[peteretep]

I feel like the studies of specialty diets bring misleading conclusions, because they always count calories for both sides.

If you’re on a calorie controlled diet, then calories in calories out holds. But most speciality diets (I’m on something pretty similar to slow carb) are targeting adherence, a factor that’s removed if you’re only measuring calories in and calories out.

Without white carbs I find it much much easier to reduce my calorific intake. To compare my diet with any other — if you’re enforcing the same number of calories — is kind of pointless, as I specifically don’t want to count calories, nor do I want to feel hungry.

[sokoloff]

Sometimes feeling hungry is ok and likely healthy. Always feeling hungry is brutal.

For me, low carb works like magic and with limited aggravation once past the first week. The problem is, if I never learn to be (sometimes) hungry, it all comes apart when I go off the diet and back to living in the land of infinite crap carbs.

[taneq]

You should spend some of each day feeling at least a bit hungry. If you're not hungry when you sit down for a meal, you've eaten too much already.

There's a huge difference between "a bit hungry" and actually properly hungry. Most people with weight problems probably never let themselves feel more than peckish, and so their perception of hunger adjusts to amplify that feeling. When I'm below my target weight (sitting at a fairly low body fat percentage) and I try to maintain a calorie deficit, the hunger I start feeling is insanely more intense than when I'm a bit chubby and losing weight.

[peteretep]

Yah. I think the biggest thing for me has been learning that I feel two distinct types of hunger, and also getting more in touch with feeing full/hungry in a way that the rush I get from eating carbs seems to hide.

Overeating without white carbs just feels uncomfortable and I rarely do it. The rush I get from pizza or fries (which I hadn’t identified until I stopped) masks that discomfort.

[tracker1]

The always hungry thing is generally why severe calorie deprevation doesn't work in the long run. Pretty much everyone gains it all and then some in a 5year term.

[willsun]

Most of the studies I looked at would "enforce" diets through direction, coaching, and meal plans, while a few provided meals to participants. Very few required daily calorie tracking. So while it is possible there is an adherence improvement for certain diets (e.g. low-carb has better satiety, better adherence, and therefore better weight loss), that improvement doesn't appear to be significant enough to regularly appear in research studies. Of course, one could make the methodological critique (e.g. "the studies aren't good enough yet to detect this"), but at least it seems to set a ceiling on the magnitude of a possible adherence improvement.