Eat less food.
Stopped snacking between meals, and ate a salad for dinner a few nights a week. Also, tried to reduce my meal size, in general.
Getting that hungry feeling between meals that I would always satisfy meant I was creating a deficit.
This is one of the useful lessons of age: you essentially get to experience living in more than one body within your lifetime. Younger-me would have posted the same confident advice as you did, and it would have seemed just as intuitively obvious - how could it be wrong when I experienced it myself! But in practice for someone with a different metabolism (at any age) it’s deeply unhelpful, even demoralizing.
that’s what my girlfriend said: “Can’t lose weight after a certain age”
She looked at me one day when I was down around 25 pounds and declared “It does work”
Next thing I know, she lost 15 pounds.
When I want to lose wait I just stop eating lunch until I start to feel it makes me sluggish. I can tell I should probably eat but that’s an easy to ignore signal.
My ex girlfriend felt hunger as an all consuming normal activity ending feeling.
Aside from calorie counting, which is very effective, the most important thing I found for avoiding discomfort is to go short on calories earlier rather than later in the day.
I've read surveys on how French women stay thinner on average and it boils down to having just a coffee and cigarette for breakfast and maybe even lunch. Both caffeine and nicotine suppress hunger. I don't recommend smoking, but I rely a lot on coffee sometimes.
I drink a lot of black tea and use nicotine gums, and my hunger is... enough to keep my weight way higher than I'd like. So either I'm doing it wrong - perhaps it needs to be actual coffee and cigarettes[0] - or... I should never stop, because my baseline hunger must be off the charts.
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[0] - Wouldn't be the first time people, including scientists, confuse tobacco (a processed product whose consumption involves smoke and complex chemical reactions releasing a lot of biologically active substances) with nicotine (a single chemical that is one of the many things you ingest when smoking).
The appetite-suppressant effect of nicotine is enhanced by caffeine (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15955118/)
Conclusion: Caffeine added to nicotine chewing gum appears to amplify its attenuating effects on appetite and the combinations of 1-mg of nicotine with caffeine seem to be well tolerated.
BTW, I've found black tea to be not as effective as black coffee as an appetite suppressant.
> BTW, I've found black tea to be not as effective as black coffee as an appetite suppressant.
I wonder what the mechanism of action is for most people. For me, black coffee hardly does anything stimulation-wise, but is an excellent laxative, and half the time makes me feel generally unwell. I suppose these effects do suppress appetite.
And yes, the famous "breakfast of champions" as it used to be known. I don't smoke either but do need several mugs of tea to get me through.
Find something that works for oneself.
Keto works for some people. Just reducing plate size helps for some.
Personally I skip breakfasts (I love breakfast, but it is not worth the brain fog that I personally get later in the day) and most workdays I just drink 1/2L of whole milk, preferably cold.
I get plenty enough energy from dinner and now I can also enjoy some snack in the evening together with my family.
Typically I just drink 0.5L of milk and walk 2-4 km during the lunch break although I do make exceptions once a week or something.
For me personally this works well, I don't get hungry either as long as I know I am not going to eat.