I'm 6 weeks into a slow cut: 5'10", 176 → 168 lb, 2,250 kcal training days, 1,950 rest. Protein 175–190 g. Weird pattern: after 4x/week heavy squats/deads, appetite is gone for 3–4 hours.
On rest days I'm ravenous by 10 a.m. Fasting labs last month: glucose 91, HbA1c 5.1, ferritin 52. Is this just training stress?
Anyone track hunger scores and protein timing around heavy sessions?
I want to keep lifts up without the rest-day rebound wrecking adherence.
I get the same after deadlifts. Not hungry until dinner, then I make up for it. Have you tried shifting more protein to rest days?
Shifting protein didn't ifx my rebound. My rest-day hunger tracks sleep more than anything. Under 7h and I'm ravenous by 10.
Sleep is the one lever that worked for me too.
Heavy squats do the same to me, but I don't think it's the protein target. I log hunger 1–10, squat days are 3, rest days 7. My weekly volume matters more: 12 to 18 sets quads made rest-day hunger worse.
18 sets on a cut is recovery debt.
Protein shakes make me hungrier. Sleep doesn't change that.
Nighttime casein is the one people actually tend to notice a difference from. But whey usually isn't the culprit behind a rest-day rebound. The part folks forget: fat intake on rest days. Common surprise — low fat makes people snacky.
I ran a 10-week cut at 1,900 rest / 2,300 training, 180g protein. Heavy lower days killed appetite, but my weekly intake averaged out.
Pre-logging rest-day meals helped more than chasing appetite. Labs stayed fine: glucose 89, ferritin 60.
If your weekly average and weight trend are okay, the daily rebound might be noise.
The volume point is real though—when I added a second leg day, my hunger scores went from 5 to 8. What are you tracking, scale trend or hunger? Also curious if your rest-day ravenousness is true hunger or just habit after training.
5'9", 174→166 two winters ago, same 4x/week
tbh dude, the 10am rest-day hangries are real. I’m a broke dorm student, so my tracking is a 0–5 hunger score on a sticky note before meals. Rest days = 5 by 9:30 unless I front-load carbs at breakfast: microwave oats + frozen berries + peanut butter. Training days I can accidentally skip lunch. Weirdly, my rebound
I tracked this for a month in Notes: hunger 1–5 every 2h plus sleep, steps, and time since first meal. The “rest day ravenous by 10” wasn’t just training stress — it was meal-timing anticipation.
On lift days my first food was ~noon because of the 3–4h blunting, so 10 a.m. wasn’t a hunger peak. On rest days I ate at 7, and by 10 my brain expected round two. Keeping first
Cafe owner here, so the rest-day 10 a.m. ravenous thing hits home—mine was partly constant exposure to muffins and sandwiches.
I tracked hunger 1–10 every hour for a week and tagged training vs rest. The surprise: my rest-day spike followed coffee + a carb-y breakfast, not the lack of lifting.
Switching to a big savory protein/fiber breakfast and taking a 10-min walk before opening flattened it. On heavy days, I set a 3-hour timer for a small snack even at zero hunger, which killed the evening rebound.
Have you tried keeping meal timing identical on both day types? Might separate routine cues from actual training stress.
Hi all, brand-new here and only week one, so I’m mostly learning. Do you log hunger at the same times on training vs rest days? I’ve been jotting 1–10 hunger before/after lifting, and my own rest-day 10 a.m.
ravenousness seems tied to the previous training day’s total intake and electrolytes, not the rest day itself. Like if I under-eat after a heavy squat day because I’m not hungry, the next morning I’m starving. Curious if yours might be a delayed rebound rather than rest days?
Mechanism-minded guess: are you actually hitting 2,250 on lifting days? I had the same pattern—after heavy squats/deads I’d coast past dinner and land at ~1,900, then rest-day 10 a.m. was brutal.
When I logged weekly intake instead of daily, the “rebound” tracked my training-day deficit almost 1:1. In the trials, exercise-induced appetite suppression is real but usually short-lived; it doesn’t automatically balance intake later.
Worth checking: do your rest-day hunger scores spike after low training-day calories, or after high ones? That’d separate stress/ghrelin from just a weekly energy debt.
try separating intensity from volume. In my log, heavy singles/triples killed appetite for ~3h, but 5x10 squats left me ravenous the next morning. I tagged session RPE, tonnage, and hunger at 8a/10a/1p.
The 10a rest-day spike correlated with prior-day tonnage and poor sleep, not with rest itself. Are you tracking tonnage or just “training vs rest”? If it’s volume-driven, shifting some carbs to the post-lift meal may flatten the next-morning rebound.
Also check whether rest-day hunger is true hunger or just lower distraction/boredom—mine was half the latter.
I log hunger 1–10 hourly plus session RPE, sleep, steps, and macro timing. My trendline didn’t show rest-day hunger—it showed next-morning hunger after heavy pulls.
Squat/dead day: appetite flat, can skip lunch. The following 7–10 a.m., I’m at 8/10 even if it’s a rest day.
It tracked with previous-day volume more than today’s calories.
The only thing that flattened it was moving ~250–300 kcal from the lifting day to the next morning, not raising weekly intake. Are you logging hunger the evening after lifting vs. the next a.m.? That split might show your rebound is delayed, not rest-day-specific.
I track hunger like weight — daily, but only trust the 7-day trend. What helped was tagging it by hours since last lift, not training vs rest.
Heavy squat/dead day: appetite gone at +3h, then noticeably up around +22–26h. Rest-day 10 a.m. ravenous just landed inside that delayed window.
Deadlifts shifted it ~1h later than squats for me. Maybe log hunger at wake, 10 a.m., and pre-lunch for a week, plus the prior day’s lift.
Does yours hit harder after deads than squats?
Dorm-based cheap trick: I started logging hunger right before bed too, not just every 2h. My rest-day 10am ravenousness was almost always after a training day where I’d hit protein but skimped on carbs because the post-lift blahs made food sound gross.
Now I force a sad little dorm “second dinner”—instant oats, Greek yogurt, frozen berries—before bed. Not glamorous, but it blunts the morning gre
One thing I would add: I tag my first meal’s protein, fat, and fier in my log. My rest-day 10 a.m. hunger was almost always after a low-protein, low-fat breakfast, even when total calories matched.
For me, shifting 35–40 g protein and some avocado or nuts to that first meal smoothed it out. My weekly average hunger score moved from about 3.6 to 2.8 without changing rest-day intake.
Are your rest-day breakfasts similar to training-day breakfasts, or does the early hunger start before you eat?
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