pcos girl on reta: insulin stuff, appetite, and a year of notes

2026-10-08 11:53

i mostly lurk here. i'm a woman in my mid-30s, pcos + insulin resistance, and most of my nights are work, then games until i should have been asleep two hours ago.

my old snack setup was diet soda, whatever chips were open, and a 2am fridge check. i started reta last spring and i'm down 27kg. still feels fake to type. what surprised me is the order stuff changed. the 2am fridge pull got quiet first, then my soda swap experiments actually stuck.

i went through sparkling water, those little flavor packets, and plain iced tea until i found two i don't hate. appetite is mostly weird at night for me, not all day.

some greasy late food made me queasy early on, so i cut that out. my fasting numbers are less chaotic, but i'm not saying this fied my pcos.

sleep is still bad because i keep playing one more match.

anyone else with pcos/IR see the appetite stuff hit after dark instead of during the day?

2026-10-18 01:51

The late-night kitchen thing is so real. I’m in maintenance now and what finally helped me was separating hunger from the gaming wind-down.

I tracked sleep + hunger 1–5 for a couple weeks, and my 2am fridge trips clustered on nights I played past midnight, even when appetite was pretty quiet. Now I keep seltzer and a pre-portioned yogurt in the fridge and try to close the kitchen when I close the game.

Curious—did your year of notes show the late-night snacking fading with appetite, or did it take changing the routine around it?

2026-10-27 17:32

I keep a spreadsheet too, so mild pushback: for me the 2am fridge raids weren't an appetite problem, they were a daytime-protein problem. When I actually logged it, nights I snacked averaged 38g protein before 6pm; no-snack nights averaged 95g. Same everything else.

Once I front-loaded protein the midnight thing mostly evaporated without white-knuckling it. So I'd ask whether your notes split out daytime intake or only the evening window — because if you're just logging the 2am stuff, you might be blaming the wrong variable entirely.

2026-10-27 19:56

27kg is not fake—that’s a whole checked-bag of effort, especially with PCOS/IR. What surprised me was tracking non-scale stuff: I used a notes app for “energy 1–5” and “hungry vs. bored” at 9pm, and after a few weeks I could see my appetite noise was lower on days I’d walked after dinner. Not magic, just patterns.

Curious—did your energy or cycle stuff shift before the scale did, or did weight come off first? Also, what game is currently eating your sleep? 😂

2026-10-28 18:48

The gaming-until-2am loop was my biggest saboteur too. One maintenance trick: I set a hard stop on ranked matches and swpped to a low-stakes game or podcast while I prepped tomorrow’s lunch.

Boring, but it killed the “reward” feeling that used to send me to the kitchen. Does your log track sleep, or just food and appetite?

I only saw my evening patterns once I added a sleep column—my worst nights followed crappy sleep, not true hunger.

2026-10-29 05:09

Night shifter here. The thing that helped me was splitting my notes into work nights vs off nights.

My 2am fridge checks were way worse on night 3+ and after crap sleep, not just after low-appetite days. I started keeping a boring “shift box” ready before I left: eggs, cottage cheese, cut fruit, gum. Sounds lame, worked.

Sharp question: did your year of notes show a difference between “hungry after bad sleep” and actual appetite? That split is what finally made my tracking useful.