Last Updated on April 12, 2024 by Fasting Planet
You excitedly start your fast, and all goes well for the first couple of hours. Then it happens: a large, audible rumbling in your stomach that soon transforms into pain. Within a few more hours, you’re lying on the couch, eagerly counting down the time until you can eat again. You have to know: when will these fasting hunger pains go away?
Your hunger won’t last forever on a fast, and the pains can disappear within a day or two. This is when levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin decrease. You’ll thus feel less hungry, making your fast easier to get through.
In this article, we’ll go in-depth on what ghrelin is and how appetite works. We’ll also share some data on why fasting causes ghrelin to lessen and what else you can do to minimize hunger pain in the meantime. You’re not going to want to miss it.
Understanding Appetite and Its Effects on the Body
You wake up in the morning starving after spending eight or nine hours asleep. By late afternoon, hours after you ate at lunchtime, you’re ravenous once again. One would say then that you have a healthy appetite.
Your appetite is your interest in eating. Sometimes, appetite is driven by hunger, as in the above situations, but it doesn’t have to be. If you’re on a walk around your neighborhood and you see a bakery with freshly-baked cakes in the window and you start drooling and feeling your tummy rumble, this isn’t hunger-based, especially if you just ate lunch.
What is it that makes us hungry besides the sight of tantalizing food or a daily eating schedule?
The answer is ghrelin.
Ghrelin is a type of circulating hormone that comes from our gastrointestinal tract’s enteroendocrine cells. When the stomach thinks it’s time to eat, ghrelin will enter the blood and pass along hunger signals until they reach your brain.
Once you’re full, ghrelin levels drop off, but only for roughly three hours. Those who undereat tend to have higher ghrelin levels overall and those who overeat may have less ghrelin.
The other hunger hormone, leptin, comes from enterocytes as well, and adipose cells too within our small intestine. Unlike ghrelin, which triggers hunger signals in the body, leptin lessens hunger to maintain our energy and keep the adipocytes’ fat storage down.
It’s believed that leptin may be able to reign in ghrelin so we don’t spend our days gorging ourselves. In some overweight people, tests have revealed that their leptin levels outpaced that of ghrelin because their bodies contained more fat.
Your fat content isn’t all that determines your leptin levels though. How much sleep you get and when you sleep can also play a role, as can how often you eat.
When Do Hunger Pains Go Away When Fasting?
Now that you understand more about the hormones that make us feel hungry (and those that don’t), let’s talk more about when those hunger pains will go away, shall we?
A hunger pang is a stomach contraction that occurs when it has nothing in it. In a non-fasted state, by the time you reach the point where you feel hunger pains, then yes, your ghrelin levels have increased, and the brain and stomach are telling you it’s time to eat.
What if you can’t eat though because you’re fasting? The reasonable expectation is that the hunger pains are only going to get worse the longer you go without food. Yet that’s not what happens.
In a 2005 study published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, the researchers found that ghrelin will increase 24 to 48 hours into your fast and then drop consistently from there.
So yes, the first day or two of your fast may be difficult and even a little painful, and you may be able to think of nothing else except when your next meal will be. Just know that if you can stick it out past one or two days that you’ll feel better for it.
Your ghrelin levels may not be the only hormone that drops off though. According to this 1999 report, also in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, when participants went on a fast for two days, their leptin levels decreased by 75 percent. The participants were all female students at the University of Virginia.
Having less leptin in your system could make you prone to overeating, which does happen to some people after a fast.
Yet the Annals of Saudi Medicine, in a 2004 study on Ramadan participants, found that when women followed the fasting rules of Ramadan, their leptin levels increased, preventing them from making poor eating decisions. The researchers also note that the women’s levels of neuropeptide-Y went down.
What is neuropeptide-Y? This is a neuropeptide that makes you hungry for carbohydrates in particular.
Those two studies do indeed present some conflicting findings. This is our takeaway: it’s certainly possible that some fasters may have a leptin increase during and even right after their fast. As your hunger comes back, you may be prone to overeating, so watch what you consume in the hours and days after a fast.
This isn’t only for your waistline, but for your health as well. We’ve written about refeeding syndrome before on the blog, but this seems like a good time to bring it up again. Refeeding syndrome occurs when you eat too much at once after a period of non-eating, such as a fast. Your cells increase protein, fat, and glycogen production to such a point that your blood concentrations of phosphorous, potassium, and magnesium become dangerously low.
This can affect your neurological, pulmonary, and cardiac health. In some cases, refeeding syndrome can be fatal.
Is It Possible to Reduce Hunger Pains on a Fast?
When you’re in the thick of your fast, waiting a day or two for your hunger pains to naturally drop off can feel like an eternity. Do you really have to suffer for that long, or is there something you can do to minimize the hunger pangs until your ghrelin levels decrease?
Yes indeed, but none involve eating. Rather, you can simulate fullness and otherwise distract yourself until your hunger vanishes. Here’s how.
Drink Water
Water, black coffee, and green or black tea are all allowable beverages on intermittent and longer-term fasts. Drinking throughout the day is a good idea outside of your hunger. Since about 20 percent of your daily hydration is from food, you need to make up for that lost hydration by drinking fluids.
You’ll also notice that if you consistently drink water or tea that your hunger pains are not as severe. A belly full of fluid isn’t the same as the satiety you get after a good meal, that’s true, but it’s better than nothing.
Exercise
Do you tend to feel hungrier before or after a workout? If you answered before a gym session, that’s not a coincidence. In a 2012 report in The Journal of Sports Science & Medicine, when participants engaged in aerobic exercises, they tended to feel less hungry since the body releases less ghrelin during physical activity.
This U.S. News & World Report article notes that exercise duration and intensity can also influence hunger levels. The intensity of your exercise makes your body send blood to your muscles, brain, and heart instead of the digestive system. When you keep up your workout for a while, it takes some time for the blood to redistribute back to the digestive system and thus for your hunger to increase.
Now, on a fast, it’s best to stick to lower-intensity workouts, but you can exercise for an hour or more if you’re feeling up to it. That may be enough to reduce hunger, and if not, then at least all the movement will make you forget about being hungry for a while.
Enjoy Some Hobbies
Any active hobbies you like to engage in are fair game, and we do mean active. It’s not enough to sit and watch Netflix, as your hunger will become so overwhelming that you won’t be able to concentrate. Play video games, do some woodworking, knitting, crafting, or tackle a fun DIY project. Just make sure no activities are too high-intensity.
Take a Nap
If all else fails, you can always spend a good chunk of your fast napping. It’s not necessarily easy to fall asleep when your stomach is rumbling loudly, but you’ll eventually be able to slip off into dreamland. When you wake up, that’s several hours fewer of your fast you have to get through.
Conclusion
Our hunger is dictated by two hormones, ghrelin, and leptin. Ghrelin makes us feel hungrier while leptin regulates appetite.
Within a day or two of fasting, ghrelin levels decrease. Some data suggest that leptin levels lessen as well, so make sure you avoid overeating post-fast!