Tips to stay under my daily calorie limit

Try to avoid sweets, and fast foods. For now, until you have built better habits.
Try to focus on high quality proteins and fiber.

A small amount of cheese will help keep you full for longer. Oatmeal can keep you full far longer than dry cereal.
Nibble on veggies for snack.
Beans can pack a lot of nutrients and fiber.
Easy enough to cook up in a crock pot and save some in freezer safe containers for a quick healthy meal later.

I’m sure you’ll get a lot of good suggestions from others too.

I don't count calories and haven't for a while, a decade or so, and have no problem with hunger one way or the other. Basically I eat until I'm comfortably full, then stop. Satiety is basically the opposite of hunger and every food will have, if you like, a satiety value, mostly universally accepted and researched but each person is effected a little differently.

It mostly has to do with digestion and hormones, basically it's a complex interaction between the gut and the hypothalamus and the subsequent feedback loops. There's a bunch or hormones like peptide YY (PYY), Peptide Hormone YY (PYY3-36), Cholecystokinin (CCK), Neuropeptide Y (NPY) and one that everyone should have heard of Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 (GLP-1) and of course Ghrelin and Leptin.

A whole food diet is pretty much where foods with the higher and highest satiety will be found, so adding more whole foods to a diet can help.

Overeating I think is pretty simple (oh gasp) where particularly, sugary foods are rooted in our evolutionary past and where such traits increased our chances of survival. However, now in the modern context of constant food availability, these once beneficial traits can and do lead to health issues like over eating and obesity and again it's mostly hormonal, see above. Basically certain foods activate our dopamine system and other reward signaling and pathways and creates the desire for more food, full stop. Basically stay away from most highly processed foods as much as you can and replace them with a whole food that you find desirable, maybe give a Mediterranean type diet a go, even though I think the main stream media's idea of the Med diet is totally a made up politically correct bunch of socially acceptable words, it is mostly a whole food diet, but personally I would be eating more animal products and all animal products pretty much will be the highest on the satiety scale and contrary to popular institutional belief, we aren't going to fall over and die of a heart attach. There's a lot more to it but that the gist.

Traquette wrote: »

You may want to analyse where your calories come from. That's where logging everything is helpful at first, even if you go over you goal !
Ex.: do you tend to drink your calories ? Do you snack a lot ? Use sweeteners ? Cooking with lots of butter ? etc
Maybe some of your meals can be tweaked just a little so they are lower on calories yet more filling.

Agreed. If you open your food diary, some folks here might be able to help give a better suggestion.

donaldjohnson4961 wrote: »

I’m new and my daily calorie goal is 2,000 but I’m way over that. Can somebody please give me some tips to stay under my calorie goal and not be super hungry

You don't need to be perfect instantly. What I suggest is to log your food, and review your diary fairly often at first. Look at the calorie "cost" of each food. Can you find some that aren't important enough to you for feeling full, getting good nutrition, or for simple enjoyment to be worth that many calories? If so, those foods are things you can reduce (frequency or portion size), maybe even eliminate altogether.

Beyond that, look at the high calorie items that remain, and think whether there might be substitutes - foods you also enjoy - that aren't quite as calorie dense. For example, I decided mayo wasn't so much better than mustard on sandwiches that I couldn't cut mayo down to a rare thing, maybe eat it at a restaurant occasionally, but use mustard at home. (Not saying you should do that. It's just an example.)

Also, look at cooking methods. Are you frying things in a good bit of oil that you could stir-steam in a bit of flavorful broth, bake, or air-fry; coating something in oil when you roast it, but a light spray of good spray oil would work OK; and that sort of thing?

There are lots of other thought processes I could use as examples, but I think you get the idea. Log your food, review your diary, look for relatively pleasant (at least tolerable) changes you could make to eat fewer calories, but still feel full and happy most of the time, and get good nutrition. You might even experiment with trying some new-to-you calorie-efficient foods, to see if you like them.

If you chip away at that kind of process, looking to change your routine eating patterns (vs. micromanaging each day individually), it can be a surprisingly short time (small number of weeks?) before you have a new set of reasonably-happy eating habits that are satisfying and calorie appropriate. At least that was my experience.

Best wishes!

Intermittent fasting was definitely an eye opener for me. I realized that I wasn't actually hungry, often I was just bored or stressed and looking for a dopamine hit. My biggest problem was I was doing a 22 hour fast and then basically binge eating for 2 hours and not tracking how many calories I was consuming. I am going to start doing it again but will back it down to an 18/6 split.