I weighed 212 at the start of the year. I'm down to 190. I'd been trying to lose weight for at least 5 years with very little success. What finally got the car pushed out of the snow was really three things:

  1. Dial in the diet.
  2. Pay less attention to hunger.
  3. Grow confidence.

First, instead of having a fixed diet with many "failure" days where I didn't eat the right thing, I completely invented my diet experimentally. I decided every day was a success if I learning something from it. I just kept adjusting (cutting, substituting or reducing) what I ate until finally, the needle started to move.

In the end, I was eating a LOT less than I never attempted during the previous five years. In retrospect, none of those diets had any chance of working. I found I HAD to modify every single food decision I made during the day. Either cut it out entirely, substitute something with fewer calories, or reduce portions by a lot. I just kept "gently" pushing down on all of these at the same time until it worked.

The second thing is I found if I ignored mild hunger it mostly went away. Somehow I had developed this hair-trigger reaction to hunger. To me, mild hunger meant I didn't eat enough the previous meal, or I needed to snack, or I needed to eat extra during the upcoming meal. Hunger triggered feelings of panic, fears of being light-headed, or feeling sick. So I always responded by overeating. Always.

Somehow I totally diffused that, and that's mostly how I've lost 22 pounds. And my trend line is still heading steeply down, I plan to lose 40 total.

I'll give you a weird analogy. Have you ever had the experience where you have to pee really bad, and the closer you get to using the bathroom the more you have to pee? I've experienced this acutely, multiple times, where it almost seems I can't unbutton fast enough or I might burst.

I submit your bladder does not know how close you are to the bathroom. It seems incredibly unlikely the physical sensation you are feeling is getting stronger. Instead what must be happening is you are paying closer and closer attention to the sensation and thus it's magnified, probably some feedback effect.

I can "prove" this because had a similar experience and could not get into the bathroom, got in the car, and was totally fine for over an hour. The feeling just went away.

I find it's the same with hunger. If you get a mild sensation of hunger and start thinking, well, I just bought that bag of chips, I could open it up. Boom, your hunger will start going nuts. If instead, you think, you know I really don't need any food right now, and you fully believe it, in my experience, the hunger vastly lessens, almost goes away. You can't fake it, you have to truly believe you don't need the food.

Which leads to the final thing, confidence. Confidence that the amount of food I ate was sufficient to get me to the next meal. Without that confidence, if I seriously entertained eating more, my hunger shot through the roof. With that confidence, it was not trivial but really not very hard.

Once I dialed in the amount of food, and I knew I could make it through the day relatively comfortably, whenever hunger came up I was like "thanks but no, I've got this covered" and I felt fine. I still get the physical sensation of hunger, but there's no alarm, no building urgency, so I put it aside.

Not sure if this will help anyone or if it's too idiosyncratic. But good luck!

I previously wrote this popular reddit post after losing 17 pounds, which I turned into this blog post: The Hungry Ancestor Diet. I hope to write a blog post about these ideas as well, once I flesh them out more.

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