My knees got quieter, my appetite cues didn’t

2026-10-05 2062 views 5 posts

I’m about 51 lb down since last March, and the physical changes are easy to spot: stairs don’t wind me, my knees are quieter, and I can sit on the floor and get up without a plan. The internal stuff hasn’t really caught up.

I still eat past comfortable when I’m tired, still feel hungry soon after a full dinner, and still have to pause and ask whether it’s mouth hunger or body hunger. Tracking signals has helped, but it’s slow and unglamorous.

I think I expected the outside changes to rewire my brain, and they didn’t. Maybe acceptance is just holding both truths kindly. For anyone further along: did your hunger and fullness cues eventually catch up, or did you have to build new ones from scratch?

late-night gamer here. the thing that finally gave me data was logging two timestamps: when i started eating and when i hit “i could probably stop” vs when i actually stopped.

on raid nights the gap was like 20+ min and i was just eating through it. also swapped soda for sparkling water + lime, but that only helped if i drank it before the food, not during.

do you notice the post-dinner hunger is worse on tired/low-sleep nights? that was my whole pattern.

One thing that helped me untangle this: I logged hunger 1–10 right before and 45–60 min after dinner, plus a note on whether it felt like stomach-empty or mouth-bored/tired. In my case the “hungry soon after full dinner” was almost

I had the same split: joints got the memo, hypothalamus didn’t. What helped me was data, not willpower. I log hunger/fullness 0–10 before, mid-meal, and 30 min after. Turns out my “full dinner” was often low volume/low protein, and the “hungry

Night shift here. Same deal: lost 60, knees quiet, brain still thinks I’m starving at 3 a.m.

What helped me was separating tired-hunger from real hunger. I rate hunger 1–10 before I eat, then 20 minutes after.

Tired me says 8 when it’s really a 4. I also pre-plate dinner and wait 20 minutes before seconds.

If I still want more, it’s protein, not crackers. Half the time the urge fades. The other half I just go to bed earlier.

Are you eating your main meal close to your sleep window? That wrecked my cues for months.