Do appetite signals come back? Asking for the eleventh time

Started 12 May 2026 · 8 replies · 319 hearts · read 4.6k times

RomyVienna, AT · 12 May 2026

2 months ago

I have asked versions of this before and I am asking again because the answer keeps changing for me, which I suspect is the actual answer.

Year two, steady dose, nothing dramatic. What I have noticed over the last few months is that something has come back, but it is not the thing that left. Before, hunger was loud and total and arrived with a sort of urgency that organised my whole afternoon. In the first year of this, that went almost entirely and I ate on a schedule like a sensible robot. Now, in year two, there is something back — but it is quieter and much more specific. It tells me I would like soup. It does not tell me to eat everything in a service station.

The reason I am asking rather than just reporting: I cannot tell whether this is my body adapting, or the medicine doing less, or simply me being a person in spring. And I notice I have started watching it anxiously, which is not a nice way to eat lunch.

For those of you further along: did signals come back for you, in what form, and did you ever work out what it meant? I am not looking for reassurance. I would rather have four honest and contradictory accounts than one comforting one.

106

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria

Four honest and contradictory accounts is the correct thing to ask for and I suspect you will get them.

Mine, plainly: something came back for me in the second year and it was different in kind, much as you describe. Specific rather than general. I have no idea what the mechanism is and I would be suspicious of anybody who told you confidently, because appetite is not one signal — it is several systems, hormonal and habitual and social, and they do not all change or return together.

What is genuinely not established is what year three and four look like. The trial windows do not go there. Anything anybody tells you about year four, including me, is a report from one body.

47me too 8

OttilieCheshire, UK

Two years in. Mine came back as noticing food again — smells mostly. I walk past the bakery on Watergate Street and I notice it, which I did not for about a year and a half. I do not usually go in. The noticing came back before any wanting did.

33me too 6

MattNottingham, UK

Contradicting Ottilie slightly: mine has not come back in any form I can detect, eighteen months in, and I would not describe that as either good or bad. It just is. I eat because it is one o’clock and because I like the sandwich.

The one difference from the early months is that food is enjoyable again in a way it briefly was not. Enjoyment came back. Drive did not. I would take that trade permanently.

41me too 7

EsmeAix-en-Provence, FR

Long lunches, small plates, no drama. Mine returned in autumn and left again in spring and I have concluded it has a season, which no clinician has ever confirmed and which I believe entirely.

What I would say about the anxious watching, since you mentioned it: I did that for a whole summer and it made every meal into a measurement. The thing that stopped it was deciding to review it monthly instead of hourly. Same information, much less of my life spent gathering it.

44me too 11

JonahFacilitatorCork, Ireland

Romy, I want to pick up the sentence you put in almost as an aside — that you have started watching it anxiously and it is not a nice way to eat lunch.

That is worth more attention than the mechanism question, in my view. Monitoring your own appetite closely, month after month, is tiring in a particular way and for some people it slides into something less benign without any single moment where it went wrong. Not saying that is where you are. Saying that the monitoring itself is a thing to keep an eye on, and Esme’s monthly-not-hourly is a genuinely good bit of practice.

51me too 9

StefanZurich, CH

Precise answer to a vague question: I cannot separate the medicine from the season from the fact that I am four years older than when I started. Nobody can. That is not a failure of observation, it is the nature of one person in one life.

29me too 4

SaraOslo, NO

Came off once, came back kinder to myself, so I have seen the signals return properly — off it, they came back fully and loudly within about five weeks, which was informative if unpleasant.

Back on and steady now, and what is there is the quiet specific version you describe. So from where I sit those are two different states and the quiet one is not the loud one arriving slowly.

38me too 6

RomyVienna, AT

That is exactly the range I wanted. Ottilie noticing bakeries, Matt with nothing back at all, Esme with a season, Sara with a comparison.

Monthly, not hourly. I have written it on the inside cover of the notebook. Thank you Jonah for reading the aside, which I did not know I had put in until you quoted it back to me.

36me too 4