Not Hungry

So do it your way and see if it works for you.

There are people here who don't track or count calories.

There are people who log every gram of lettuce.

There are every type of "system" in between.

Experimentation is part of this process.

As with all of life, just do you, boo.

Many of us are here because our hunger cues are broken. But not everyone. Some people would drastically undereat if they only ate when they were noticably and consistently hungry. Others would drastically overeat. For some, hunger cues can lead to rollercoaster swings, where they undereat for several days and then the hunger catches up with them and they stuff themselves. But some people do just fine intuitive eating.

If you aren't sure if your hunger cues are accurate, eat based on them for a week or two, but accurately measure and log your food as well. Then you can see how your numbers look and if you are still managing to eat a balanced and nutritious diet this way.

You don't have to eat the same calories every day, but you do need higher and lower days to balance out over time. One day undereating or overeating is no big deal, but several days in a row can become a problem.

As others said, you have to find what works for you - what balances your preferences, lifestyle, food availability, and health. There is no one right way for everyone to eat.

HerNameIsMischief wrote: »

The problem is that MFP has to worry about liability. That's why I think if you were to eat, say, 800 calories in a day and attempt to post it, they won't let you because they figure others will see it and copy you and MFP could get in legal trouble. It's also why they refuse to entertain the idea of a person losing more than 2 lbs a week, which seems a bit ridiculous to me. I know that works for some people, especially if they are smaller in stature and don't have much to lose. I can't stand the notion that I'd have to wait at least a year before I could look at myself in the mirror or date.

Something to keep in mind is it's not just about losing weight, it's about keeping it off. Just because losing weight fast is possible and some people get to goal that way doesn't mean it's healthy and doesn't mean it sets you up best to stay at that healthy weight going forward. The people who I know who lose weight fast are yo yo dieters.

Your body can only burn so much fat in one day. If you lose weight faster than that can happen, you either lose more muscle than you'd want to, and/or your body doesn't work as well, which is why some people lose hair or seem to constantly have a cold. It's also why many people get to goal fast and are still disappointed by what they see in the mirror. Forcing your body thru the stress of months of drastic weight loss can take its toll too, especially if you tend to keep gaining it all back.

At 270, you could probably be ok losing 2.5 per week at first, but you don't want to push that for too long. There's value in having some goals around health and fitness and stress reduction rather than just focusing on the number on the scale as defining you, please give that some thought as well. Best of luck

You just have to find what works. There has never been a diet plan or method that didn't work for someone, and I'm going all the way back to the cavemen in saying that. In some cave in 12,000 BC in some rural part of France, some guy who was painting little bird-men on the walls decided to eat only the tails of the mammoths his band hunted, because his wife was getting on his case for chubbing up, and voila, he turned into a lean, mean mammoth-hunting machine. Literally anything can work, as long as it causes a calorie deficit. And won't work, if it doesn't.

So the question is never "what works and what doesn't". Everything works, or doesn't, if it keeps you in a calorie deficit, or doesn't.

Intuitive eating was the worst "diet" I was ever on. Ever, period. I gained so much weight trying to eat intuitively that I spent years just trying to get back to even.

Counting calories to the gram, logging, getting on the scale every morning, and putting every detail on a spreadsheet has been working for me, for 20 months.

My problem with IE is that I sometimes ate because of hunger, but mostly ate because food tastes really, really good. Knowing that I'm "full" was never disincentive to not grab the next piece of pizza, because if it could literally fit in my stomach at all, I was willing to see what I could stuff in there. Not to ameliorate hunger but just because I love eating food.

Calorie counting, for whatever reason, works for me. I get my 1850 calories, I do my best to budget them out through the day so that I have the right amount left for dinner, snack, etc., and occasionally when I miss, I miss, but most of the time, I total out to that 1850 and put another solid day of dieting in the rear view mirror. To me, its so much easier and clearer than trying to listen to hunger signals.

The big question mark I have about IE for anyone above a normal or perhaps overweight BMI is, anyone who's obese clearly either doesn't have properly-functioning hunger signals or will eat whether hungry or not (like me - quite happy to eat while stuffed). I mean, how else could you be obese? Both of those conditions may be fixable through therapy, intense effort to control behavior signals and so on, but ... why bother when you can just weigh and count your food and train yourself to stop when you get to the calorie limit for the day?

But again, ANY diet can work, and there has probably never been a diet that hasn't worked for someone, so "whatever works".

You can lose fast by under eating and exceeding the 0.5% to 1% of body weight per week weight loss most of us would accept as fairly fast. And you can definitely exceed the 20% of TDEE maximum deficit that I would personally advocate.

The beauty of hormones and hormonal re-bounds is that they're invisible and subconscious

The way that the few of us who manage it will manage to retain our weight loss two to five years later is by developing over time and putting in play a number of pre-conditions including behavioral and lifestyles changes that encourage the maintenance of the new lower weight as opposed to a swift return to the previous weight.

You're not on ice and your life is not over because you're losing weight. And life will not be perfect because you will manage to lose weight. Mind you, as the years go by, being at a lower weight definitely has some health advantages!

If you want to come down to a normal weight and retain that over the next 5 years.... you're in a 5-year project. Not a 6 month to a year project.

Starting from a position of obesity you can probably survive way higher than advisable deficits for a few months. Whether that will be beneficial to you in the long term... is an open question.

Just remember that defeat is when you give up because things are so hard you end up giving up because it's not worth the effort. Making things easier means it's easier to win and move forward and to continue moving in the right direction. Not for a few months; but for years.

I’m trying to figure out a way to say this tactfully and caringly.

Why do you have to lose weight to date?

I know so many lonely, lonely people. I really feel for them. But it often seems to be a matter of either them waiting to be perfect themselves, or waiting for someone who is.

Perfect people, if they exist at all, are taken. There’s a lot of happiness and satisfaction to be found with the ones who aren’t, or who are willing to accept that you’re not.

Weight loss is not an end all, be all.

I’m waaaaay more confident than I was two years ago and a hundred pounds heavier. But I’m still the same old awkward clumsy me in any social situation, same old tongue tied panic. Some things are not going to change.

Why wait for the magic to happen? It may not.

You deserve to be happy now, not at some carefully calculated point in the distant future.

Okay, but be aware you're not going to love the way you look when you lose weight either. You aren't going to get a body that hasn't been obese. There will be stretched out skin for at least a while, particularly if you lose weight and dont' work to build muscle. If you lose fast you will also lose muscle, and possibly also have thinning hair.

Weight loss is good.

But it's not going to fix your self-esteem issues.

You will find new things to hate about your appearance.

To fix THAT you don't need to eat less. You need to see a psychologist and work on your self-image.

As someone who's always had ample food at my fingertips, I really have not idea what hunger is, or feels like. Sure, I've gone without food for a few hours or a day. I felt stuff. Was that hunger?

I've worked really hard, physically, for hours, in the cold besides, without eating, and felt depleted; then ate and felt renewed again. Had that been hunger?

I had stored fat, for sure, in all cases. Had hunger? I dunno. I don't know how to distinguish hunger from desire (of other types).

I'm lucky to live in the developed world, to have adequate resources so that I can eat whenever I like - despite not being "wealthy" in an objective sense.

I have a very strong hedonic streak. How would I distinguish the impulse to satisfy that, from hunger? I have no idea.

It's laughable to me to think I'll figure out hunger now, through some hopeful intuitive eating impulsive. I've been living and eating for 65 years now. If I haven't figured it out by now, it's unlikely I will. I'm happily, non-intrusively, easily at a healthy weight (for 5+ years now) by calorie counting, after decades of obesity, even 12+ years of obesity while training regularly and competing as a masters athlete.

Calorie counting works for me. I'm going to keep doing it.