Says I, who just completed my meal even though it was slightly painful....
That alone doesn't explain the 40 pounds I need to lose, though.
The second biggest scam is the perception that most people can lose weight without either doing an absolute ton of exercise, or feeling hungry quite a lot of the time.
And boredom is a real problem.
I liken trying to lose weight to trying to quit smoking. If all you had to fight were the nicotine cravings, nobody would be smoking today. It's the habits you have to fight, those things we build our life out of, and to fight habit you have to fix a lot of other parts of your life. Just finding ways to take five minute breaks that don't involve smoking. We want to treat these things in isolation, but they're not isolated, they all interact with each other. To do something like this forces you to deal with your entire life up to the present and be confronted with your own inadequacies. So there's that too.
Somebody who manages to quit smoking or lose weight and keep it off hasn't just managed to do that one thing, they've also managed to effect a complicated and difficult lifestyle change, and should by all rights be considered a completely different person. I don't feel particularly different from the me that was 210 pounds, but when I look at the big picture, I can understand why women aren't just being shallow when they wouldn't even look at me before, and now all seem to beg for attention.
That's why I focus at the level of lifestyle rather than on more mechanistic concerns like whether the keto diet is better than slow-carb and whatnot.
That's one of my biggest issues. I'm on a meal plan at the moment which is great during my workdays and I'm really feeling good.... but then on the weekend when I'm not home and I'm visiting family or friends, I don't know how to stick to it without being a) extremely tempted by the food or b) potentially feeling rude or out-of-place (bringing my own food, etc).
Long-term IF essentially made hunger a non-issue for me. I believe something neurological happened where my vagus nerve system got decoupled in some way from my CNS brain. I get hungry, but it's easy to ignore and to make my decisions on socially-practical grounds rather than the purely immediate.
Yesterday I had called up my business partner for dinner in my car right as I was about to leave. He didn't pick up, so I started driving. I get a few blocks down the road and he calls back, accepting my invitation. I did not mention that I was already in my car and hungry, simply drove back home. It was another two hours before we finally sat down for dinner. None of it bothered me, the hunger just went away when I willed it to.