Is there a better version of this idea written somewhere I can share? Something with not so much sarcasm and more reason.
It's weird to realize that pretty much no one knows what's up with nutrition. It's the opposite of data-driven.
That said, current nutritional recommendation is 45–65% of your caloric intake should be complex carbohydrates. Now that doesn't necessarily mean grain, but grain is an easy source.
Basically what I'm saying is, eating fewer calories doesn't necessarily mean you're hungry, because putting food into your mouth isn't just a reaction to being hungry, and because we tend to eat more than is necessary to satisfy hunger anyway.
However, eating fewer calories by cutting out grains is not the same thing as being on a calorie-restricted diet.
FWIW I also have cut out grains but my weight is very stable, so it seems fair to assume I now just eat more of other things.
More generally, it's just a bit pedantic to say that eating fewer calories than you would otherwise should be called a "calorie-restricted diet". The first reason is because the phrase "calorie-restricted diet" implies a significant restriction instead (for example, I'm only 1200 calories per day right now; that's a significant restriction compared to what I would be eating if I wanted to maintain my current weight). The second reason is because "calorie-restricted diet" implies a diet focused around tracking calories. Cutting out grains isn't a diet focused on calorie intake (heck, it's not tracking calories at all), it's just a diet that has the side effect of likely reducing calorie intake.
That's kind of a misleading sentence. Fat is about 9 kcal per g. Carbohydrates and proteins are about 4 kcal per g (it's slightly more complicated than that because proteins have slightly higher caloric content, but take energy to absorb, while larger carbohydrates are can not be absorbed at all, but let's just take these as rough values).
Grain isn't very "caloric" at all compared to, say, butter. 10g of white flour is 36 kcal, while 10g of butter is 72 kcal. Compared to lettuce it's quite "caloric". 10g of lettuce gives you only 2 kcal. But that's because lettuce is all water.
Although I really like eating grains, I'm also a pretty big fan of vegetables. If you imagine that a meal is about 600 kcal (give or take), I think it's instructive to assemble a variety of food and see what quantity of food that is. 3/4 of a stick of butter; or half a loaf of bread (assuming a 1 lb loaf); or 6 large heads of iceberg lettuce.
You can see pretty easily that if you want to eat more food, while maintaining the same caloric intake, then vegetables are the way to go -- because they have a lot of water. But you can also have soups, etc to get the same effect. Even grains work well: a bowl of porridge made with 250 ml of semi skimmed milk is only 254 kcal according to google -- but that tablespoon of brown sugar is going to bump it up to over 300 kcal.
So that's really the thing: if you remove water from stuff (flour, sugar, oil, butter) it's pretty calorie dense -- especially oils and fats. Eating things that are essentially dried out conglomerations of these things (potato chips, cookies, muffins, cheese, granola, etc, etc) means that you can only eat a ridiculously small amount of food if you are trying to hit a calorie target. Virtually all of our "convenience foods" fall into that category -- even sandwiches are often bread, meat, mayonnaise and a token slice of greenery. The secret is to cook so as to maintain flavour while keeping the water content up (or to enjoy eating more intense foods, with much smaller portions).
Of course if you cut them out of your diet and still eat the same amounts of everything else you will lose weight, that's just thermodynamics!
Did you track your calories? Dropping grains almost certainly means you cut your calories and thus lost weight. Exercise doesn't burn as many calories as people think. The adage 'abs are made in the kitchen, not the gym' rings true.
Of course, the point is there is almost no amount of exercise (8 hours/day in the pool like Phelps maybe) that can make up for a bad diet when it comes to abs. Abs are almost strictly a function of body fat percentage.