| | Water Fasting

Why am I so hungry?

I‘m on day 4 of 18:6. The meal I “skip” is breakfast. Until today it was very easy ... but I’ve been hungry all day. I had two good sized nutritious meals, but I’m lying in bed ready for sleep, but hangry ... which is completely abnormal (has dinner 3.5 hours ago). Outside of IF, I never needed much of a breakfast and would eat a healthy small one when I did. Not a snacker either ... Is my metabolism just going wonky while adjusting? Should I have a normal day (eat breakfast) tomorrow to help with this transition? Thanks :)

Answer

I have been doing 20:4, but found that I do best eating from 11-3 everyday. I have no problem with hunger after 3, super easy for me, but not eating between 10-1 is a struggle. I started with a dinner OMAD, which moved to a late lunch, which further moved to 1 half lunch at 11 and the other half at 2, now everything seems super easy. Maybe play around with timing if your work and family allow.

Before IF I was not a breakfast eater so I didn’t think I would miss it as much as I did, go figure.

Answer

Drink some water, primarily. Like a nice big glass. Chew some gum, too. More than likely you have plenty of food in your system that your body hasn’t really worked on. It’s just that your stomach is saying “I’m not full enough.”

You may also not have gotten enough salt in your system today, or otherwise have been having unbalanced meals so your body is telling you that you’re missing something. If you are really stupendously hungry, it’s not going to hurt to go ahead and put a little something in your system so that you can tackle skipping breakfast again the next day. Otherwise you risk going into the day truly famished and wind up overeating everything.

Answer

For me personally, I had 3 days of feeling very hungry almost all the time until my hunger pangs “normalized” I thought eating once a day was crazy talk, but I’ve also been doing that now for nearly 60 days.