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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

I love (and I mean LOOOOOOVEEEEE) food, eating and feeling full or even overfed. So doing straight multi-day fasting is extremely hard for me, psychologically / motivationally.

However, I'm quite lucky in that I don't really get hungry very soon, if I don't eat. It's quite a weird effect; if I eat in the morning, I'll be hungry throughout the day, but if I skip breakfast (or even lunch), I'll only get hungry towards the evening.

So I just skip breakfast (almost always) and lunch (when I want to lose weight). Greatest diet hack I've ever discovered (actually, psychological hack).

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I'm exactly like you (except I hate the feeling of being overfed). I don't need to eat for 4-5 hours after I wake up, but if I do eat something when I wake up, I'll be hungry very soon afterwards.

I've actually had fights with my dietician who insisted I eat breakfast as soon as I wake up, and wouldn't hear any of my links to published research, or even arguments of "if I'm not hungry, why eat extra calories that will just make me even hungrier?!"

Just skip breakfast and eat the first meal when you're hungry (don't wait until you're starving, or you might overeat). You're literally not missing anything.

I'm never hungry when I wake up, but I think that's mostly just a habit thing. Your body adjusts to expect food on a schedule, if you normally eat on a schedule.

I only eat lunch (at noon) and dinner (at 8pm), pretty much like clockwork. It's very rare that I eat outside of these times during the work week. I don't snack through the work day, and I very seldom snack at home on work evenings. But I still end up eating too much; lunch + dinner is more than I need. I'm thinking about paring it back to just dinner (perhaps 2 days a week starting out), since that's the most important, socially.

I didn't have any problem sticking with my normal 60kg weight until I got over 35 or so, now I'm up to 70kg or so and I can feel my body fat jiggle as I run up or down stairs - an alien feeling to me.

> I didn't have any problem sticking with my normal 60kg weight until I got over 35 or so, now I'm up to 70kg

Yeah, I put on 10 kg as well once I hit 33. I don't know what happened, everything I've read said your metabolism doesn't slow down until much later, but I exercise more and eat less than I used to, yet I put on a bunch of weight that I can't easily lose.

I'd love to figure out why that is, but I can't find anything.

> Yeah, I put on 10 kg as well once I hit 33. I don't know what happened, everything I've read said your metabolism doesn't slow down until much later

I remained trim eating 4000ish calories a day of junk food from about age 15 to age 22 or so. Attempted to crash diet to a strict 1400 calories a day to make my comes-and-goes six-pack a bit more permanent. Kept it up for about two months. Nothing (more or less) happened. Stopped since it wasn't working. Promptly put on ten pounds. Have struggled to keep my weight under control ever since.

Metabolisms are weird.

Jeez, that sucks. Did you go back to 4000 calories when you stopped? 1400 calories don't sound too terrible, I wonder what happened.

IDK, probably. 4k's a conservative estimate for what I figure the average probably was, it may have been higher, not like I was counting those calories—I was a multiple liters of soda, maybe a whole pizza, perhaps some pop tarts or just eight slices of toast for breakfast kinda teenager. Plus probably some french fries and maybe some potato chips or snack crackers (not a small quantity of either) thrown in there. Maybe a snickers. That'd be one day of food. I have no idea what my body was doing with all that extra energy. Or why my blood pressure was dead in the middle of "healthy".

Man, bodies are weird.

It can be more than just hunger. I don’t typically get hungry until 12-1 so historically do not eat in the am. However I noticed how much more irritable I was in the morning, which is always chalked up to not being a morning person. Now I try to eat a tiny bit, the massive AM mood swings have gone away

Here's a hack that seems to work. Reduce the sides of your serving plates.

We have a tendency to finish all the food that's put in front of us. So many times we continue to eat even if we are not hungry. So by reducing the plate size we end up eating less.

I've noticed that the feeling of hunger only persists for a certain amount of time. If I'm preoccupied with something else or I can't eat while I have that feeling then after a while it just goes away. I think sleep is long enough that it gets over that feeling of hunger and that's why I don't feel hungry when I wake up.

> It's quite a weird effect; if I eat in the morning, I'll be hungry throughout the day, but if I skip breakfast (or even lunch), I'll only get hungry towards the evening.

I think that's actually a pretty normal effect, though perhaps not usually as pronounced as "only get hungry towards the evening". You don't normally get hungry while asleep, so I think one of breakfast's purposes is to kick-start the metabolism, with the side-effect of getting hungry afterwards. Especially if you're on a diet and are sticking to small breakfasts, making that meal counterproductive.

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