Hunger

Can anyone tell me how long it takes for the hunger to subside on any diet, especially at night?

It's hard to say for you specifically since you don't have anything in your food diary. What plan are you following? My first instinct is to tell you that if you're hungry, you're dieting wrong, but assuming you're reducing your calories it can take a couple of days for your appetite to catch up with your new caloric level. At your current weight you can comfortably eat 2000 calories a day & still lose weight, so why wouldn't you?

As far as eating at night, there's no reason not to eat a light snack before bed since you'll be fasting while you sleep. Something with protein & fat will satisfy you & keep you from raiding the kitchen looking for something loaded with sugar. Nuts are always a good alternative, but high fiber foods will fend off hunger also. I love Kashi cereals & used to eat them a lot as a bedtime snack before I went low carb.

Are you sure you're hungry? Make sure you're drinking enough water, as you could be thirsty, or just bored. Keep track of foods that seem to do a good job filling you up and if you continue to have problems in the evening, try to build dinners around those foods. I find that you can get a lot of mileage out of a piece of white meat chicken or steak, a baked potato, a veggie side and a salad. It's a lot of food but as long as you keep the added fats down and your portions reasonable, its not that many calories. You just have to experiment to find out what works for you.

On my new plan (Slim-Fast), I was intensely hungry for the first two or three days, then I adjusted to the new calorie level and I only felt hungry occasionally. The plan has me eating six times a day, so I'm never more than a couple of hours away from a meal or snack and that helps me resist if I do feel particularly hungry.

After a week on the plan, it was kind of automatic. I still had to fight the urge to snack, but that was more about boredom than hunger. I did have a return of intense hunger when I started back at the gym, but again after a week of so of acclimating, that has gone away too.

What kstubblefield said. Basically, if you're hungry then you're probably doing something wrong... diets that leave you hungry aren't sustainable.

@Nick, another thing you should be aware of is your water intake. A typical guideline is your body weight divided by 2; that's how many ounces of water you should drink in a day, with 64 oz being a minimum. Personally I've found that once I kept it up above 80 oz a day, my weight loss moved along very nicely, & just lately I've kicked it up to a gallon+ a day because I exercise quite a bit.

@alan, you reminded me of that because I was on SlimFast for a while also & I found that drinking lots of water controlled my appetite between shakes/meals. I hope it works well for you, I stayed with SlimFast for close to 2 months, then decided it wasn't substantial enough to support my workouts & switched over to calorie counting.