How Do You Control Your Hunger While Intermittent Fasting?

Are you completely starving the rest of the day while intermittent fasting? Hunger and intermittent fasting? How do you survive?

How do you not eat your arm off?

How can you really make it through the day?

This may be one of the most-asked questions I get and even I find it surprising that I can get through the day as easily as I do.

First, when I am eating one meal a day (OMAD), I eat a very big meal. As I describe in the video, I eat usually eat a meal with a very large salad component and that salad (especially the coleslaw) will digest for hours. I actually feel completely stuffed for a few hours after the meal and, particularly on the cabbage days, I don’t feel hungry even hours later, at bedtime. However, I usually do get a bit hungry by bedtime and I have just learned not to pay attention to it. I go to sleep and I wake up feeling less hungry. As morning hunger creeps in, I am just a couple of hours from my meal so I don’t find it to be a big deal.

Simply, I have adjusted well to the rhythm. I have never been on a weight loss diet in which I wasn’t hungry. This may be the easiest one in the hunger department. (I’ve been on close-to-zero carb diets and you could eat anything you want that’s virtually zero carbs but I would get hungry because I would reach a point of complete boredom with the allowed food that I stopped eating it altogether.)

Hunger and Intermittent Fasting: The Hormone Tie-In

One reason your hunger will be less than you imagine is because as you reduce your eating window through intermittent fasting, your hormones will become better regulated, including the hormone that is responsible for those hunger pangs. Did you realize that those feelings of hunger and not some sort of real, starvation hunger? A hormone gets triggered to tell you that you are hungry and sometimes that stupid hormone can drive us completely insane.

The feeling of wanting to eat your arm off? It’s your out-of-control hunger hormone!

Guess what helps that feeling go away? Intermittent fasting. It really does make a big difference.

However, a second important psychological factor for me is the fact that the diet so darned successful. There is nothing like seeing the scale go down-down-down to keep you on track. I have been at parties, on vacations, traveling, and more and have stayed on track through it all. There is apparently not much that will woo me off track at this point. A little bit of hunger certainly won’t.