You're Not Losing Fat Because You're Eating Too Damn Much (2016)

I’ve never been on a calorie deficit and not been hungry.

Calorie deficits are always a little unpleasant imo. It’s just suffering through that to get to a place where you want to maintain (which is much easier).

I’ve lost 73lbs, 53lbs, 35lbs (different times and gained weight over years in between). Each time the calorie deficit sucked. There is a 3 day hump and two week hump of misery until you get kind of used to it sucking, but I wouldn’t say it’s ever great.

a) Thank you for writing this. I'm also quite a bit heavier than whatever some random committee's idea of my "ideal weight" is and it's tough to navigate these types of threads.

b) assuming it was intentional and desired, congratulations on the loss

c) constant hunger has been a theme for me as well. Since getting medication for a mental health condition I've noticed that I'm not really hungry while it has effect but as soon as it wears off I want to eat everything, even if I've eaten a reasonable amount throughout the day. Fighting against constant hunger is _exhausting_ and I think people that say "it's just calories in and out" are just not experiencing it.

So if you eat less, your body eventually adjusts so that you're satiated earlier. People say that your "stomach shrinks" when you eat less, but it's really just your appetite that does.

When you eat a meal you should also try eating slower, or having more frequent but smaller portions. Have you ever noticed that you're still hungry after a meal, but after a few minutes it goes away? That's because it takes ~20 minutes for you to feel full after eating.

There's also appetite suppressants (both naturally found in certain foods + prescription drugs), that can work wonders for weight loss.

Also, if you ever try fasting, usually your appetite is strongest for the first 2 days, then falls off. With natural fat stores + an intake of water/electrolytes/potassium/magnesium, you can fast for many days at a time without feeling hungry.

Commenting purely on my own experience.

I have found that my hunger is malleable. If I start eating breakfast, I will be hungry in the morning at around the time I started eating breakfast. But, if I stop eating breakfast and only do lunch and dinner, I will eventually lose my hunger for breakfast and have no problem coasting till lunch on nothing but a coffee.

Couldn't agree more with hunger being a sensation rather than a problem in its own right. I'd recommend a two or three day fast to almost anyone at least once in their life, to experience that feeling of "I am hungry, this is unpleasant, but it's not the end of the world".

> I'm down 30 pounds from my max.

Huge congratulations on the progress!

> There is a very good chance that someone is writing a reply with some suggestion as to how I should eat so that I'm not hungry.

Actually I was wanted to ask the opposite: what prevents you from letting yourself go hungry a fraction of the day? You might get a stomachache for a bit, I know, but have you tried and seen any consequences beyond that? Note I'm not suggesting "eat absolutely nothing the whole day", but like if you cut your portions into a half or a third of the usual (or eat fiber/etc. so as to at least fill your stomach)... is that going to actually cause you any problems beside a bit of stomach pain? (and might trying a mild pain reliever like acetaminophen potentially help with that until your body gets used to it?)

Thanks for sharing. Here's my perspective as a lean person who has no problems literally starving themselves to do other things.

It does indeed sound like your hunger is more intense than my hunger. I think I benefit from a ton of experience in transitioning past "I'm very hungry" to "I'm fine" when I choose not to eat. There's a clear point (for me) when the body just says "oh we're not going to eat now? ok, I'll stop interrupting the brain with 'I'm hungry' signals." It just goes away and I'm no doubt in a caloric deficit.

Some of this is self-discipline, and some of it is an ability to find something more engaging/interesting than eating. If I push past the hunger threshold, it's easy to just not eat for a long stretch of time. Eventually, I notice that I'm extremely physically weak and mentally fatigued (but still not very hungry), and I realize that I have to eat, or it's going to start causing problems.

Anyways, take that for what it's worth.

> reply with some suggestion as to how I should eat so that I'm not hungry

Not to be that guy... but are you eating low calorie dense foods or high calorie dense foods?

The article points out that an Apple and a Donut have roughly the same volume, but an Apple is half the calories.

Also, as the article suggests, cutting out liquid calories (that don't satisfy hunger) are easy first steps.

I think you just need to accept living with hunger. As in be hungry constantly and just learn to live with it. This is the only method by which I've ever successfully lost weight. Go at a large forced deficit. After a week or so you get kind of used to being hungry (your hunger decreases, but it never goes away) and it becomes easier, but it's never totally easy.

Some people are able to avoid hunger by sticking to certain foods, but that's never worked for me.

Same boat. I got over this once but fell back. I'm 'only' 70lbs overweight but food is an addiction for me. One I need to survive. Very hard.

have you gone more than 2 weeks on a restricted diet (<1000 calories/day)?

in my experience, 2 weeks is about the boundary for when the body decides it's going to adapt its hunger point to the new realities. unfortunately, it shifts back much quicker, or at least seems to do so since we're usually not paying as much attention then.

The most important thing anyone who wants to manage their weight has to realize is why they eat. You feel hunter but why?

Food is complicated and people eat for many reasons. People can eat because they're bored or they're anxious or even just to feel better, even briefly.

A healthy state to get to (which is easier said than done to be sure) is to treat food as fuel not as medicine or even a reward. You put gas in your car when it needs gas. Food should be the sam, ideally.

For me, I had a lot of success with intermittent fasting. This works for me. It may not work for you. But whether or not it works (and for some people it doesn't) one thing you do learn how much of hunger is just habit. Your'e used to eating a certain amount or at certain times. That feeling of feeling full actually isn't normal or even desirable. You'll be surprised at how little you actually need.

A good place to start is to inccrease protein consumption. A lot of high-calorie diets are surprisingly low in protein but really high in carbs (particularly sugar) and fat. It's actually much more difficult to overeat with high-protein. I've known more than a few people with weight issues who avoid eating protein just because of this.

Even small changes add up. Like people who scoop sugar and heavy cream into coffee and can end up consuming 700 calories per coffee multiple times a day. Drink black coffee. If you don't like that you should consider that you don't actually like coffee. You like coffee flavoured sugar and fat.

And if you don't like black unsweetened coffee, forcing yourself to drink it will actually kill your appetite. That's not such a bad thing.

But you need to figure out your relationship with food.

Try fasting. I would get hungry 1-2 days in but then it subsides (don't overdo it... I think I did 3-4 days max).

Or try eating more protein. 1kg of chicken breast (1600 kcal). I couldn't (but I'm "normally sized" and my stomach is as well)

It makes 100% sense to be hungry while you are on diet. The opposite would be surprising.

But you are even hungry now that you are not on a diet. Do you prefer to be hungry and obese or be hungry and not be obese ? Not saying that it is just something that you can decide like that. But I would understand your point if you were not hungry now, but you say this is not the case.

Hey, I agree with you that it's different for everyone. Personally, if I've been eating too much and I try to eat a healthy amount I will always be a bit hungry for at least a few days - maybe longer -until my body adjusts to the new amounts. After a while it gets easier, especially if I'm smart in my food shopping.

Eating certain types of foods (the article calls them hyper-palatable) can also kick off feeling much more hungry. It's sometimes hard for me to get back into a healthy cadence, especially if I have stress in other areas of my life.

When this is going on I think a lot about Ego Depletion - the idea that willpower is a limited resource. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

I think it's definitely OK to be a little hungry, or even a lot hungry. In fact, when I'm feeling like I have some willpower to spare I go on a fast. I think it really helps me calibrate my internal tolerance for hunger. After a fast, the mild hunger I feel after eating an appropriately sized meal barely even registers as hunger.

Keep up the good work!

It's an individual struggle for many. Although I'm rather close to the weight I want to be(now) I struggle and have struggled with hunger too. My weight has gone up and down, I too have tried many things. The struggle with hunger is similar regardless of weight, until I get really quite lean.

I have gone from being in perfect control of my weight(I had to make weight for a sport), to being completely out of control(because the stuff that used to work didn't anymore), to being in control again(new stuff worked), to loosing some of the control(because it stopped working, but I found new stuff before it got out of hand again).

Everyone is different, different stuff works for different people and you yourself are different people when your weight changes significantly, as you age, and as your environment and knowledge changes.

Things that effect hunger: fewer bigger meals (unless it doesn't and you do better with more small meals). Protein, fiber (generally less hunger for most people), carbs (varies), fats (ditto). Avoiding trigger foods, (there are some foods and different for everyone, that once you eat a little it causes more hunger and triggers into more eating). Psychological tricks: (1. realize that a state of being somewhat hungry all the time is the normal state that humans lived with for thousands of years, 2. realize that you can burry yourself with work as a good distraction from hunger and get a lot more done at the same time. 3. Realize that "Hunger is the best spice" - Epictetus 4. Every time you catch yourself thinking about the costs of dieting(hunger), make sure you spend even more time thinking about the benefits. Exercise: figure out what exercises increase and decrease hunger for you, today. Liquid calories: your body doesn't register them and sometimes registers them negatively, best avoided all together. If you need a treat, prefer the ice cream over the milk shake. Cinnabon's highest calorie item is a drink.

I wish you the best, I hope something I said may help.

Same. Had to go on keto and it was tough the first couple days but now I struggle to eat enough as crazy as it sounds. I’m just not hungry like I used to be. Consistently losing 2lbs a week. Hope you stick with what works for you!

I think this is actually the most common experience. Everyone says they want to lose weight, but they just can't bring themselves to eat a sensible amount. Heck, I'm trying it now, writing down everything I eat, weighing myself each day, and it's still going pretty damn slowly.

> So many diets talk about not being hungry while you are on the diet. I've been to dieticians and told them I'm hungry, and they suggest eating more protein or more fiber. That does help, but I still feel hungry.

Have you thought about eating something that just has very few calories, in order to fill you up? Carrots have barely any calories and need a fair bit of chewing. Popcorn without salt/sugar/butter as well. Diet drinks or water.

What's helped me a bit is just looking at all the calorie labels on everything to get a feel for what the cost of each item is, then using that as a kind of "is it worth it" budget. A lot of things go out the door when you do that, but surprisingly some quite nice things stay on the menu.

Your hunger is partly driven by gut bacteria that want you to feed them. It is a genuine form of mind control. Your current mixture of biota aren't doing you any favors. It would be worthwhile to look into medical treatment that can kill them off and replace with a known good inoculation.

I have a pet theory that obesity is linear to tastey food. As we have sugar and tastey food readily available it's far easier to continue to consume. I catch myself eating a whole bag of cereal, even though it's not fulfilling, simply because it tastes good and I'm hungry. If instead my only options were healthy foods I'd eat a lot less.

I have just accepted being hungry all the time. Lost 61 pounds in 6 months, still got 44 to go before reaching my ideal weight. Being hungry all the time became normal after 2 months. It was difficult, still is.

So, my diet plan was - eat less. And of that which I eat, avoid sugar like poison and avoid carbohydrates as much as possible, while still having at least some daily intake split between meals.

And regular blood tests and monitoring by doctors (endocrinologist, GP, cardiologist).

Have you tried Saxenda or similar? It was a life changer for me.

Good luck, I also struggle with weight and it's clear there's something we have not figured out yet.

+1 to this.

I am almost permanently hungry. It is extremely rare for me to feel full. My wife, friends, co-workers etc who eat the same meals as me (e.g. at restaurants or Xmas dinners etc) stop with comments like "man I am so full I could not eat another morsel!" yet I sit there with a clean plate thinking I could eat the entire thing again while also wondering what is for dessert. At home I will pretty much always finish off what my family leave on their plate.

I think I am just missing that gene or whatever that tells you you have eaten enough, kinda like how horses can eat themselves to death without a nosebag.

The only thing that has kinda worked for me is MyFitnessPal and eating sugar-free sweets or black coffee to distract my brain.

> Maybe it's Ok to be a little hungry.

This is the key. On evolutionary time scales, human beings have only very recently come to inhabit a world where regularly being able to eat to full satiation (and beyond) is commonplace. Being "a little hungry" is actually the typical condition under which most of our ancestors over many thousands of years have operated. Put an organism evolved to survive amid scarcity in an environment of abundance, and it's going to gain weight unless it comes up with a method for stopping at or before the earliest signs of satiety.

Maybe you should try embracing the hunger. I'm on the opposite side of the spectrum, too skinny. It was very difficult for me to gain muscle mass for the longest time. Eventually I came to enjoy the feeling of working out for the muscle soreness it caused. I still do not enjoy working out after 10 years, but I associate soreness with muscle gain and fitness, and so I enjoy it. If you are able to convince yourself that hunger is actually the feeling of yourself losing weight, it might be easier to embrace. Hunger can be torturous but it isn't dangerous.

WHO recently released a report on obesity in europe[1]

Stressing, among other things, that obesity is a chronic disease starting very early in life, indeed even before conception, and cannot be treated as an individual failing.

They also point out that health professionals should focus not on weight loss, but on life long prevention of comorbidities. To which end various treatment options are available. Weight loss may be part of it, but as little as loosing 10-15% maybe enough towards that particular goal.

They mention some drugs that might have an impact on hunger.

Unfortunately, its a disease that is very hard to treat, and for cases of severe obesity, drastic measures like bariatric surgery may be the only option. An option well worth considering in light of the alternative if nothing else works though.

(My personal opinion is that some drastic diet intervention with focus on undoing the epigenetic damage from early life should be possible, and far preferable to the surgery option if at all effective, but the science is still being worked out on that one)

[1] https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/noncommunicable-di...

I don't live in your body, know how you feel or know what you've tried. But I can share my experience as it seems similar and had an solution that was overlooked by multiple professionals.

While my situation may be different, it may still provide an insight on what kind of things to look at.

Turns out times I felt most hungry were times when my blood sugar was low. If I ever eat something with a high glycemic index without something with a low GI along side it then I am bound to have low blood sugar inside of a couple hours especially if it's for breakfast (even medium sweetness cereals are a no go for that). When I get low blood sugar I feel like eating a horse. Turns out that even a small amount of food will sate me if I am patient enough (difficult when your body feels like it is telling you that you'll die if you don't eat cake or drink juice).

Being autistic doesn't help, I often forget to eat until my blood sugar drops.

I do think coming to terms with hunger is a huge part of weight loss - its can be an absolutely uncomfortable, anxious, or dreadful feeling for many and its a wrecking ball to well laid plans.

Like most primal drives - once its present in my mind its not long before it blossoms into behavior.

When I'm losing weight, I treat hunger like any other non-constructive impulse (e.g. anger, sloth, apathy, negative self talk, etc...):

1) I try to prevent it by not putting myself into situations where my judgement is compromised. With hunger, this most often means never waiting too long to nourish - I've got to feed the body before the mind starts producing urges that aren't consistent with healthy outcomes. Less often, this means not being hung over and heading for a fast food breakfast.

2) I keep busy so there's not much cycle time in my brain for it to take root. Anything will do as long as its immersive. Sipping something with no or few calories throughout is helpful. The devil will find work for idle hands to do, they say.

3) When these don't do the trick, I respond to any emergent internal pleading directly. When I sense the familiar "but I won't be satisfied if I don't do X, and don't I deserve to be satisfied?" I respond as I would with my child or any other 3rd person who's about to abandon the plan - I reaffirm that we're all in this together and being satisfied is definitely the goal and one we're committed to and in this case satisfaction looks like weight loss, not nachos.

I don't win every time, but these generally get me enough wins to tip the war in my favor.

I used to think loosing weight was easy, and maybe it was when I was a skinny 20-something. Now at 35+ I'm skipping meals, reducing sweets and alcohol, and doing light exercise every day and it is still hard to just maintain the current weight, let alone drop a few kg. The thing that seems to help is fasting for a few days here and there.

Your body craves carbohydrates, it's like an addiction. Overcoming that addition is all about training your willpower and delayed gratification.

It's the same as smoking. Strong willed people can stop smoking in a heartbeat. Weak minded people cannot, their minds are simply too weak to resist smoking and they need it every 2 hours. Same with eating.

Next time you feel that hunger feeling, out of spite just don't eat and the craving goes away within 1-2 hours and you'll get long term endorphins instead that make you feel good for your mind being stronger than that craving. It's not so hard, you just have to be a bit stronger than that desire.

You can also try fasting. Just don't eat for 24h and you'll feel a lot better than if you ate.

Some people simply cannot delay gratification, they need to be on their phone, watch tv constantly to get their dopamine hit. However, other people are able to delay gratification and get a much larger amount of endorphins and also the better ones.

It should become a habit to receive your dopamine hits from resisting the temptation and being stronger than this degenerate craving for unhealthy, processed food carefully designed to make the population addicted to their produce to buy more and more and eat more, so that they make more money.

There is a way to get out of this easily, don't eat any more sugar and carbohydrates, but plants and meat, which is the keto diet. It's very healthy and natural as well. You'll drop a lot of weight and you can still eat well.

This.

It is the annoying, aggravating, all consuming hunger that is the cause, not a misunderstanding about how many calories are in what foods.

I would have thought by now science would have a drug to modulate abnormal levels of hunger, but we still don't have one. And we don't know what causes them.

My experience is that hunger is a lot like the sensation you get when quitting smoking. And eating while hungry is definitely triggering the same stuff than smoking an overdue cigarette. It’s something in the throat that has must have neural connections in the upper back (at least for me!).

What I am trying now is to find hunger not too unpleasant. It feels unpleasant at first, then if you think about it, it’s not painful, it’s just different.

Like smoking, temptation is difficult to resist, so things like working in a place with no access to food is a must have. And filling days with activities which make you think about something else also works. I have really bad sleep sometimes, and when I do, my resistance to temptation is less efficient. So you need to know that kind of stuff about yourself.

I don’t know man, just do what you can.

I know that weight loss happens differently for different people, so read this or ignore this. Hopefully you haven't heard this exact take before, but with the number of people who dump advice on you when they think you're unhappy with your weight, you probably have at some point.

Keto has consistently been the most effective way for me to lose weight. More important than the actual diet though, was that it became clear to me that there was a difference between, "Hey, you were supposed to eat by now." hungry and "OK, I'm a bit dizzy and forgetful and need to get something in my stomach." Just knowing that there were two completely different hunger signals made losing weight a lot easier. I ignore the one that generally occurs at set times or after a certain period of time since the last meal and make sure I have something on hand to straighten things out if my blood sugar needs some support.

For me, cutting out carbs and maintaining a reasonable calorie deficit works wonders. My mom can't sustain a keto diet very long and does super well counting calories. I've had friends in the past who maintained a healthy weight eating small, carby meals frequently in addition to exercise.

The actual combo of diet and exercise is very dependent on the individual, but I feel that knowing the difference between "hungry" and "need to get calories in to function" is a big advantage, however you get to that point.

Next time you are hungry: take a hot bath with epson salts, while you read aloud. After your body is warmed up, do 30 minutes yoga. Followed by 10 minute guided meditation. Boho Beutiful has a Youtube channel where you can find Yoga/meditation vides. This routine will improve focus and mental clarity and help with the cravings while also being great for stretch. Can do it in the morning or at night, or even repeat it through the day instead of sitting at the computer.

Try different cousins, as many different new fruits, spices, etc as you can, along with vitamins and minerals.

To me, this sounds like your body wants something and it never gets it.

Where did you get the idea that hunger should be avoided at all cost? I'm almost always hungry.

This kind of hunger is what I've felt my whole life too, though my weight is still only in the overweight category. I can eat twice, three times what a normal portion is and still feel like I need to eat. I could easily eat multiple large pizzas by myself with no problem at all. There's a scene from The West Wing where the chief of staff describes his alcoholism and how people would ask him how could he drink so much and still want more. His answer is that he doesn't understand how anybody else could not want more. That it's the best thing in the world. And that's exactly how food feels to me.

A year ago I was diagnosed with ADHD (inattentive) and prescribed a very low dose of Vyvanse (amphetamine based). Suddenly it was gone. I'd want to eat at normal times, I'd eat a normal portion but I could easily walk away or I actually just didn't want more. I asked my wife, is this what other people feel like? It really rocked my world a bit. It's one thing to logically know that people experience reality differently, but I've rarely had such a stark example of it.

> It doesn't even take that much extra food to gain a lot of weight. One extra piece of cake a week [...]

I honestly only say this in case it helps, and I'm firmly on the upper end of 'healthy' UK BMI so not in any health freak position of judgement by a long shot, but I last had a slice of cake months ago, so the casual 'just an extra slice of cake every week' really stands out to me.

(On a complete tangent I don't at all think regular cake eating is incompatible with a healthy diet, but I do think that in 2022 it's highly inversely correlated, and that going against that almost requires baking your own.)

Periodic fasting for 24 hours (few weeks between) can improve health and help you gain mastery over your appetite.

Good luck with your journey. Years of life can be hard to change.

how tall are you?

> One extra piece of cake a week

So… I was never predisposed to put on weight, but as I got older I got less and less fit than I used to be. My doctor told me my cholesterol and triglycerides were up and suggested that I just stop eating desserts and candy entirely. It seemed impossible when he suggested it, but I’ve been able to stick to it for almost two decades now. When I made the decision that I just wasn’t going to have any more desserts, ever, it was much easier than it seemed it was going to be.

Just a note, I've lost significant weight by having just one meal a day and snacking thru the day. The key is to plan your day's food and snacks and not to have extra food ready to eat. Why one meal? I found that every time I sat down to eat it would be a struggle not to over eat. So to reduce the possibility of over eating I only do it once a day.

Counting on willpower to help you lose weight is a lost cause for most people. The key is to put yourself in situations where you can't over eat and/or you have to follow what your past self thought was good for you.

Your weight loss should be gradual but consistent. People want to lose all the weight in a short time but they never reflect that it took years to gain the weight. It should take a while to lose it.

It's depends on habit. People are not used to being actually in empty stomach since childhood.

Eating all the time makes our brain want food all the time. I did intermittent fasting and now I'm completely okay not eating during that time. For other times it becomes easy, after not eating like before.

The food doesn't have to be calorie heavy. Replace with meat, nuts, vegetable, fruits (not juice).

My friend, I suggest seeing an obesity medicine specialist. There are medications that can help. Insurance more than likely will cover it. Obesity is no joke and leads to (or complicates) a vast array of medical issues.

Firstly, congrats on the weight loss. 30 pounds is huge. It sounds like you're on the right track.

My thoughts on hunger: I used to treat hunger as if my body was signalling that it needed food right to survive. Then one day I got sick and couldn't keep food down -- even though I was hungry -- so I stopped eating. To my surprise, my hunger went away. After the sickness had passed, eating anything at all would give me tremendous heartburn, so I continued not eating for about another week. I found it unusual that I could walk the streets in a completely fasted state, my body cannibalising its own muscle and fat reserves, and not feel any hunger at all. To me, it demonstrated that hunger wasn't the 'you require food right now' signal that I thought it was. It must mean something else.

When I began eating again, my hunger returned.

I walked away from that experience with a recalibrated understanding of hunger. It now seems more like a suggestion from the body: 'this is the time that food is usually available, so you should eat if at all possible, because we can't be sure when food will be available again', rather than 'I require food right now to survive'.

Just a theory. May be you are hungry because the bigger you get the more food is needed to maintain the energy levels at current weight? If you tend to over eat even 50% of the times, you are now getting bigger, and more hungry(to maintain the increasing weight) in a never ending loop?

I don't have a solution for this. But it does look like to reverse this you will have to do the exact opposite. Like under eat a little and exercise enough to burn calories, and go into this loop?

Why do you obey your body?

At my maximum I weighed 192kg.

Then I really tried to eat only salads and generally healthy things while doing a lot of sports.

I lost almost 95kg within less then 2 years and for most off the time, the hunger was gone.

At some point, the hunger came back however, and I'm back up to 160kg. It is a terrible feeling, and while it's possible to ignore it for a while... At least I cannot for months or even years. I'm not sure why it went a away before, but I wish I knew. Switching over to salad diet and doing sports doesn't seem to work by itself, at least not within a reasonable amount of time

You will not die over night if you restrict calories, if you read the article you would have saw what the author wrote about the Minnesota starvation study. This tells me you have not ever tried to restrict calories and you lack the disciple or mental fortitude to cut out low density, high calorie foods such as the “cake” every week you referenced. Why not try replacing the junk food cake with steamed broccoli and fruit??

I’m sorry but I ballooned to 250 during COVID lockdown and am back to a healthy weight by lifting heavy in the squat rack (starting strength + 5x5) and eating nutritious foods at a deficit.

Until you try this or try and determine you have a medical condition and seek treatment (hyperthyroidism), you get 0 sympathy from me. Consider this some tough love from someone who put in the hard work to turn their life around.

I believe in you, please try change your mentality you are limiting yourself from any progress in weight loss and can only blame yourself.

“Anyway, now I realize that I am hungry. It never goes away unless I eat a significant amount of food. My body told me to eat, so I ate.”

Hunger =/ I NEED to eat to make this feeling of discomfort go away

You're not really hungry, you're a sugar addict.

I know that doesn't solve the problem. But try treating this as an addiction, it will help.

> There is a very good chance that someone is writing a reply with some suggestion as to how I should eat so that I'm not hungry.

I will write about a personal experience that has nothing to do with selecting different foods - intermittent fasting.

First I thought this was a torture people put themselves up to. Then a few friends tried it, said you get used to it, and this made me curious. I used to say black coffee was torture, until I stuck with it for a week and now I hate sugar in it - an eye opener that what I thought was an absolute truth about my preferences could be turned around with so easily.

So I tried intermittent fasting. The first few days sucked, I was uncomfortable and moody in the morning, and starving by the time of lunch. Then I got used to it, didn't feel hungry anymore and stuck with it for a year - lost 10 kgs whike barely* thinking about it.

* I didn't lose weight for the first month, then I realized I was over compensating with big meals and eating more junk (believing the fasting would compensate it - it didn't). After I got back to my regular habits when eating, the diet was a breeze.

> You gain weight in kilograms and lose weight in grams.

Ultra false. It takes years to get fat while in few months you can lose a significant amount.

> There is a very good chance that someone is writing a reply with some suggestion as to how I should eat so that I'm not hungry. Thank you for the thoughts, but realize that you don't live in my body, you don't know how I feel, you don't know what I've tried.

I completely agree with this. I still do want to chime in a little. Don't feel obligated to try any of this, maybe you have already tried. I have a hunch you've tried it already. Perhaps someone else hasn't and will try upon reading it.

One rather simple change in diet is volume eating. As in, eat food that fills your stomach, but does not contain (many) calories. A prime example is lettuce, broccoli, or practically any vegetable.

When you're hungry try eating a large salad (a clean one that is, no sauces, or oil). When eating dinner add a large portion of broccoli, raw spinach, cauliflower. Try grilling or steaming vegetables.

In normal dishes try and replace as many ingredients with lower calorie alternatives, especially oils when cooking. These calories add up, quickly.

The above doesn't mean you cannot eat heavier sources of protein, fats, and carbs. Please just keep eating those, in balance. In balance meaning there's no need to have more grams of fats per day than a healthy weight in kg (e.g. 80kg -> 80 grams). Same story for proteins, but at a moderate ratio of 1-1.6 grams per kg body weight. Feel free to play with carbs.

> Hunger sounds like a problem to people. Hunger feels like a problem inside the body. People still tell me I shouldn't be hungry. Maybe part of the solution is realizing that eating to satisfaction is ... bad for some people. Maybe it's Ok to be a little hungry.

Strong agree with this. Funnily enough it's often thirst, which feels similar.

People like to come up with all kinds of 'tricks' to lose weight without feeling hungry. To me it sounds like trying to gain muscle in the gym without feeling fatigued or sore. Just be hungry and deal with that feeling. It's okay to feel discomfort. I'm hungry right now but I have decided writing a post on HN is more important than eating immediately; fat people should decide that losing weight is also more important.

>People still tell me I shouldn't be hungry. >Maybe it's Ok to be a little hungry.

I think you're 100% on to something. We suffer from avoidance of discomfort, as demonstrated by our obesity and opioid epidemics. Facing that discomfort is usually the fastest path to growth in every aspect of life across career, education, diet, love, exercise.

We always try to find routes around discomfort. There're endless dating gurus promising to save you the potentially horrible pain of rejection, cosmetic surgeries, drugs, and avoidance options. None of these shortcuts work, instead resulting in addictions, cowardice, unfulfilled dreams and lives.

There's mounting evidence of the health benefits from calorie restriction, though autophagy and inflammation reduction. We evolved to have maintenance pathways only function in times of caloric deficit, and to eat when food was available. Now food is always available. I've found that taking coffee while I fast reduces the discomfort. Depending on the mechanism of action, this might decrease the benefits.

All of us have opportunities in our lives to practice equanimity with discomfort. There's no moral failure here. We can all support each other to face our discomfort as we endeavor every day to move a step closer to our goals.

Congratulations on your progress!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction#Life_exten...

If there's one thing I've learnt about hunger it's that not all hunger is real.

You have to think to yourself, am I hungry, or am I bored/idle?

I find keeping yourself busy/no snacking or food at desk etc helps a lot. It may be different for other people but if I get up and walk around a bit/stretch I usually realise I'm not hungry, just for some reason sitting & idling too long make me feel like food.

Another big one is hydration, drinking enough water helps a lot, count coffee, etc as a - for the amount of water you drink. If I'm a little peckish and I realise I haven't had enough water, just drinking half a glass usually staves off the feeling of hunger.

Have you tried protein heavy diet? Just try drinking protein whey protein powder drinks the whole day for a week and see what it does to you.

I dont have a problem with losing weight but It's incredibly difficult and annoying to get lean and burn fat while building muscles. I literally cant force myself to eat more if I try to do at least 200g protein every day. 2xmozarella light (42g protein), 2x66 protein drinks (132) and I am on 174g of protein and I cant force myself to eat anything else.

Try to take a period of reprograming, where you just stick with it. Also consider a detox. Get all the garbage you don't want to eat out of the house, and insist on not buying it. Whenever you get a craving, just go drink water instead.

Lastly, consider carnivore or alternate day fasting. You can get there, if you want to.

It's genetics. I think it's called the set point theory. You're genetically programmed to keep a certain body fat percentage. Anything below (or above) that set point and you're body will regulate your appetite with hormones. You can manipulate this set point with things like diet or exercise, but there is only so much you can do. If you're genetically programmed to keep a body fat percentage of 25% for example you're not gonna have a lot of fun staying below 15%.

Counting calories may not be correct and useful advice for most people. It ignores what the calories do in your body. As an absurd example, sand is very calorically dense, and you'll lose a lot of weight and then die if it's all you eat. Telling people they "eat too much" is usually ineffective, it just makes people feel bad that they can't tolerate hunger.

Ketosis will work (it's very low carb, not zero carb). You (as in you personally) won't be able to do it, you likely lack the willpower, and if you're social, it's difficult to do in a social setting, especially without taking a deep dive into the science to help understand the how and the why.

By the way, I recently read Slime Mold Time Mold's hilarious diet proposal (https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/04/29/potato-diet-communi...), namely "only eat potatoes, fry them lightly in vegetable oil if you want but prefer no extra fat, use hot sauce if you want but ideally literally just potatoes, supplement B12 and Vitamin A, definitely no dairy". They claim that this diet… just doesn't require willpower? Might be worth a quick go. God knows what nutrients are absent from the diet, but :shrug:

Since the big selling point is that it doesn't take willpower, you'll know nice and quickly if it's failed - it's a very low-commitment diet. (I have never tried it, I lift and I want more protein than the diet can provide.)

I've been told that the reason carbs are such a problem is that once metabolized into glucose the body has to produce insulin to balance the blood sugar. Eventually this process makes us hungry especially if we eat too many carbs.

One way to reduce the affect of excess carbs is to follow a low glycemic diet similar to what people with diabetes follow. You might want to look into it.

Yes, 75% of the diet is psychology and not calories-in-calories-out. Obviously CICO is a thing inasmuch as it's a thermodynamic process. Those people who parrot it though aren't really using their brain and are trying to simplify a complex human process down to "eat less". Nutrition in humans is complex and psychology is more important than other factors (assuming you don't really have some limiting health issue). The only way I could lose weight was low carb. It lowered my cravings and I started eating two meals a day (I usually had a sizeable breakfast which I dropped). the first two weeks to a month were rough but after that the amount of will power needed decreased dramatically. I lost 80lbs this way and have kept it off by staying away from refined carbs and eating much much less sugar. Will it work for everyone? Probably not, but even if it works for a sizeable minority it's worth it, and I think it's like hitting a reset button on your relationship with food. You realize you're in control, your physical cravings lessen. I had tried all kinds of diets before, but low carb worked for me.

> Why do some people's bodies/minds insist so insistently that they eat more when they clearly are already overweight? That's the question I would love to have answered.

Pretty sure it's habit. Eating calorie all the time makes our brain want that food all the time. People are not used to being actually in empty stomach since their childhood. I did intermittent fasting and now I'm completely okay not eating during that time. For other times it becomes easy, after not eating like before.

The food doesn't have to be calorie heavy either. Replace with meat, nuts, vegetable, fruits (not juice).

How long do those thoughts last? I used to eat a lot of snacks past dinner, and then tried intermittent fasting - after an (annoying) week without that habit, my body just got used to it and stopped craving for them.

Of course it's useless, the author is selling himlself, he's a fitness coach...

It's more like they DO NOT want to believe how small portion sizes are required to consistently lose weight.

Even if there was a device that could scan all food before eating it, they would still exempt some meals with the "do not count" argument.

Rule of thumb, that if a meal is easy and fast to prepare, then it is probably not suited for a diet.

To lose weight you have to do a lot more exercise than you think consistently. And you have to eat a lot less than you think.

Most people just don't have that kind of willpower.

One of my roommates tried everything, including good hard exercise and all sorts of diets. Nothing seemed to be working. It was kind of perplexing me, actually.

Then we started working the same schedule, breakfast together. The whole thing unravelled with a casual comment he made. "Wow, you're really stingy with the sugar in your coffee."

Except I wasn't. I was actually indulging myself, like two tablespoons.

Show me how you make coffee? Ah. Yes. If you put 500 calories of sugar and cream into your coffee multiple times a day, you're not gonna lose weight.

He didn't believe me at first! I had to measure his quantities out and calculate it and show him. Liquids/powders in general seem to trip people up. We are bad at measuring them by sight. Soda, mayonnaise and dips. The oil in a nice salad dressing applied over-liberally can exceed the calories in the burger that goes with it.

Try measuring/weighing these sorts of foods and looking up their caloric content if you haven't before. You may be a shocked as my poor roommate was.

Or alternatively, they know they are eating too much, but simply don't have the will power to quit. I'm no food expert, but to me it looks like any other addiction. They rely on food emotionally, so when they are ashamed or depressed that they aren't losing weight, they turn to food, which continues the addiction cycle.

"I'm big boned" - show them an MRI or cat scan of a morbidly obese person and you see a tiny little skeleton surrounded by what looks like a giant, puffed up cartoon balloon body.

"I have a low metabolism" - obese people actually have a high 'metabolism', because moving all that extra weight takes a lot of energy

"Being overweight is not unhealthy" - weird then that they are having trouble getting pregnant and/or miscarriage regularly, need a machine to breathe at night lest their brain not receive enough oxygen, their knees and hips and eyes are that of someone several decades older, they're likely dependent upon insulin injections to live, and substantially more likely to develop cancer, etc.

Yes, there are a lot of negative attitudes towards obese patients in the medical community. That is partly because obese people think they know better than medical science, and are more interested in screaming about how they're being discriminated against thanks to the patriarchy and unrealistic beauty standards....than actually doing something about their weight...like accepting a referral to a nutritionist and accepting the advice to engage in more activity and weight-bearing exercise.

When someone needs a machine to breathe, artificial joint replacements, hourly/daily insulin, and Star Trek levels of intervention to reproduce, maybe they just need to shut the fuck up and lose weight.

You know what's really infuriating? Maintaining a healthy weight, getting exercise, making an effort to eat a balanced diet that hits lots of nutrients....and seeing these people cost my insurance company several orders of magnitude more money to keep alive than I do.

There are a lot of nuances to both nutritional understanding, and to the meta of nutritional understanding... how people understand it. A lot of methods, food types, rulesets and whatnot are actually very useful. Often, they have benefits in the meta. Fasting-ish methods help people deal with and experience what hungry is, and relate to the biological fact that they'll be just fine skipping a meal, or ten. Food type-ish diets help avoid getting into overeating modes^. Point systems

That said, totally agree. The basics starts with a basic understanding of "how much." Food is quantified calorically. If you don't have knowledge or intuition about how much is how much, you're not aware of your eating habits.

Mates of mine are vegan, and I think they make the mistake in the other direction with their kid. They're hyper focused on "quality calories" but they underestimate calorie quantity. A kid's meal consisting of cucumber, greens, carrot, and bean noodles is 100 calories, and the kid needs 300. They do put a lot of effort into learning about healthy vegan diets, but the basics... quantity estimation isn't there.

^BTW, I think the whole idea behind courses and other "feasting" traditions might be that it allows us to pig out more effectively. I'm all full on soup, but I could go for some of that potato. Then sweets. Mebe some cheese.

I lived with a dieting obese couple who would reward themselves with a "cheat" dinner if they'd been good for a whole 2 meals prior.

its exhausting to do that. Im switching my diet up a little to bit to reduce cholesterol and some liver enzyme thing lately and Im starting to get tired of thinking so much before every meal and shopping trip. wish it was easier to not fall in to unhealthy traps. so many labels, and so much meal planning.

Modern food is kinda weird in how high-energy and very energy-dense food is the default and cheap, and it somehow is more expensive to buy less calories.

That’s why it’s important to make exercise a lifelong habit. Diet to lose the weight, exercise to keep it off.

To some extent you always need to manage your caloric intake of course - but if you exercise regularly, the occasional indulgence isn’t a big deal.

Once you start learning about this your next visit to the grocery store you realize how much junk is really lining the shelfs.

Learning how to cook is a great way to do that. You know exactly what's in what you eat.

Ego depletion (limited willpower) turns out not to be true [0]. It could not be replicated and is no longer considered how willpower works.

> Results from the current multilab registered replication of the ego-depletion effect provide evidence that, if there is any effect, it is close to zero. [1]

> Taken all together, experiments conducted at 24 different labs showed no signs whatsoever of Baumeister and Tice’s original effect. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_...

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916166528...

[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...

Just want to note here that I recently switched off MFP for Cronometer because MFP had a literal week long outage and is architected in such a way that it must phone home in order to save anything like a recipe you make. So that was a whole week where I couldn't save a new recipe.

I've found Cronometer to be a lot faster in every way, and actually has an up to date database and when you scan something it doesn't have, it lets you scan the label and updates the database. Highly recommend.

Only problem is what's endemic to apps in general right now. They want a subscription instead of buying the app outright. That's gonna be a no from me, dawg.

Burgers get a bad rap, it was actually using MyFitnessPal that showed this to me.

There's no law says you have to get a fries and corn syrup drink with the burger, a burger and mineral water is a great meal, macros line up and I feel full for hours.

> you just scan the barcode and it tots up the calories.

A good tule of thumb is to minimize the number of things you eat with barcodes.

I agree.

It's not even wrapping any text! It's just 'quote-unquote" used by itself as a prefix modifier on the next noun phrase.

Disgusting.

It does make it more accessible if you're passing it through a TTS engine for reading.

“Write like you talk” has been a genuine abomination on the internet. It has destroyed a lot of spaces for me

it has a different meaning because it puts more emphasis on the author distancing themselves from what is being said. Just putting things in quotes in text may just be a value neutral quote. Writing it out is a rhetorical device because it's difficult to quote sarcastically in written form. It's basically the textual version of doing quotes with your fingers in the air. From the text:

Most of these quote-unquote marketed protein products are nothing more than glorified chocolate bars.

The “Health Halo” effect of food is when consumers believe foods that are advertised as healthier have fewer calories

Sounds the same as the app I've had success with, Lose It. Also highly recommended.

"And those benefits to dieting are very much "potential". Study after study has shown that diets don't work in the long term; people usually gain the weight back."

I'm sorry, but this is misleading BS. Studies have found that diets don't work for most people cause most people just suck at sticking to diets, not because CICO is somehow fundamentally flawed. To imply the second is dishonest.

It would be like saying that suggesting people to work out to get in shape is useless cause studies have found that most people don't stick to exercise plans.

"Leave fat people the fuck alone about their diets."

Unfortunately we can't. Cause obesity is a real public health crisis and diets is why. That's not to say that we should encourage fat shaming. But we need to be honest and not coddle people

It is essentially, a 5 whys meeting cut short.

Last time I had a feeling like this I was sick with the beginnings of Covid. If it's an unusual urge, you might want to follow it.

sometimes you just want to eat.

one of my favourite weight-loss tips is from youtube cyclist phil gaimon: instead of trying to eat less, set a goal for eating more of something with a very low calorie density. he was eating a whole 1lb pack of spinach every day. that's a lot of spinach, it'll take a lot of snacking to get through to the point where it's actually difficult to eat that much. but it's only 100 calories.

In my experience, you could be craving something you are not getting in you diet. Try multivitamins and a gallon of water a day. If that doesn't cut it in a coue weeks, get a comprehensive blood panel.

I am inclined to put that the other way around.

The ultimate cause is consuming too much, the proximate causes are various elements of modern culture (i.e. Bigger serving sizes, more readily available snacks, alcohol consumption, etc).

I got diagnosed with type 2 diabetes two years ago. I switched to a super low carb diet (30g per day). Contrast that with a 16oz Mt Dew, which has 77g. Or a bowl of cereal at 36g plus whatever is in the milk.

I ate all kinds of protiens and fats - cheese, meats, fish, veggies just to quell the hunger. I lost about 58 pounds in a year. Most of what I lost was fat. Two years later, I'm still doing a very low carb, but keep it under 50g per day. My weight has stayed ±3 pounds. I'm pretty convinced it's the super-high carb load everyone is eating three times per day.

Honestly, get a trainer / coach. Ideally one who will help you both on the training and nutrition side. You can even get one of those online ones (it's what I did). When you have children, you don't have the time to think about this stuff yourself, so outsourcing it to a trainer makes a lot of sense.

Just chiming in that I am in this boat too. I find it easy to fast at the office, provided there's not some ridiculous snack brought in by coworkers. However, at home the sheer amount of food I see while I'm preparing it for the kids, who constantly want snacks, makes it difficult for me to resist eating. I've had a bit of success by "skipping" some meals and only eating the kids' leftovers.

The stress of raising kids doesn't help either.

Oh - and cooking / preparation methods - what has been researched about this and nutrients we are not getting because of them?

From my very limited understanding - cooking some foods a bit helps to unlock calories easier and better - but certainly there must be a sweet spot where things are better and a point where more is lost than gained (?)

Look cooking a food at 350 for 10 minutes is good, but cooking in 500 degree hot oil for 20 minutes burns away stuff?

I was thinking about this when I learned that some folks have an allergy to fresh shrimp being cooked on a stove because proteins are being released into the air... well if you overcook them, or if you are taking cooked then re-burning them them again before eating, is there a substantial amount of protein or/and other things being lost?

Like a 1/3 burger of high fat is cooked down to less than a quarter pound patty, are we still calculating the calories and protein of a 1/3 pound?

I wonder the same with squashes and other vegetables when cooked a long time or and microwaved / re-cooked as well.

You're not wrong because it's about calorie deficit of which exercise can help you achieve. Also since the way fat gets "burned" for weight loss is by exhaling carbon atoms, aerobic exercise can assist with this process.

As always do not add more mass than you expel.

this is another one of those things that's true in a sort of broad sense, but factually incorrect. exercise burns calories, and burning calories makes you lose fat - that's just basic math.

but exercise makes you hungry, and to the article's main point: people are terrible at estimating calories. a one-hour easy run, a two-hour bike ride, or a full day of alpine skiing burns what's basically an irrelevant amount of calories. if you're taking in any extra amount of calories, normal amounts of exercise doesn't help you lose weight.

How do you have time to do 5 times a week? You must not have young kids with special needs I take it?

I think there are two approaches for that:

1. Count your calories and pick food that let's you stay within your goals.

2. Do intermittent fasting. After a few days, (some?) people's body just adapt and stop craving for food during the fasting hours - I was a late-night snacker but after doing it for a week, the cravings diminished a lot, so much that I stuck with it for a year.

Energy balance is a proximate cause though. It's not wrong that it works, the problem is how to actually make yourself do it. It's like how profit is revenue minus cost, that doesn't tell everyone how to make money.

I got bad news for you: I know multiple people who lost weight for two months (as anyone can on literally any calorie-restriction diet) but simply couldn't follow it for much longer than that.

I myself stopped being keto a couple of days after the evening crying started.

So are vegan diets. (By which I mean: whole food, plant based.)

But you don't need to pick a team with all the tribalism that's involved. It really is as simple as eating less, like the article lays out.

And eating less is much easier if the foods you are eating are fiber rich (more filling).

Most studies on the subject of "keto mortality" say otherwise. I wouldn't consider keto safe at all.

Here's a few from a quick search: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7145128/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23372809/

https://www.thelancet.com/article/S2468-2667(18)30135-X/full...

imo, organizations like NutritionalFacts.org offer the best evidence based guidence for health, and weight loss. They site studies for each talking point. There are years of content here. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCddn8dUxYdgJz3Qr5mjADtA

I like keto because it helps me maintain energy throughout the day, but I need to eat practically non-stop to avoid losing weight while on it. It's crazy.

Same. I calorie counted religiously for over two years almost a decade ago and to this day, I'm still able to eyeball the calories on most things.

My guesses were 800, 2400, 100, 400 (assumed cream and milk), 1200.

I've basically maintained my same weight from age 23 to 33 and I think knowing the calorie count of most things plays a big part in that.

I love doing cardio, especially running gives me a rush like no other. If people don't want to do cardio you don't have to do it, you just have to adapt your calorie intake accordingly. But for those that don't mind it or even like it it's a neat way to squeeze out some more calories for a delicious meal or whatever.

I do agree that resistance training is important and often forgotten part of fitness. Having muscles means extra BMR and you will look better when you do lose that extra weight as opposed to that skinny fat look.

This is terrible advice. Do cardio, it's good for you, also do weight training, it's also good for you.

Are you kidding me? I love strength training, but cardio will absolutely make you feel better in nearly every active activity you do. [0]

[0] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/the-many-benefits-of-a-ca...

False. Cardio in the form of high intensity interval training is absolutely beneficial for your heart. I do agree that you should not neglect anaerobic training.

Sugar isn't specifically worse than other ways to consume calories, as far as I understand. The way we know this is that there have been many studies in humans, some with high-sugar diets and some with low-sugar diets, and as long as calories are equated, almost everything else about them is the same. Same amount of weight loss, blood markers look similar, etc.

I admit I'm distrustful of such a dramatic title. The central message from the originally posted article is that losing weight is mostly a matter of maintaining a caloric deficit. This is has been understood for some time now. What is the "new research" that is so important, in this case?

You can just do the math and see how much exercise you have to do to make any difference in your weight loss. You definitely can’t “walk” your way to weight loss

Define enough. One hour workout every day? That's usually 500-1000 extra calories. It's not that hard for people to eat that much more extra, so they still put on weight.

I can overeat 1000 calories without even trying. It would take me 4-5 hours to walk off 1000 calories.

What?!

Off season bodybuilders are an obvious counter example.

Exhibit A. https://d3h9ln6psucegz.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/201...

I cycle 200 - 400 Km per week on a road bike, with varying intensity, and yet it's very easy to eat way too much.

> 2) Only shopping at expensive health food stores that only carry specialty brands (no Oreos or Poptarts in stock!)

This is one of the reasons I like shopping at Whole Foods, everything sold is has been vetted and doesn’t contain crap like high fructose corn syrup. I remember reading an article somewhere where like 75% of the groceries sold at Walmart can’t be sold at Whole Foods.

There’s a list of banned ingredients here:

https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/quality-standards/food-ingr...