Hungry!!!

I’ve heard from quite a few people that when they first start a keto or low carb diet, they find that they are hungry. And I mean hungry all the time, HANGRY! I don’t remember feeling overwhelmingly hungry at the outset but I do recall that horrible feeling of “What CAN I eat?” That blank stare into the fridge where you tick off, nope, can’t eat that yogurt. Nope, can’t eat that leftover pasta dish.

NOPE!

Talk about a way to challenge your motivation to stick with it.

The first thing that was the hardest thing to resist for me was purple popcorn! Purple popcorn you ask? What on earth is that? It sounds disgusting. Ah, but it is heaven. It’s Boom Chick a Pop Sweet & Salty Kettle Corn. It just happens to come in a purple bag. It was my go-to snack while watching a movie with the family. So, for me, it wasn’t that I was particularly hungry throughout the day but come intermission with the family movie and my response is, “Please, just a tiny bowl!!!!” That was hard to push through. I kept looking for a keto alternative to that yummy sweet and salty popcorn. Pork rinds didn’t cut it. I like them and use them also for breading, but it didn’t meet my sweet and salty craving.

We tried several keto snacks. Many of them so bad I couldn’t even remember what they were at this point. I now have found some yummy alternatives, but that’s for another blog.

What is wild though is that after about a month, Terry and I both found that our appetites had dropped! And I mean plummeted. We found ourselves sharing food. NEVER did Terry want to share food, ever! Now I can barely even finish a small container of keto-friendly yogurt by myself!

Many scientific studies can explain why your appetite can drop while you are in ketosis. But again, I’m not a scientist, so I’ll leave that for you to google and research.

The bottom line is, it can be hard at the start to stay motivated, especially when you feel hungry. I think feeling hungry hits a very primal place in our bodies and can pull some strong emotional triggers.

But here are a few tips for what Terry and I have found helps when you do feel hungry.

1) Increase the fats in what you are eating. Add some heavy cream or butter to what you are eating. MCT oil is often recommended. Some people put it in their coffee. I haven’t tried that; it sounds disgusting to me.

2) Nuts, toasted almonds are a fantastic snack. We have ended up making a nut mixture of roasted almonds, a small number of cashews, pistachios, and peanuts (the last three nuts aren’t as keto-friendly so we keep them to a minimum.) Terry would often bring a small container of this nut mixture with him wherever he went in case he started to feel hungry, he would eat a couple and the hunger passed.

3) Protein. Protein helps curb your appetite between meals. A slice of lunch meat, leftover meats, a meat stick (just make sure it doesn’t have a bunch of sugar in it, some do). A couple of slices of cheese. All of these will help keep you full.

4) Find things that are low carb that are similar to what you are craving that you can’t have. For me? The substitute for purple popcorn is the Coconut Keto Clusters. We find it at Costco. A perfect mixture of sweet and salty. Again, I find I can only eat a small handful but they sure hit the spot for me.

So, push through it if you are feeling hungry. It really is true that as you go along, your appetite will diminish!