[Purpleegg]

This kind of blew me away, so that tells you something. I have plenty of mental hunger, but I can only think of one time when I felt real, painful, sick-causing hunger and that was when I was about 5 or 6 years old.

I generally eat about 1200 calories, mostly protein, every day and have been losing steadily. Anywho, last night I think I was close to 1100 calories when I went to bed. Next thing I know, I feel like total crap. I can't even describe it. Kind of like heartburn, but not really. I only knew that I had to eat something to make it feel better.

So, I had about 1/3 cup of black beans with maple syrup and that did the trick! That was interesting to me too, how little food it took to make the hunger go away..then I started thinking about all the starving people in the world, and how little it takes to stop the hunger and so forth...well, you know how it is when you're drifting off to sleep ::sigh::

[munchievictim]

I know what you mean. It's so hard when you first start losing weight (and sometimes far into your weight loss journey!) to differentiate between real hunger and mental hunger. For me, for a very long time, the feeling of hunger was the nagging thought at the back of my mind telling me to eat cookies NOW!!!! It was an amazing (and kind of wonderful) feeling to have my stomach growl with real hunger when I started dieting. It's important to control that too, because I know that sometimes it gives me a panicky feeling and causes me to then eat more than I want or should if I let myself get really hungry, but there are times that it's a real motivater.
Congrats on twenty lbs lost!!!!!!!

[WinterJinx]

Aw man I use to have the same problem with being able to tell the difference between mental hunger and genuine hunger pains. My resolve was to create a food tine schdual of when I am allowed to eat

[krampus]

I have only experienced really severe hunger once and I think it was a combination of hunger and thirst. I was at a stressful job interview all day - got up at 4 am to catch a train to NYC, no breakfast, no lunch except peanuts since I had thought there would be places to eat by the venue and there weren't, almost no water. By 4-5 pm I couldn't think about anything except how hungry I was and by 6 pm I could barely move and I felt extremely light-headed and sick.

Recently I haven't felt anything similar. 1200 is really disciplined - good work on the weight loss!

[JessLess]

I have hypoglycemia and my mom really insisted that I never let myself get hungry. Now being hungry scares me. It's something I'm working on.

[shcirerf]

The worst hungry I can recall, (we live on a farm/ranch) was a few years ago, when the neighbors cows ran out of water and woke us up on a Sunday morning at 6am, tearing through our yard and garden and trying to get in the corral to where the cow tank was. They were everywhere! I saddled up the horse and hubby and the kids scrambled with pickups and on foot. We had to move the cows we had out of the way, to avoid cow sorting later, to let in the thirsty ones, who were in a hizzic. Thank God for good cow dogs!

Then we had to be a church by 9 for the boys confirmation, no breakfast, Then truck off to family dinner that did not happen until 12:30. We were all ready to do a SWAT assault on the kitchen by then. And we didn't get any coffee either!

[Onederchic]

My real hunger was when my boyfriend drove from New York to Tennessee to pick me and my doggy up to move in with him. We were on the road for over 2 days and I didn't eat anything but a snack pack of saltines (due to myself and not my boyfriend).

[Arctic Mama]

Some hunger, I find, can be a good feeling from time to time, but I have to be so careful! If I get to the gut-gnawing hunger, or the painful hunger, I tend to get shaky, moody, and ravenous enough that I have a much harder time staying on plan and not consuming everything in sight.

A little hungry to satisfied is great. Super hungry to overfull is not. I struggle with the latter more than the former, moderation is my goal but I have a hard time not struggling with the extremes.

[munchievictim]

Is it funny that I'm commenting this twice? This is a really fascinating subject for me.
I have a history with eating disorders (and could argue that I suffer from binge eating disorder now), and through high school I was often either starving or binge/purging. For me, even now, the feeling of hunger fuels me. It's like the fuller I am, the more I want to eat until I reach that final limit where I'm sick and I never wnat to eat again (usually after 2000 calories in one sitting). But when I'm hungry, it just motivates me. It's like it gives me power. I don't think that's a healthy feeling, I'm just mulling over it. However, when I get way way hungry (the shaky, cranky kind) it's like I get so worked up and hysterical about it that it makes me feel sick to try and eat. I think hunger is really tied to my unhealthy relationship with food, both crossing into the area where I can finally feel it, and also not even being able to recognize true hunger from false hunger in binges, to the point where I don't seem to have an "off-button" once I'm triggered. I never seem to fill up! It's as if it takes me several weeks of eating constantly to finally get full, but once I'm full I'm sick for days.
Sorry if this is sort of off topic, it just made me really think about what "hungry" means, and what its associations are.