Table of Contents

• What to expect in the first week
• Hungry during the day? Here are some tips!
• I’m hungry at night. What can I do?
• Snacks on a fat-loss diet

What to expect in the first week

Hunger: It’s not uncommon to feel hungry and tired the first week. The reason: You may not be used to eating every 3 – 4 hours, and instead have either gone long periods of time without eating, grazed throughout the day, or a combination of both. Your body needs time to adapt, but it will definitely adapt, usually within a few days or weeks at most. Stay patient and stay the course.

What you are experiencing is quite common for anyone coming off of a low carbohydrate diet when introducing carbs into their system.

Weight-gain: When you transition to RP from a low carb diet (which can include the Ketogenic diet), your body quickly burns through its stored intra-muscular carbohydrate, called glycogen. For every gram of stored glycogen, at least 3g of water is stored as well, so when your body depletes stored glycogen on a low carb diet, lots of water loss occurs. When you re-introduce carbs on a diet such as the RP Diet, glycogen gets reloaded into your muscles (which is excellent for building muscle and improving sport performance) and water comes along, temporarily increasing your body weight for a week or two. This weight is NOT fat tissue and is actually a sign that you’re eating to support performance and muscle retention, so it’s nothing to worry about.

Please check out these articles from people who transitioned from low carb diets to RP:

• Ashley’s Transformation: From Keto to RP
• My Transition from Keto to Carbs

Hungry during the day? Here are some tips!

While hunger is inevitable when dieting, there are several strategies you can use to help reduce hunger:

• Hydrate: Fluids will fill your stomach, which expands it. This causes a signal to be sent to the brain that you’re not as hungry. Try drinking 12 – 16 ounces of water before meals to help curb your appetite.
• Choose More Filling Options: If you choose fruits and high-volume veggies for your carbs, they will fill you up more than if you choose very energy-dense options, such as white rice.
• Eat Slowly: It takes roughly 20 minutes for your body to send signals to your brain that you’re full. By slowing down, you allow ample time for this to occur, while simultaneously eating less. By the end of the meal, you will have eaten less, yet feel fuller than usual – an especially great feeling when dieting! To help yourself slow down:
  • Cut food into tiny, bite size pieces
  • Do 15 – 20 chews per bite
  • Put down your eating utensil in between bites

I’m hungry at night. What can I do?

If hunger is a recurring theme in the evening, please consider our Evening Hunger Templates, designed exactly for this purpose.

Find more information here.

Snacks on a fat-loss diet

We recommend that, especially on a fat loss diet, you eliminate snacking as much as possible. Long-term research on diet adherence and success shows that people who snack less tend to get better results. If you’re on a maintenance diet, you can snack if you’d like, but the more you snack, them less whole food the diet will adjust to prescribing you, so keep snacking limited. If you’re on the muscle gain diet, a bit of snacking isn’t terrible, as long as you’re not eating too much junk and sticking mostly to the planned meals.