You're drawing a false dichotomy between "yummy stuff" and "healthy stuff." There's a lot more overlap there than you think.
You might be hungry because you're just plain not getting enough volume in your meals. I like to eat until I'm full. Not stuffed, not uncomfortable, but really truly I-mean-it
full. If you finish a meal and are scrounging your finger around on the plate to get every crumb and still feel like you could eat another whole meal (and I know what that's like because I've done it), you probably need to take a good look at your food choices.
What's a typical day's menu for you?
To give you some idea of what I'm talking about with volume, here's what I've eaten today (so far, I still have a 400-calorie snack planned):
- cereal with milk
- an orange
- a grilled chicken and artichoke wrap with spinach, onions, and feta
- a salad because I haven't eaten one in, like, a month and wanted it
- two black bean tacos on corn tortillas
- a black bean burrito on a whole wheat tortilla
- a whole lotta salsa
- a chocolate ice cream sandwich (they're Skinny Cows, but I limit these to a couple a week and tonight is choco-night).
It feels like a lot of food, so I'm comfortably well-fed a couple of hours after dinner/dessert. It tasted good, so I'm not bored or feeling deprived. I've been doing this for months and I could do it forever because it's actually not bad at all once you fuse the concepts of "healthy" and "yummy" in your mind and mouth.
Free days work for some people, but they never did for me; I spent so much time looking ahead to that day that I forgot to enjoy the food on my plate today. Why not look forward to dinner every night by learning how to make healthy stuff that tastes good?