One of the biggest concerns people tend to have when they’re considering trying out intermittent fasting is that they’ll be too hungry to succeed. After all, if you’re used to getting hunger pangs every morning when you wake up or every few hours throughout the day, the idea of going 18 hours or even multiple days without food can sound pretty agonizing. The automatic expectation is that fasting will affect your appetite by making you hungrier.
So, is that true? What exactly does fasting do to one’s appetite?
How Fasting Regulates Your Appetite
If you’re one of those people who thinks that fasting can make you hungrier, you’re partially right: Indeed, the body’s appetite does tend to adjust to changes in one’s eating times. However, it doesn’t do so in the way you’d intuitively think. Over time, fasting actually decreases, not increases, your appetite.
You might think that TIME + NO_FOOD = HUNGRY, but there’s more to it than that! Sure, at the beginning, a long fasting time will cause you to feel hungrier. However, once your body gets used to it, you’ll start to have a new “fasting appetite.” You’ll have lower levels of the hormones that cause hunger, and your appetite will either decrease or return to the levels it was at before you started fasting.
How You Can Regulate Your Own Appetite
However, we don’t want to mislead you. Fasting isn’t magic. Despite the fact that your appetite will adjust to your new fasting time, you’re still going to feel hungry sometimes when you don’t eat.
But if you’ve committed to intermittent fasting, kept at it for a few weeks, and still find yourself distracted by hunger throughout the day, that doesn’t mean you have to give up. There are still other ways you can manage your appetite while fasting. For example, mindfulness, keeping busy and active, and drinking water are all good options.
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Staying Hydrated
Continuing to drink plenty of water throughout the day is actually one of the best ways that you can curb hunger while fasting. This is because, a lot of the time, our body interprets thirst as a hunger signal. This is one of the reasons people who don’t drink enough water tend to overeat. You might think you’re hungry when really you just need a drink.
In fact, drinking water is even more important while you’re fasting than when you’re eating at regular intervals throughout the day. This is because up to 20 percent of our daily water intake usually comes from food, which explains why the brain sometimes sends your body hunger signals as a response to dehydration.
See, when you’re not getting one-fifth of your typical non-fasting daily water intake, you end up at a greater risk for dehydration, which means that you’ll definitely need to put extra thought into getting enough water into your day while you’re fasting. The fact that it’ll help regulate your appetite is just an added bonus.
Supplements
Another way to regulate your appetite while fasting is to take a Citravin supplement containing THCV, a cannabinoid that is known to decrease appetite. Unlike its neighbor THC, THCV has been shown to block CB1, a cannabinoid receptor in the human body that regulates appetite. By doing so, THCV ends up reducing the influence of hunger hormones, making us feel less hungry.
THCV is naturally found in the cannabis plant, but Citravin is derived from citrus peel extracts, making it 100% legal, cannabis-free, and non-high-inducing. So if you’re finding that you need a little help making it through your fasting periods without being distracted by thoughts of food, Citravin can be a very helpful tool.