One important part of fully committing to recovery is starting to eat without any restrictions. But what do you do when you're constantly hungry? Is it ever going to stop?
No calories. No macros. No weighing, measuring, calculating, timing, and of course, no diets. That's what full commitment looks like.
If you've just realized that you have hypothalamic amenorrhea too, download this quick guide that teaches you exactly how to eat to get your period back.
Saying no to any food rules is the best thing you can do to get your recovery started. Getting your mind to that point might be difficult though. You basically need to restart your brain, deleting words like calories and diets from its memory. Once you get there and start eating freely, then congratulations – you just took a huge step toward recovery!
I Want to Eat All The Time!
The next thing you may realize is that all you want to do is eat. No matter what or how much you eat, you're still constantly hungry and never seem to get full and satisfied. You may be confused, because it doesn't make sense: You've significantly reduced exercise, so where is this hunger coming from?
I believe that most women who have hypothalamic amenorrhea, have some sort of under eating history. It is possible that your hypothalamic amenorrhea is a result of just overtraining or too much mental stress, but it's probably safe to say that most women have dieted in the past. That's important to realize because this is the main reason why you're constantly hungry now.
Physical Hunger and the Hunger Hormones
First of all, you may feel hungry all the time because you actually are hungry. I know, it doesn't sound exactly mind blowing, but that's what's going on. And it's not a bad thing — remember that NPNW recommends you to eat at least 2500 calories a day to restore your period!
When you start giving yourself more food, your body loves this abundance! But because your body is not sure how long this party is going to last (because it has experienced maybe for years that it often doesn't last that long!), it's turning those hunger hormones up a bit to make you even hungrier. It wants to get in as many calories as possible.
You may also crave something badly, usually things you haven't given yourself. Like Anna said in her recovery story, she just couldn't stay away from full fat foods.
She says:
I wanted to eat peanut butter ALL THE TIME. And avocado. And whole eggs (not just the whites). And full fat yogurt. Its like my body was being deprived of fats for so long it just wanted EVERYTHING.
Before she started her recovery, her diet was very low in fat, so when she finally let all restrictions go, she was able to listen to her body's voice and give it what it needed, in her case, all the fat.
You may wonder, why you seem to be so much hungrier now as you aren't working out. You were less hungry when you were training all the time!
I experienced that also. One thing that I used to do was training on an empty stomach. I may have started the workout little bit hungry, but by the way I was done with my HIIT, I wasn't that hungry anymore, if at all. That's because high intensity exercise can suppress appetite.
There are several hormones whose levels change during the exercise and that affect our hunger levels. For example, ghrelin is the hormone that increases appetite, but exercise, especially high intensity exercise, can suppress ghrelin levels.
Another hormone is peptide YY, and this hormone decreases appetite. When you workout, levels of peptide YY will increase.
So when your ghrelin levels are lowered and peptide YY levels are high, you don't want to eat, which is often what's happening in your body after any high intensity workout.
Now as you have stopped exercise, you don't get that kind of hunger hormone fluctuation, and you feel hungry when you actually are hungry.
Psychological Hunger
If you have restricted your eating for a while, you've definitely been also psychologically hungry. There were foods that you actually really, really wanted, but because you thought that they're bad for you, you never allowed yourself to eat them.
We've all seen what happens to little kids when you tell them NOT to do something. The more you tell them they shouldn't do something, the more they want to do it! I believe that adults aren't much different. It's in our psychology. When something is forbidden, we want it even more. Remember the forbidden fruit story?
When you now realize that you can eat whatever you please, you may feel like a kid in a candy store for a while.
I can eat anything? Really, anything I want?
And you eat and eat and eat, because you've never (or at least in the past future), had this experience.
This is exactly where deprivation gets you – overdoing it. Always! But don't worry about it too much for now, because this step is necessary to get you back to normal eating habits. The novelty of being able to eat whatever you want, lasts maybe a few months and then gradually slows down.
The Magic of Abundance
If you're worried that your constant physical and / or psychological hunger will never come to an end, I promise you that this is not the case. It will stop.
Here's what happens to your physical and physiological hunger: When you constantly keep eating enough food, over time the need for it decreases. You sort of have to earn your body's trust back, so there's no more need for it to turn the hunger hormones up every time it gets some food. Because after a while, it knows that that's not the last time it's being fed, there will be more food coming later. To get to this place, it's important that you eat consistently and don't let yourself get very hungry (you don't have to eat non stop or every two hours, but just don't let the breaks get too long).
Also, at first, there's a ton of repair work to do in your body. Over time, your body won't need to be flooded with that much food anymore. But that's something you can't decide, by saying I guess I'm done with this over eating! It's something that your body tells you. If you're still hungry, you should still eat.
From the psychological standpoint, the key is keeping in mind that there's no forbidden foods that you need to avoid. You've tried it already, and you saw that nothing good came out of it. When you don't restrict anything, you don't create this deprivation that takes over your mind. So, if you feel like eating ice cream, eat ice cream, then move on with your life. If you never allow yourself this ice cream, that's all you're going to want. And when you once you run out of willpower and finally eat it, you can't stop, no matter how hard you try.
Conclusion
When you start eating everything and anything, think about it as giving your body much needed medicine. It may need a lot of it at first, which may be confusing. But the reality is that you probably really need this much, because both your body and mind are deprived. Trust what your body asks. This hunger won't last forever and it will stabilize later, 100%!
Do you have hypothalamic amenorrhea? Learn how to eat to recover from it.
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Thanks for this article!
I am going now through very tough times. I had lost my period by getting underweight, but I started recovery and got to my healthy weight and got my period back and almost plateaued (I still gained weight but very slowly). During recovery my metabolism was very low so I ate normal portions, until satiation, and at first I was gaining around one pound/week and in the end I was almost maintaining on that.
But after I got my period i “relaxed” with my eating a bit, I went to a camp and unintentionally I ate less. I didn’t eat that little, but at the end of the camp I had lost 1 kg. I think it was also water weight, because my clothes fit quite the same. That didn’t worry me. I kept on eating “normal ” but I lost another 1.5 kg without wanting to in the next trip. That worried me a little, but, again, my clothes didn’t fit differently. I was confused. How can you lose that much but not look like it? Then I didn’t lose any weight, but my period didn’t come anymore. My hair got thinner and my acne disappeared. The next 1.5 months in fact I continued gaining, but my period still didn’t come. Many evenings, after eating normally I realised I wasn’t really feeling full, was just not hungry, but not full. This continued until 2 weeks ago when I started paying attention more to my hunger cues in order to fix my HA (again,…) and I realised I was actually very hungry! After eating normally, I mean a whole day with snacks, meals etc, I was still sloghtly hungry. I ate and ate and ate . Sandwiches, cookies, whatever I had around me, but that wouldn’t stop. Since then, Almost everyday I started crying because I was sooooo afraid. And when I cry, my hunger disappears, so I supressed my hunger. I was feeling guilty but sooo scared of gaining weight.
I do not understand. Why does this happen? When I recovered, I did it on almost normal portions, and everything was fine, I got back to my set point….but now I’m around my set point and this ravenous hunger hit me? I am eating tons and tons at every meal. I just want to be normal. i see people around me eating normal portions and I…..I am so scared. I am gaining weight very fast, faster than in the beginning of my recovery!
I am so scared because this won’t take a week or two to fix, but probably months, and if i gain so much and so fast……. I just don’t want to think what I will look like in the end. Now everything I gain looks terribke, because I am gaining it above my set point.
Will I ever return to my set point? After this ends? I just don’t under stand why my body reacts like this. I will most likely overshoot massively after this. I am so sad. I wake up in the middle of the night because I used to be at a normal weight my whole life, but now everything will change….I will become overweight and I just don’t know how I will be able to cope with it. I lost all my motivation to do anything….to work, to meet people etc
Sorry for this long comment..,
this is exactly how i feel
I really think this article is useful because I experienced the same hunger descripted above (I think I’m still in it). I’m so scared about my weight gain, it’s almost five months that I eat unconditionally and I already started feeling physically full, but my brain keeps screaming “I want to eattttt” until my stomach doesn’t hurt. Sometimes I feel “normal” because I stop eating when I’m still comfortable with it but it’s rare and it happens because I distract myself with TV or walks or sports (yep, sadly I didn’t stop overexercising, and I can’t). It may happens once a day or once a week. The food fulfills me for like ten minutes than it’s like I’m lean again (not hungry but even with the stomach stretched). I started the weight gain I was 40kg and I ended up at 64!!! Don’t be scared, no one will probably gain that much weight (doctors said it’s all muscles and water weight and that it will go down by itself, but they also believe that I already know how to eat properly) 64kg was my starting weight… I have a diet history. At the age of 12 I weighed 72kg and I went on a diet (with a dietician even though my doctor said my weigh would have settled by itself) that brought me to 63kg. I started eating again and arrived at 64 in 6 months. I suddenly decided (14yrld) to lose weight again and become the “beauty, confident and skinny girl” of every boys’ dream. It ended up in a boney and fragile person (I couldn’t be defined a girl). After one month in recovery I started bingeing without knowing about extreme hunger (my doctors never exposed me to that) I probably would have felt less guilty but I also would have eaten more!
Now I can always feel physically full but for some reason I can’t stop eating (my period didn’t come yet but doctors said that it arrives after a certain period of time).
My aim wasn’t to scare or discourage anyone, but I just want some assurances about recovery success and others testimonials.
If there are grammatical mistakes I’m writing you as a teenage italian English student.