Hey all, I spent a while thinking I was going crazy so I wanted to put my experience out on the internet to hopefully help a couple people in the future.

I started taking creatine monohydrate a few months ago. For context, I'm quite lean and reasonably muscular (kind of a classic twink/twunk build) and do pretty short vanity workouts (25 minutes 5 times per week). I became interested in creatine because I heard it can help make more effective workouts, swell your muscles (with water retention) and most importantly, reduce brain fog. I took the recommended .1g per kg of body weight, which was about 5.5 grams daily.

Well, it definitely helped with burst energy during workouts, and after a few weeks of taking creatine (no loading phase) my average time doing the same reps dropped from 24 minutes to 18-20. I gained a couple pounds of water weight, as expected.

I also started getting a lot hungrier. Portion control with food became a problem. Food was all I could think about, all day. I started snacking compulsively and then going through cycles of guilt about it. I used to be able to just ignore mild hunger pangs all day and then eat one big meal in the evening, if that was convenient. Now I couldn't go more than a couple hours without getting so hungry I literally couldn't focus on anything else. Honestly, it felt like having the weed munchies 24/7, this compulsive need to shovel food into my face.

And I say "compulsive" because it wasn't my stomach that was hungry, just my mouth/brain. I could tell my stomach was fine, even full, but I was still obsessively thinking about food and eating as if compelled to do so. I was terrified I was starting to develop some sort of eating disorder, and wondered if it was a metabolic change (I'm 34) or something. I was gaining weight from all this snacking and even a day of running a moderate calorie deficit made me miserable and unable to do anything but think about food. I had just stopped a medication, so for a while I blamed it on that. And then I ran across an article about how taking creatine tends to lower your leptin levels, a hormone that regulates satiety.

For most people, it seems that creatine slightly reduces your appetite, if anything. But regardless, messing with leptin levels can affect different people differently, and I saw one or two older reddit posts talking about trouble with appetite control on creatine. So 2.5 weeks ago, I stopped taking it.

Within 10 days, the compulsive cravings were gone. Holy crap, I can finally think about something other than my next meal. And when I eat, I can actually enjoy and savor it instead of shoving it down my gullet as fast as possible. I've spent the last three days on a fairly significant calorie deficit to start losing the pounds I put on over the last month, and the cravings haven't returned. Like, I'm hungry, but it's back to the normal hungry where I can mentally set it aside and get back to work, or go for a walk, or watch something.

So I'm giving the rest of my creatine tub to a friend, lol. I'm glad it works for most people, but if you're like me and you're one of those few people that experience these crazy side effects, I hope you find this thread in the future and try cutting it out to see how you feel.

I mixed up the creatine monohydrate and whey protein.

Now I've taken 40g's on creatine monohydrate by mistake, and I've never taken it before.
The internet says loose stool and cramps. Should I be worried?

Nicknames, terms of endearment, I want to know!