hungry when you sit down to eat. Yes and means you enjoy the meal a lot more.

I don't get hungry often because of anxiety, which sits directly in my stomach.
Also from a generation who weren't used to faff about with it.
Weight sorted.

After a while your stomach gets used to how you eat, I've always been a 6-8 and sometimes have to force myself to eat once a day with intermittent fasting. If I stop fasting for a week hunger pangs get annoying and I find myself mindlessly eating snacks or something and it's hard to stop once I start.

I echo PPs advice on protein. I eat 120g protein daily, which, by the time you add in veg, fruit, and some carbs, there isn’t much room in my stomach for anything else! Chicken, eggs, cottage cheese, 0% Greek yoghurt, turkey etc.

I also ‘volume eat’ and recommend checking out volume eating videos on YouTube. It’s about eating lots of low-calorie food that satisfies your psychological need to eat. Big salad, popcorn, dips made from Greek yoghurt with veg, etc.

I also meal prep daily lunch and snacks for me and DH, which stops me having to think about what I’m eating until dinner (I have the same protein porridge breakfast every day).

Ive lost all the baby weight after having 3 DC and I’m feeling better than ever. I don’t even need to rely on willpower because I’m always satisfied. Of course, I’ll eat a piece of chocolate or cake whenever I want. My biggest weakness is sourdough bread that I bake for the DC, so I weigh a small slice with butter and eat it every evening. That might seem crazy, but otherwise I’d eat half the loaf, especially when it’s fresh from the oven!

I watch my calories and am rarely ever hungry. Your body adapts, eat high fibre and high protein, good complex carbs. People who are thin naturally do not get all the food noise or wanting to eat when they're not hungry like you've described.

Bit of a dodgy response there mate, nobody's rewarded by hunger if they've got a healthy relationship with food.

I think you are confusing cravings and hunger as PP said. Hunger is gurgling empty tummy. Craving is fancying something xyz to eat

As I said, i’d rather go to bed a bit hungry than feeling overly full, disappointed in myself and fat. I wake up hungry, ready for my breakfast. I’m very happy with my body so I guess that’s my trade off. I’ve been larger before and I know how I prefer to live.

A healthy relationship with food can also mean knowing you don’t need to eat every time you have a twinge of hunger / you’ve had a few weeks of poorer choices and need to get your act in gear.

This is a post about managing hunger and sometimes.. you just have to feel a bit hungry!

I am not thin by any means but I have lost a significant amount of weight over the last year or so.

I don't mind being hungry at times. I am not going to snack if I am having dinner in an hour. I try and eat balanced meals and key an eye on portion sizes. I think sometimes that we are so used to massive portion that when we get a standard portion we think we are being underfed when we are actually not. It took a bit to get used to recommended portion sizes but I actually find now that most are plenty.

I do make sure that I sit at a table when I am eating and eat with a knife and fork when possible and chew my food well. I find I eat a lot more if I eat fast so take my time. Also hunger can often be thirst so I try to keep my water intake up.

Zoe: zoe.com/

I am following this programme, which gives you individual advice on what food works
For your body and what doesn't.

I am never hungry and eat lots of hummus, olive oil, nuts, full fat Greek yogurt plus I am losing around 3 or 4lb a week (I am very overweight).

Eating high fat foods won't fill you. You need to eat more protein

I've always been thin but I never go hungry. I hate being hungry. I do think the stomach shrinks and hunger becomes less of a thing. I don't limit my calorie intake, it seems to regulate itself. Today I've eaten a large bowl of porridge with 3 small pieces of 80% dark chocolate and coconut yoghurt, flax seeds, toasted mixed seeds and a sliced banana. Then lunch was two slices of brown bread with real butter and 2 fried eggs. Then I just had a snack of a bag of crisps and a slice of buttered bread and a tiny bit of cheese . Dinner is leftover potato & carrot mash, half a leftover bean burger, a helping of steamed spinach beet, a tomato, onion and chickpea ragout, sprouted beans and some salad leaves.
I don't drink fizzy drinks or eat cake or puddings, or sweets, except at Christmas! I choose tea over coffee and dont drink alcohol. Yoga every morning.
I'm a big advocate of 3 square meals a day and as little UPF as possible.

Not starving but I'm hungrier than I would be if I just ate what I wanted. I find that if i have carbs / protein that helps keep me full.

I seem to do more or less ok as long as I'm careful to eat protein eg nuts or peanut butter with an apple if I ever have a snack. I try to stick to meals but honestly, the key thing is to keep busy!

I have always been slim, I eat whatever I want but in small portions.

I am very fit and active as well so have to eat well or I wouldn't have the energy!

I'm never hungry*^^

This is not true. Some people who are 'naturally' thin don't get the food noise, I agree. But I do, and posters on other threads have said they do too, so it's not just me. I think about food almost all day every day. I dream about what I'm going to eat next all the time. But I value being healthy more than I want to give in to it. So I choose, every time, to ignore the food noise and I choose to wait until the next meal time. It is very difficult I grant you! But it is perfectly possible.

The 2 thinnest people I know (who have always been thin) say they never feel really hungry, just peckish. They can go ages without getting a rumbling tummy. Me, I'm starving as soon as I wake up.

Thank you all for the replies. I want to be a healthy BMI, certainly not instagrammable thin. I was a good BMI until my mid 30s and the weight just piled on, I'm 90ish kilos and 165cm, so I'm morbidly obese. I wasn't even this weight in any of my pregnancies, it has just crept up, and so have my hunger levels. It's not just a pang, but a real pain in the stomach, nausea feeling where I think I might be sick. All bloods are normal, so no thyroid issues to blame. Recently I was reading the book by that famous bariatric surgeon (and of course I can't remember the name of the book or his name!) recently and it mentioned something about some people having excessive levels of grelin production over time (the hunger hormone) so their only chance of losing weight is a gastric bypass, and I do wonder if that might be my case. I'm certainly not going for surgery, so need to do something else.

@usernother I wake up in the night with hunger sometimes and have to eat yoghurt or cheese and crackers 😔

Try focusing on fibre and protein. I was eating a reasonable amount of protein but increasing fibre intake has really helped. If you aim for 30g a day it forces you to eat other things like berries, veg, chia/flax. It has helped me with hunger.

I've done that too. If I've got bananas I have one, because I find them filling but they are less calories. My stomach is rumbling in the morning when I wake up, I'm so hungry.