[bxji]

Your description of always feeling hungry after keeping it off is rather worrying to me, since I’m getting close to my target weight after a 1 year+ journey of diet and exercise.

I do remember reading before that the fat cells that get created when you gain weight never really go away, they just “deflate”. So after you lose weight, you are more likely to gain the weight back than someone who is at the same weight now but who has never been bigger than that.

I also recall seeing a study that your body sends you extra hunger pangs to gain the weight that you lost back, because it assumes that losing weight means you’re in fight-or-flight mode, so it wants to make sure you survive. That’s why a weight loss drug where an extra 300-400 calories per day were excreted via urine did not show significant results.

I couldn’t find the exact study for the second part. So I’ll just leave a general reference from Northwestern alluding to the same results.

1. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/your-fat-cells-never...

2. https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/how-your-body-fig...

[CJefferson]

The best advice I can give is to keep weighing yourself by your current schedule, and plan on doing so forever.

I definately give up at some point, then lived in denial for 6 months or so, by which point a lot of the damage was done (certainly psycologically). I don't know if I would have controlled it better if I saw the weight coming back on, but at least I wouldn't have been pretending otherwise.

I'm not losing weight again, and I've set a reminder to weigh myself (I've set it to weekly, I know some people do daily or whatever). I'm planning on that being active forever.

[jimmaswell]

I've lost 130lbs through calorie counting. I was hungry in the very beginning, maybe the first few weeks. After that my hunger adapted to my diet and I have no issues with it now.

I was worried about all that stuff about the body never adapting back after being used to eating a certain amount but it just hasn't come up. Maybe that's more likely to happen if you go too fast. I've been keeping a steady pace of ~1.3lbs/week which is slow but easily sustainable.

It also helps hunger to eat more protein, not avoid fat too much, and avoid simple carbs.