I was just wondering how you all would handle it? If you're hungry but you know if you succumb to your hunger (no matter how low cal it may be), you'd go over your daily calorie allowance? When do you say "My body is telling me I'm hungry so I should feed it" vs "I shouldnt go over my calories". I've allowed myself 1600 today and that's without exercise but at 4:00pm I'm already at 1200 and starving! I feel like a bottomless pit today and I've purposely have eaten nourishing foods like lean meat, almond butter on my toast and beans. Dinner isn't until 7:00pm either. It also doesn't help I'm PMSing

The trouble is that there is, alas, not a perfect correlation between calorie density and fullness; if there were, a big handful of salt and vinegar chips would leave a person as satiated as a proper meal. You can get plenty of food on 1600 a day, but you need to be careful about how you spend those calories.

So the question is, have you been eating foods with plenty of volume? A tablespoon of almond butter has 100 calories but really isn't very filling. What you want are veggies, and lots of them! You can make an absolutely gigantic salad for less than 100 calories, or piles of roasted veggies for under 200. It's important to eat lean proteins and healthy fats, but veggies are really crucial to getting your belly FULL.

I always eat in this case something low-cal but filling like celery and hummus/BabaGhannouj and listen to my body, but if I think I really can't eat for some reasons I'll try and get a workout in and fill up with water and re-examine what caused me to crave/behungry (Too many empty carbs tha day? Etc)

I think my PMS week is always the problem. I can eat and eat and still not feel satiated. Yes, I have dense low cal food but calories will still add up. For instance I made a salad with 5 cups of iceberg and topped it with chickpeas and black beans, or I had almond butter with 12 grain bread.

I guess my question is also a general 'thinking out loud" that if your body is telling you you're hungry is there ever a point where you would think that you should eat because there's a reason and not rely on a number as much? As I'm losing weight I also worry about the point in my life where it becomes a maintenance lifestyle and I want to focus on learning to listen to my body and nourish myself when my body needs it. I think the biggest culprit of my weight issues have been the fact that my wires are all crossed when it comes to listening to my body and knowing when I'm hungry and when I'm full. Meh, maybe I'm thinking too much

Yeah, I see what you're saying. I wonder about that as well. If you know it's just a PMS thing thing and not that you need extra calories to make up for a extra hard workout the day before or something like that... I suppose I wouldn't eat.

Listening to your body I suppose takes time, because lots of us rarely allowed oursleves to get all that hungry at all because of excess calories. Atleast that was my case. Learning why I would overeat when I specifically was NOT hungry was a big win for me. I'm still learning to translate the signals too.

I always wondered why hormones caused the cravings during of TOM.

I think our hunger varies as well. I'm ravenous before my period, and then once I get it my hunger is very low for a few days, then it balances out.

I also have a gut feeling that eating healthy foods when we are hungry (and stopping when satisfied) will never, ever cause us to gain weight, barring medical conditions and such. In fact, that's how I began this. I had absolutely no faith that anything I'd try would work. I had a big problem of thinking that if I ate whenever I was hungry until I was satisfied, that I would never become satisfied, that I would eat the world. I decided to try it anyway. Even if I didn't lose weight this way, I told myself, at least I would feel better, and screw the world. If I'm hungry enough to eat it, then I will! If it meant I would eat ten times a day, so be it. Turned out to be 5-7 times a day and the weight began coming off.

As a result, I'm kind of a fan of the "eat if you are hungry" school. I get very cranky very quickly if I go hungry.

Hmm... I tend to try to distinguish between cravings and hunger. If it's just a regular day and I crave something but I'm not hungry, I try not to eat. Sometimes I even have a little dialogue with myself in my head: craving feeling, "are you hungry?" "no"; craving feeling, "are you hungry" "no", etc. until the desire to eat something diminishes. If I'm actually hungry, though, I'll have something to eat, even if it puts me over my planned number of calories.

When it's TOM, I try to anticipate and respond to cravings - so if I know I'm likely to want chocolate, I'll plan to have some. The last time, I found a ghiardelli bar that was only one serving and about 150 calories (as opposed to most of the chocolate bars that were up to 3 servings and 400-500 calories). Then I had the chocolate with a cup of cherries - it was delicious and so satisfying! In the winter, sometimes I'll some chocolate, some almonds, and a clementine - if I combine a smaller amount of chocolate with something healthier and yet also tasty, I don't tend to crave more chocolate.

I guess for me it comes down to two things. First, if I feel hungry and I don't eat, I usually start to feel bad - I get headaches, I can't concentrate, low energy, etc. Even if I've probably had enough calories, I don't want to have to go about my day to day life feeling that way. Second, staying hungry or refusing a craving that I know I'm going to have makes me feel deprived, which in turn leads to going off plan entirely. I'd rather have a few extra calories one day instead of giving up on the idea of eating healthily altogether, which I'm likely to do if I feel deprived or I try to function while hungry.

I guess for me loose regulation over what I'm eating works better than no regulation or very tight regulation. And there are days when I'm more active and days when I'm less, days when I have more calories and days with I have less, and times when I lose weight and times when I don't. It seems like an illusion that I'm completely in control of this process, so I tend not to try to control it very precisely - all of this being a very long winded way of saying that I tend not to rely on a particular number.