I miss food

Cauliflower chips and salsa are negative calorie foods

Make sure what you eat you can work off - Drink lots of water. ..:)

Why can't you eat some of these things but in moderation? I still eat cashews.

Except that MFP does not calculate TDEE. It calculates NEAT. (calories not including exercise). 500 calories can mean the difference of you feeling deprived, and not feeling deprived. So, if you can do it with 500 more calories per day, why wouldn't you want to?

The 500 calories a day is also the difference between 2 pounds a week and 1 pound a week. Since I only hit 1 pound a week anyway, that extra 500 calories would probably just put me into maintenance.

Anyway, it turns out, from the video I posted, it's not the caloric intake that leads to the feeling hungry and cold. It's the loss of leptin caused by the loss of body fat.

So it's the weight loss itself is the problem, not the calorie deficit.

You could try it and see. It could also be cortisol that is causing you to lose 1 pound a week instead of 2. Or inaccurate logging. Or the heavy carb loads/insulin resistance. You might also try to walk 20-30 minutes per day for a little bit of a calorie burn to help.

I'm pretty sure it's inaccurate logging. Often I have to pick substitute items out of the MFP fod database to approximate what I actually ate.

Editing to add: Leptin is not the only hormone in your body that has to do with weight loss. There are other interactions as well.

Yes, of course. If you watch the video, that is discussed. There are many, many genes that are thought to probably play a role that are not yet understood. Even the ones that are someone understood are not completely understood in humans. However, the kingpin appeared to be leptin. Leptin evidently is generated based on the amount of body fat you have. When leptin levels fall it causes a lot of other interactions to come into play. And when leptin levels were artificially raised (presumably by injection?) the symptoms like hunger and hypometabolism went away.

The upshot of this is that it is the fat loss, not the caloric intake, that seems to bring on the problems. To paraphrase the doctor, once you screw with leptin, all hell breaks loose downstream.

Moderation is key!

At what point does it level out, at some point things would have to normalize at a lower body fat % ?

According to the doctor, it may not ever. They saw this effect in people who had kept weight off for 3-4 years. You end up with reduced leptin levels and reduced metabolism.

I highly recommend you watch the entire video if you have an hour. It is very enlightening. It's also very depressing, as it basically says that most people won't have the willpower to fight against the systems your body has to protect body fat.

there sure seem to be a lot of people right here on MFP with a lot of willpower and low body fat %. hormones.....:grumble:

Moderation. Calorie Deficit. Fitness.

yep. That's how my mom does it. If you like eating it. DO NOT EAT IT. My parents simply never buy chips, sweets, cheese, nuts, etc. My dad jokes that they live on baked fish, kale and dust. My mom says you loose the cravings completely after 6-9 months if you never give in.

If that works for you, that's fine.

I don't believe it's true. I don't believe the cravings go away just by not having those foods. If they did, nobody would have started eating those foods in the first place, because they wouldn't have had any particular desire for them.

We eat those foods because they taste good. We crave them because we know they taste good.

I think there is be some biological component that causes us to crave them more than usual if you've been having unhealthy amounts, and that undoubtedly gets better over time. There is also a psychological component to craving, though, and I don't believe for a moment that just magically "goes away" over time. (I would suggest that your dad's comment that they live on, "baked fish, kale, and dust," supports my thesis. His cravings don't seem to have gone away, or he likely wouldn't refer to their diet as "dust.")

So... we have a choice to make - and that choice may be appropriately different for different folks. If the only way you can avoid constantly over-indulging is to go cold turkey and not have those foods ever again, then you may need to do that - but you need to acknowledge that such a decision makes it very difficult to sustain a lifestyle. Alternatively, if you can manage *how much* of those "craved" foods you choose to have in a sensible nutrition lifestyle, then you can enjoy those foods in moderation and still live a healthy (and enjoyable) life.

For me personally, if I simply decide to completely deprive myself of the foods I enjoy semi-permanently, I know that my diet will be unsustainable. (I will decide to remove things from my diet for periods of time to accelerate my progress, however - and I will consciously limit things like sugars long-term.)

Just my $0.02.

there sure seem to be a lot of people right here on MFP with a lot of willpower and low body fat %. hormones.....grumble

It's also that somewhere between 80% and 95% of people who try to lose weight fail. Also there are a lot of people on MFP who have never been obese, which is evidently a big part of the problem. It may well be that becoming obese causes irreversible consequences regarding leptin.

This video gives a great insight as to why that is so. It also shows that the symptoms that I have been experiencing for years are not to be brushed off as, "Oh, you're just eating too few calories!". Loss of body fat triggers loss of leptin which, at least in some people, causes hypometabolism, which can cause cold sensitivity, and increases in hunger. The idea that many people insist here that "you can diet without being hungry or cold" may not, in fact, be true for some people.

there sure seem to be a lot of people right here on MFP with a lot of willpower and low body fat %. hormones.....grumble

It's also that somewhere between 80% and 95% of people who try to lose weight fail. Also there are a lot of people on MFP who have never been obese, which is evidently a big part of the problem. It may well be that becoming obese causes irreversible consequences regarding leptin.

This video gives a great insight as to why that is so. It also shows that the symptoms that I have been experiencing for years are not to be brushed off as, "Oh, you're just eating too few calories!". Loss of body fat triggers loss of leptin which, at least in some people, causes hypometabolism, which can cause cold sensitivity, and increases in hunger. The idea that many people insist here that "you can diet without being hungry or cold" may not, in fact, be true for some people.

What "video" do you keep talking about?

I'm betting money it's some straight-to-youtube "documentary."