Thoughtful reply from another board
Reply from another board:
I was never hungry on BFL. Frankly, I only ate 5 meals for most of the period that I lost weight because I just wasn't hungry enough for 6. I followed the book's nutrition plan, which is a little different from how you're doing it, but I think there's a lot to be said for grazing all day long. You're simply eating so often that you don't have time to get hungry.
Also I've heard that your stomach can be conditioned to handle a variety of meal sizes. In other words, eat a lot of big meals and your stomach stretches & becomes accustomed to big meals. Eat smaller meals and your stomach shrinks & becomes accustomed to smaller meals. It may well be that eating lots of smaller meals simply conditions you to feel full after less food.
Anyway, the short answer is a resounding no, you do not have to be hungry while dieting.
Your carboload day is Saturday, right? Give yourself a few more days to see if you lose the remaining weight. Then give yourself 2-3 more weeks to see if you're gaining, maintaining or losing. It may well take a whole week after carboloading to achieve a net loss, or you may not lose weight at all due to muscle gains.
Also, the carboloading may have a muscle volumizing effect wherein your muscle cells absorb extra water and become fuller. This is a good thing and not the same as water retention. Muscle volumizing is conducive to greater strength, better performance, and better recovery. Water retention, on the other hand, is associated with extra water held under the skin and has no real benefits (other than a defense mechanism against dehydration). Both have a similar effect of increasing your weight slightly.
Based on your earlier report about LBWO going so well, I might guess that this is what's going on. If indeed this is muscle volumization, you are in a good position to improve exercise perfomance & recover well. That could likely lead to gains in lean mass. Your weight may even go up somewhat, but so will your metabolism.
All of this takes time, so the only way to know for sure what's happening is to keep things constant for a few weeks and see what changes. Do you get stronger? Do your measurements shrink? Do you get bigger? Does your weight keep increasing? Based on the patterns you see, you can make educated guesses about what's happening, and then make educated guesses about how to redirect your training to achieve the results you're after.
As a final thought, and this is pretty much just a guess, it could be that induction caused you to lose a lot of water, both from muscles as I've heard reported by bodybuilders and from water retention. It's likely that carboloading directs carbs (and therefore water) both to muscles & subcutaneous tissue. It may be that going back to the low-carb portion of your diet helps to flush out water retention first, but that water in your muscles is retained longer. Therefore the pattern you'd see is a large initial water loss from induction, a moderate initial water gain (a "correction" due to muscle volumization) when you start carboloading, and then a progressive pattern of fat loss and/or muscle gain as you continue your cycled diet & training. Again, that's just me developing a theory to fit the facts, but I think it does make sense. Just don't be too quick to celebrate or panic, because how well your program works is going to take time to determine.
Take care,
S
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