[tsimionescu]

You need to eat roughly somewhere between 1300 and 2000 Cal every day to maintain your weight even if you are doing to exercise at all.

If you want to lose weight, it's far easier to remove 800 Cal from your diet, at least time wise, then it is to exercise 800 Cal's worth every day.

Either way, if you're losing weight at any appreciable rate, you will feel hungry (at least if it's not chemically induced in some way, such as chemo or GLP-1 inhibitors or similar). That's just something you have to get used to if you want to lose weight.

[sdfhbdf]

This is well-intentioned but I think it oversimplifies in ways that can actually be harmful. "Just get used to being hungry" is rough advice to give people - chronic hunger is one of the main reasons diets fail, and framing weight loss as a willpower contest against hunger ignores that satiety is heavily influenced by _what_ you eat, not just how much. A 400 kcal meal of protein, fat, and fiber will keep you full for hours; 400 kcal of simple carbs will leave you hungry again in 45 minutes, in part because of the insulin and blood glucose dynamics involved.

The calories in/out model isn't wrong exactly, but it's so reductionist that it becomes misleading in practice. It omits hormonal responses (insulin, leptin, ghrelin), the thermic effect differences between macronutrients (your body burns 20-30% of protein calories just processing them vs 0-5% for fat), gut microbiome composition, sleep quality, stress hormones, meal timing, and individual metabolic variation. Two people eating identical calorie counts can have very different outcomes. Telling someone "just eat less and accept the hunger" without any of that context can set them up for a miserable yo-yo cycle - or worse, a disordered relationship with food.

[topocite]

No, the common "wisdom" you are puppeting here is harmful because it just doesn't work.

We have been telling people for decades now to be worried that they might harm themselves by too much restriction and it is just wrong. What is harmful is being over weight. What is harmful is then confusing people that they are somehow going to lose weight without much restriction or being hungry.

This also scales really bad with age because as you age the CNS recovery gets worse and worse compared to muscle recovery.

At 55, there is simply no way for me to lose weight other than being hungry. It is impossible to recover from the amount of exercise that would be needed. The reality is that no one needs to worry about too much restriction until they are down to around 12% or so body fat. The fact a person's bodyfat % is never mentioned in this is exemplary of how bad the standard advise is.

Most people have too much leptin and leptin resistance. Then those same people get the same bad advise over and over to not restrict too much because you don't want to be like an anorexic or extreme athlete and have too low of leptin. Of course, ignoring that the anorexic and extreme athlete are going to have incredibly low bodyfat percentages.

[tsimionescu]

I think the advice that everyone who is overweight or obese really needs is to experiment with different ways of reducing their food consumption while managing their hunger and cravings, and find out a method that works for them. I don't think there's any universal solution. Even saying "eat less simple carbs, those make you more hungry because of this and that chemical pathway" is not good universal advice, because food consumption is not strictly tied to hunger in all people. It is up to you as the one who wants to lose weight to experiment and figure out what motivates you and works for you longer term.

For example, I don't feel satisfied with my meal if I don't feel slightly full. So, what has worked for me is to generally have a single large meal per day, in which I will typically eat whatever I've been really craving since my last meal. In some days that might be steak and brocolli, in other days it might be a McDonald's meal, or some cake. When I get cravings, it's far easier for me to defer them to tomorrow's meal than it would be to just stop eating junk food entirely, or to eat half a burger and two fries from the bag. The exact opposite might be true for other people, and you won't really know until you've tried for yourself.

One thing I will note - I think one of the concerns of the poster you are replying to with focusing too much on enduring hunger is that it might lead some people to develop anorexia, which is indeed a huge problem, even when the person is really overweight (since their anorexia will not just go away once they've lost that extra weight, it will keep going until they get dangerously malnourished).

[tsimionescu]

I don't think I implied that the only thing that matters to weight loss is CICO, and that you only need willpower to lose weight. I don't personally believe this at all.

My point was instead that whatever effort you can spend on weight loss is better spent on managing your diet than increasing your level of activity (though I should also say that fitness is important beyond weight loss). Even when I said you can reduce 800 Cal of food, that doesn't mean "just skip a meal" (though that is also a valid strategy for some people). It can also mean "eat different kinds of food".

However, I do strongly believe that for any weight loss at a significant pace (say, 1kg/month or faster), and assuming it's not just a correction after a short stint of overeating (as in, it's more than losing 1-2kg you put on over Christmas) - then some feeling of hunger is inevitable. Losing long-term accumulated weight is going against your body's "wishes" (especially in the lipostat model, where your body has a set fat% equilibrium that it seeks to maintain), and hunger is an inevitable response to that. How much hunger you will feel can be controlled by better food choices and so on, but you will have to also get used to feeling some level of hunger.

[jahnu]

> If you want to lose weight, it's far easier to remove 800 Cal from your diet, at least time wise, then it is to exercise 800 Cal's worth every day.

That I absolutely agree with and so do my legs ;)

I only found the suggestion that exercise _doesn't_ burn calories a bit weird.

> you will feel hungry

That I also agree with... all this talk of sandwiches!

[Izkata]

> I only found the suggestion that exercise _doesn't_ burn calories a bit weird.

I mean... No one said that? The very first comment was about how it's not a lot / not as much as people think, not that it's none.

[SubNoize]

For cardio sure but for weight training you're burning calories and tearing muscle fibres to increase size/strength. Also depending on the running you're doing, you're likely staying fitter.

Sure it's easier to fast but you're missing out on the other benefits associated with exercise.

[tsimionescu]

> Sure it's easier to fast but you're missing out on the other benefits associated with exercise.

This is very true, exercise is very important for health regardless of its effect on weight.

> For cardio sure but for weight training you're burning calories and tearing muscle fibres to increase size/strength.

True, but you need to spend even more time to rack up 800 Cal worth of exercise by weight training compared to doing cardio, as a beginner or even an intermediate level gym goer.

It is also true though that weight training, if you actually successfully build muscle mass, can significantly increase your BMR and thus help with losing weight in that way, even if you're not spending hours or lifting hundreds of kilos at every session.

[BobaFloutist]

Yeah, unfortunately back of envelope physics math about the kC burned for lifting weights is deeply disappointing. Luckily our bodies are quite inefficient compared to a bomb-calorimeter, because back of envelope gets me less than a (k)calorie per 3 sets of 5 lifts, if you just do lazy potential energy math.

[tsimionescu]

A tiny technical note - Cal is the official symbol for a "large calorie", equal to a kcal, 1000 cal, if you want to be precise but concise on the exact type of calorie you're talking about.

[BobaFloutist]

Duly noted!