I do something similar, two meals targeting 1,000 apiece. That means each meal can be a huge variety of things, even eating out where you wouldn't normally consider eating while pursuing weight loss, such as Chipotle. It's been very successful and my family thinks I'm on drugs with how quickly I've been losing weight.

Like you, hunger sucked at the beginning, but now I never even notice it.

My go to with Chipotle is to get a bowl w/ fajita veggies subbed for rice and beans, double barbacoa, cheese, lettuce, hot salsa and sour cream. I will eat what I can and then mix the leftovers with eggs the following day.

Yeah, the bowl is the trick, even with the double protein. When I tell people the tortilla is 300 calories alone they universally gasp and refuse to believe me.

Also look at a caloric intake / use over a larger moving window. The notion that our body functions on a daily unit of time is artificial. If you look at a larger window, managing a diet becomes easier.

> At the end of the day it will always be calories in vs. calories out.

This is based on the assumption that all calories are digested and metabolized.

Calorie is simply a unit of energy. There are calories in paper, charcoal and wood, so taking that to the extreme would mean that one would gain the same amount of weight consuming a bunch of shredded paper as consuming, let's say, a donut, yet digestion does not work that way.

At that point I would imagine it's the same concept as net carbs. Obviously not all food/matter is digestible. I do think it's still safe to say calories in/calories out however since most of us aren't entering shredded paper, charcoal and wood into MFP logs.

While you can control the input, the output gets harder - one cannot just simply double/triple their defecation rate, and exercise tends to work out an appetite.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/exercising-but-gain...

Output is governed by hormones, and the only reliable hack for now seems to be significantly lowering insulin by switching to ketogenic diet (or a variation thereof, /r/zerocarb, /r/keto, Atkins, Dukan). I'd recommend this book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Calories,_Bad_Calories with understanding that a lot of nutrition and diet science is in very premature stage because of World War 2 and lack of funding thereafter.

I once read that different kinds of food deliver calories in forms with different degrees of absorb-ability.

Source: http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/why-most-food-...

What do you eat and when do you eat it?

So most of my meals are very bachelor-like. Cook some sort of protein(chicken/steak/fish) or eggs/meat/cheese in a pan on the stove and then an entire steamable bag of frozen veggies of some sort. If I want to get really fancy I will do either a stir fry or beef/turkey chili with some veggies/beans mixed in. Depending on how busy I am during the day this can be anywhere from 4-8 pm.

If I have hunger issues later on I will drink cold water or unsweetened vanilla almond milk (It's crazy, IIRC, an entire half gallon is only 200 calories).

Cashew milk is similarly low-calorie.

It doesn't matter if you're not doing a calorie deficit.

It doesn't matter for weight loss but it matters a lot for managing hunger, which for many people is a critical part of losing weight sustainably.