I’m not sure I would. It’s a bit like using a tank to shoot a fly (unless you wants particles and animations tied into that counter). But, if you wanted to you could simply create an infinite looping passive, set the length of the Ability to your tick rate, add logic in OnAbilityStart that gets the SelfActor, casts it to your character class, and then increments your hunger variable.
But again, if it’s something constant like that, I’d likely just make a timer in my Character Blueprint that calls every X seconds/milliseconds and do it that way.