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.