About the Evening Hunger Templates
The Evening Hunger Templates are automated diets designed to allow you to lose weight by following a set of simple diet spreadsheets and moving from one spreadsheet to the next by following a couple of simple instructions (see the document “How to Use the Evening Hunger Templates” for that description). But we already have very effective and incredibly popular diet templates at RP, so what makes these templates special?
Purpose of the Evening Hunger Templates
The Evening Hunger Templates are designed for exactly what they are titled as. Many people find that their biggest struggle with the fat loss dieting process are the hunger and cravings that get incrementally worse as the diet progresses. In addition, many people find that they can get through quite a tough and restrictive diet through the day, but are particularly prone to hunger cravings as the evening hours unfold. This can of course lead to unplanned cheat meals and diet breaks that can frustrate the diet process and thus stall the results. Lastly, one of the toughest features of the cutting process is the experience of having to fall asleep hungry night after night. Not only is this very taxing, unpleasant, and stressful, it can also interfere with the sleep process and lower both the quantity and quality of sleep. This is especially unfortunate since sleep quality and quantity have been shown to be important factors in promoting fat loss and preserving muscle.
The Evening Hunger Templates are fat loss diet auto-progression templates that are designed to guide you through the weight loss process. But more than RP’s general diet templates, they focused on easing the psychological aspect of the dieting process. To be sure, they are very effective physiologically as well. That is, they promote fat loss and are designed to spare muscle and promote hard-training workouts. However, they are not geared as much for performance as the original templates, and are designed to promote an effective combination of physiological outcome (effective fat loss and muscle retention) and psychological outcome, particularly a less mentally difficult dieting process that enhances consistency to a great extent.
Ok, so what’s the deal? What is it about the Evening Hunger Template design that makes them so powerful in modulating hunger, especially later in the day?
How the Template design helps
There are distinct features programmed into the templates that enhance their hunger-fighting powers:
- More Protein
Of all of the three macronutrients (protein, carbs and fats), protein has the highest hunger-suppressing effects per calorie. Carbs are not very hunger suppressing when compared to protein, and fat is very hunger suppressing but is also high in calories. The more of your diet is made up of protein, the less hungry you’ll be given any calorie amount. Because we can’t just add protein to the normal fat loss diet plan (as that would raise calories and interfere with the fat loss process), we’ve removed some carbs and fats to allow for protein intakes to be higher.
- More Veggies
The template are higher in protein and lower in carbs, but they are not carb-free. Carbs are still very much required to fuel performance in the gym and help with muscle retention during fat loss. Additionally, cutting carbs completely right off the bat during a diet can cause carb cravings, which can lead to unplanned cheating even if general hunger is in control. However, not all carbs have the same effect on hunger levels. Because they take up a large amount of room in the digestive tract and take longer to digest, fibrous carbs such as green veggies are the most effective at suppressing hunger. Their intake is three times higher in these templates than in or original ones, but some grain and fruit carbs are cut to make room for the extra veggies.
- Evening-Biased Nutrient Amounts
The evening is when most people on a fat loss diet will experience their worst hunger cravings. Most individuals can chug through the day, with the help of 4 main factors:
o Due to higher cortisol levels in the morning, hunger is usually not as high as it is later in the day. At work and especially during times of higher stress, hunger is actually reduced and cheating becomes less likely.
o When busy with work and/or other daily tasks, thoughts about food are more easily outcompeted by more pertinent matters. In addition, even if you’re thinking about food anyway, it’s usually much harder to find the time to get away for a mega cheat meal during this time.
o Caffeine consumption during the day leads to more productivity, but caffeine consumption at night can lead to poor sleep, so most people will consume the bulk of their caffeine (if they do take in caffeine) earlier in the day. Caffeine has hunger-suppressing effects, resulting in a lowered chance of cravings during its use.
o While the office staff might bring in donuts or cookies for special occasions, if you’re going to eat tasty cheat food at work, you often have to be the one to bring it in yourself. If you simply don’t pack it, you’re already much less likely to cheat, because then you’d have to rely on leaving work or the help of co-workers in getting you junk food. At home and at night when you’re relaxing, you’re not just free of hunger-suppressing stress and cheat-meal-interfering work responsibilities, but you also have much great access to the food that you and your family keep around the house. This higher access makes harsh dieting through the evening very tough.
Because evening hunger is so much higher and more likely to lead to cheating, the food amounts of each succeeding meal in the templates increase. From the first meal to the last, the meals get bigger as the day goes on, with the biggest meal of the day being the last. If you can grind through the first couple of meals, it’s smooth sailing after that, especially in the evening when cravings are the biggest danger. Not only are the protein portions bigger at night, but carb and fat portions are their biggest as well.
- Evening-Biased Nutrient Timing
Not only do the meals get bigger through the day, they get closer together as well. While an average of 5 hours separates the first and second meals, the second and third meals are separated by an average of only 4 hours, and the third and fourth meals are separated by an average of only 3 hours. The last meal of the day is timed to one hour before sleep, so it’s flexible in its relationship to the first four meals, but if you’d like, that meal can be as close as an hour after the fourth.
The result of this meal sizing and spacing is that the morning will be by far the biggest challenge of the diet. However, by staying busy, possibly drinking caffeinated beverages, and relying on the naturally low-hunger mental state of the morning, most will find this time period more than manageable. On the very bright side, the evening will be the time of the highest food consumption, and not only is cheating going to be much less likely, it might be downright difficult to pull off with how much diet food you’d have to eat in order to even get to the cheat foods! You can go to bed every night without hunger pangs (or at least much less hunger than on traditional fat loss diets), and every hour of the morning and midday that you stick to the plan is an hour closer to the diet getting easier and easier as food becomes more plentiful and meals more frequent.
- Low Palatability Foods
As the how-to document explains, the blander and less appealing your food is, the less likely you are to have cravings to eat more of it and other tasty, high-calorie foods. Our big recommendation in the how-to document to choose blander foods is an important and powerful feature of this diet.
- No Shakes
Shakes are a great way to take in large amounts of food without getting full, which can be a problem on a very limited calorie budget during a fat loss diet. By omitting shakes from this template, we’ve freed up those calories to be used for much more filling whole foods.
- No Workout Window
Right after workouts, many individuals don’t become hungry for quite some time because they still have higher concentrations of fight or flight hormones in their blood. By eating a lot of food right after the workout, performance and recovery are maximized but less food is available to eat at other times of the day, when hunger is usually worse. In a similar way, the pre-workout meal and workout shake potentiate performance, but lead to a situation in which there is plenty of food being taken in right around the time that the workout quells hunger anyway. But eliminating the workout window nutritional requirements and simply letting individuals eat their next planned meal when it occurs on the schedule, we save more food for the times of higher hunger cravings. Does this lack of a workout window and workout shakes impede results? A bit, with much more detail on that in the next section.
- Slower Weight Loss Rates
The calorie cuts between the Base sheet and the three Cut sheets are smaller in these templates than in our originals. This does mean that weight losses will be a bit slower on these templates. However the big advantage is that the easier calorie cuts will be less likely to cause as much hunger as the ones in the originals, allowing for better consistency of dieting and thus better end-results.
Who are these templates best suited for? Who are they least suited for?
The Evening Hunger Templates were designed specifically for people who:
- Experience strong hunger cravings on fat loss diets
- Have trouble with diet consistency due to cravings
- Experience their worst cravings in the evenings
- Cheat on their diets the most in the evenings
In addition, they were designed for individuals with primary goals of fat and weight loss, with optimal muscle retention and athletic performance as secondary goals. For these folks, we at RP honestly believe that this product will be a powerful tool in enhancing success.
On the other hand, for folks that have their primary interest in high level athletic performance or muscle retention during the fat loss process, our original templates are more effective. Are the differences huge? No way. By eating slightly less carbohydrate and doing away with the workout window and supplements like protein shakes and carb powders, at most a 10% difference in results will occur. To put this in perspective, if you lose 15lbs of fat and normally give up 3lbs of muscle to do so with the original templates, you might lose another half-pound of muscle on the Evening Hunger Templates with a 15lbs fat loss. To a high level weightlifter, this might result in 5kg off of their total and a 3rd place finish instead of first. But to someone just looking to get in shape by losing some fat, this muscle loss can be reversed within 2 weeks of the maintenance plan and never even be noticed.
Mind you, these are worst-case scenarios. For many of us that have successfully used the original fat loss auto-templates, no muscle loss whatsoever even occurs on the diet, so that the end result of the hunger templates might be just a tiny bit of muscle lost or no muscle lost at all. In the grand scheme, if the hunger templates lead to 15lbs of fat loss and a pound of lost muscle, that’s much better than a diet failed due to cravings, resulting in much less fat loss or no fat loss at all!
Can you use these templates as a basis for a sound diet when not trying to lose weight?
All of the RP diet templates are currently undergoing an overhaul and being fitting with maintenance diets and new post-diet bases. These features will allow you to re-establish your new baseline metabolism and food consumption at your new low (or high it it’s a mass phase template) bodyweight, and give you a diet that you can use as long as you like in keeping your new physique and higher level of performance.
The Evening Hunger Templates come standard with these features, so you CAN absolutely use your diet for as long as you like after you’re done with the fat loss phase or until the next fat loss phase begins. If you’d like to follow a more performance-oriented template for your regular training after your diet, those will still be available for sale. But, if you struggle with cravings even when you’re not trying to lose weight, using the New Base sheet as your indefinite diet with the hunger templates is totally ok.
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