There are many contexts for a calorie deficit, if you are too fat already, a calorie deficit is bringing you back to optimal.
In this context, it’s important to recognize your body is an amazing homeostasis machine, it wants to stay at optimal.
If you don’t eat processed foods, anything that comes in a box. If you eat a very low carb diet, such as carnivore or keto plant based diet. You’re managing your insulin levels to normal, optimal ranges, which allows the entire body to operate its homeostasis magic. And even though you’re in a calorie deficit, you don’t feel hungry. Your body will want to maintain a calorie deficit, till it’s back to normal.
The important key here, is to eat whole foods. Basically anything people ate before 1900, you can eat, and you will feel full with the right time, and you will be in a calorie deficit if you need to lose weight.
The big problem with processed food, sugar foods, the carb rich environment people find themselves in nowadays… These diets tend to spike glucose, maintain highly insulin levels all the time, reduce ghrelin production. Processed food specifically is designed to not satiate, to encourage continual hunger. Doritos are famous for engineering the perfect constant craving, through food science.
If you’re always having elevated insulin levels, your body is always trying to be in an anabolic state, it’s hard to burn fat. Your body only stores fat, all of your energy reserves are in fat. With a few exceptions in the muscles and a tiny amount of glycation in the liver. Since your body cannot meaningfully store sugar, or carbs, only the amount in the bloodstream remains, so you’re always hungry because you’re running out of energy… I believe only 5 g of sugar can be in the bloodstream at any one time. You burn through that pretty quickly, in a hour or two, and hungry again.
In short, this is the food addiction cycle.
If you want to lose 1 lb in a month, or gain 1 lb, you need to consume or burn 3,500 calories. Or 116 calories a day. Or 38 calories per meal… Easy right? … In the US, calorie estimates are allowed to be off by as much as 25%, and that’s just packaged food, forget any restaurant or line cook being exactly precise with portions… So for 2,500 average daily diet, over three meals, the margin of error is 208 calories. Your target is 38 calories. You’re trying to do something within the margin of error of all of your estimates. Calorie counting is a very difficult game to do! The deck is stacked against you. This is why it’s important to allow the homeostasis machinery in your body to handle all of this through satiation. It’s going to do the right thing if you let it
Try and see. Everything’s contextual, subjective, and personal. For example you can feel more energetic and focused and not particularly hungry.
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.
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.
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.
The second and third day of fasting feel amazing.
Your head hurts.
I’m in a calorie deficit from switching to a mostly whole food (and plant-based) diet, which is rich in fiber and water. I actually feel full every meal and satiated for much longer after eating than before, due to the fiber and water bulk in the healthier, less processed food.
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.
You’re hungry.
To add to that, if the calorie deficit is small enough, the hunger feeling will be reduced over time as your body adjusts to the new calorie intake, but will always be there until the body is a weight that matches the calorie intake.
Example: Someone who is overweight eating the calories for their target weight will have a calorie deficit that becomes less of a deficit until they reach that target weight and at that point they should no longer feel hungry except when they actually need to eat to maintain weight. Obviously other factors can create a feeling of hunger when the body isn’t actually sending the hunger signals or people wouldn’t be overweight.
As someone on semaglutide therapy, I can share that a large calorie deficit hits you in the wills to live. At some point even just eating feels like a stop at the gas station to fuel up, and it hardly matters whether it’s 87 or 95 octane. Hell, rancid fry oil would even work. At some point, you stop caring whether you eat because it feels like another chore.
Eventually your metabolism syncs up again with your energy demand and you start getting interested in food, except you’re way more selective about how you’re (edit:
spending) acquiring those calories. I almost can’t abide by junk food, fast food, or breaded fried crap anymore. But neither do I want salad or vegetables because they’re “fluffy.” Too much volume, not enough calories. I want about 6 or 10 forks full of food, and then that’s it. And it’d best taste good, or I can’t be bothered. Restaurants easily stop looking like a good deal.Anyway that’s a digest of my diary for the last 22 months. Do with the info as you will.
Same!
This isn’t correct. Even when someone who has lost weight hits caloric balance they stay hungry. Fat cells produce hunger signals when it’s at lower than it’s previous stored energy levels.
It takes several years for fat cells to adapt to the new normal and not try to reach their previous levels.
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.
I’ve fasted – like, just water and vitamins – for a week before.
I found that I was hungry, especially for about the first two or three days, but that I mostly ignored it after that, though I did find myself paying more attention to food ads and stuff like that than normal.
I was significantly cooler. I assume that the metabolism cranks down. I needed to wear heavier clothing than normal to feel comfortable.
I felt like I had less energy to effortlessly run around. Like, I could get up and go somewhere, wasn’t weak, just felt more like something you’d think about doing before doing.
Don’t need to hit the toilet much. That’s neat. Do need to stay hydrated, which I found to be surprisingly easy to forget about without sitting down for a meal.
I wasn’t trying to push myself physically while doing that, though.
I’ve also tried running a long-run calorie deficit where I wasn’t fasting, but also wasn’t eating much – something like 500 calories a day or less – for a longer period of time, for months, and then did a ten mile bike ride a day – there are calories coming in, but they’re considerably less than what you’re burning just living. I found the biking to be kinda rough. It just yanked all of the sugar out of my blood. Had a couple times doing that when I had my vision start to gray out at the end of my ride, needed to stop and get my head down. Was kinda like a zombie after my ride for a bit. Also was colder, just as when fasting. While it’s doable – I lost a bunch of weight doing it – I have to say that I think that it was rather harder than just outright fasting and not doing the exercise. Every time I ate, I felt like it kicked me back into “being hungry mode”, and it was only really physically a strain during the bike ride.
I had a harder time mentally concentrating on things when I’m doing that. Haven’t tried quantifying it, but I’d say that I was less-productive while doing that.
Everything I’ve seen and read says exercise won’t actually change how many calories you burn in a day. It’s still super healthy to do, but does not replace a calorie deficit.
Your anecdote seems to support that. You burned up all your blood sugar by biking 10 miles and then almost passed out. So now you’re just going to laze around for hours burning fewer calories than you would have during that time had you not exercised.
I’ve dieted before and always embraced the “eat your exercise calories” idea. Exercise is good for your body, but any calories spent doing it should be eaten as extra food outside of your normal calorie goals.
My goodness this must be such an individual response because exercise is the only way I’ve been able to modify my weight downward, ever. Did fasting for health one year, 36 hours a week, no change in weight, did get lower cholesterol.
But start walking to work instead of driving? Weight drops. Stop walking the dogs at night? Weight creeps back up. My activity level seems to be the most important variable in my weight. Except for stress, which I don’t recommend as a weight loss strategy.
Interesting insight. If you were on a 500 calorie diet and “bonked” while cycling then presumably it was shortly after a meal, since at that level of calorie restriction you’re going to be running mostly on fat reserves directly rather than sugar via glycogen. It is absolutely possible to run marathons without having eating a gram of sugar. The advantage is precisely that you can’t hit a wall when the glycogen runs out. But apparently the keto diet is not quite as performant at the margin, which is why athletes haven’t all switched to it. It does deal with the hunger issue though, by all accounts.
You’ll feel the cold much more.
But after some time, the stomach adapts and you don’t really feel that much hunger anymore.
Just can be, that you produce a Gastritis, because the stomach wants to dissolve something and after some time it’s itself.
Also, muscles will be used, after fat, and you lose weight in a not nice way.
It’s (imho) also really hard to get back to regularly eating normal meals.
After a few weeks of stress and not eating much (last week was like 1.5 sandwiches the whole week), I needed quite some time to be able to process a real meal again.
I would eat a few bites, get the sweats and want to puke.But the was a bit of an extreme case - at least on countries without famine…
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.
