Satisfied vs. Stuffed

If you enjoy eating big meals like that, there's no real reason you have to stop. I don't do it daily but I'll frequently eat only 2 meals/day or 1 large meal/day paired with a couple of snacks. Now eating 3-5 large meals a day is probably not going to work unless you're extremely active, but there's no reason you can't manage one large meal/day.

I was like this. I don't know if I've ever experienced the feeling of just being satisfied that some other people seem to (or maybe they just learned self control before I did). I have two settings:

1. Want to eat all the food.
2. So full that I wish all the food would magically vanish from my stomach.

I've been like that since I was a little kid. The only time I ran away from home was when my mother refused to give me lunch early. I'd had breakfast. I wasn't starving. I just just wanted to eat. I walked across the street to an empty field with a loaf of sliced bread and proceeded to eat until I felt sick. Then when I got bored, I went back home. I was 7.

In grade school, after 5th grade, I could get seconds at lunch. I did every single day while also eating the food that other kids around me didn't want. Oddly enough, that's when I went from being a normal weight child to an overweight child despite my mother's repeated attempts to curb my weight gain. When she found out about seconds, she started sending me with packed lunches but it did no good since I could still eat the food from the kids around me. I never told her I did that because telling her about seconds got them taken away. I would save up allowance money just so I could walk the two miles to the closest grocery store and buy candy bars (off brand ones because they were cheaper and I could up my quantity), sometimes stockpiling them for weeks so I could eat them all at once. If I hadn't been an extremely active child (school sports, walking/biking everywhere in our rural location, horseback riding, daily high intensity farm chores, etc), I would have been obese.

It's tough sometimes but it does get easier once you work hard towards breaking old habits and forming new ones. It's never gone, you can never completely let your guard down but it's far from hopeless.

Good luck.

I've been thinking about why I've tried and failed to lose weight so many times. And I've realized it's because I like eating til I'm stuffed. Whether it's an incredibly healthy salad or mashed potatoes, I love the feeling. And I need to change my attitude on that. Just the hardest thing to do! It's so hard to push that plate away when it's not empty, when everything on there that remains is so delicious. But now that I've realized my trap, it's now time to change. Here goes nothing!

Try incorporating more hot liquids into your meals... Fill up on some low calorie soup and then eat the main entree... Hot liquids always fill me up pretty quick . I acutally like to drink a 40 oz skinny margarita at texas roadhouse (only 200 calories) or when I'm out to eat drink several glasses of unsweetened iced tea to fill my belly before I dig into my food. I can barely if ever finish my food when I do that.

I have a bottomless pit for a belly as well. I'm trying really hard to change out high calorie, low nutrient, compact foods for huge bowls of veggies and a little fruit. We'll see if I get anywhere with it over time. It is nice to sit down with an overflowing bowl of something and know it's only 700 calories when the same bowl overflowing with ice cream and cookies would have been 2000 calories.

If you enjoy eating big meals like that, there's no real reason you have to stop. I don't do it daily but I'll frequently eat only 2 meals/day or 1 large meal/day paired with a couple of snacks. Now eating 3-5 large meals a day is probably not going to work unless you're extremely active, but there's no reason you can't manage one large meal/day.

you'd be surprised how much some people can eat in an entire sitting. back in the good ol days i could eat a whole bag of pasta plus a chicken breast or 2 in one meal, easily over my TDEE

It really depends on what you're eating. Substitute that pasta for broccoli and you'll find you can eat a LOT of volume worth of chicken and broccoli before you're near your TDEE. Of course, if you're eating richer foods, you'll be able to eat a lot less. But take a food like chicken - a whole rotisserie chicken is ~1200 calories, depending on the size of the chicken and what you eat (e.g., how much skin, etc.). I could fit two birds into my TDEE for the day and still have some calories to spare, but I can't remember the last time I sat down and ate two entire chickens. Whether you go hungry has as much to do with what you're eating as it does the volume you're eating.