That said, there is a lot of stuff happening in our body with regards to our food intake that I had no idea about. Insulin, ghrelin, leptin, and of course, testosterone for a man, is extremely important. Even limiting xenoestrogens as a man is extremely important.
Also, people seem to forget somehow that your body can excrete calories.
I agree with you about the problem of "people will try to eat the same types of food (high-caloric-density), just less of it". In the past, I tried a vegetarian, calorie-restricted diet, and I just felt hungry all the time. It wasn't a one for one diet to what I eat now, but it about the same.
In terms of why intermittent fasting works, I don't know for sure, but from what I have read, your body's metabolism doesn't crash because your feeding window controls the ghrelin in your system. With your metabolism maintained, and by only drinking water during the 16-hour fast period, your body is forced to consume your fat stores for energy.
Having said all that, you could be right... perhaps I just consumed fewer calories as the plant-based diet was just less calorie-dense. The volume of food may have made it feel like I was eating more when I wasn't. Honestly, I just don't know for sure.
When I control my food supply, my hunger will almost always override the cold math of the calories.
It's a bit like how abstinence can prevent pregnancies, so you don't need condoms or pills. It's of course true in a technical sense, but real world people aren't strong enough to remain abstinent.
That's a case of your hunger causing you to eat more calories, not a case of your hunger causing you to gain more weight from the same calories. The math still works just fine if you count the calories that your plan says you shouldn't have eaten. It's the plan that isn't working for you, not the math.
Sure, there are "tricks" (such as eating lots more low-calorie-dense food such as broccoli or cucumbers to quell hunger pangs) but those are just tools that still require hard work to apply.
A lot of people lose weight doing that without the hard work, aside from abstaining from all your favorite sugary foods. But there is plenty of delicious fat & protein food.
But yes, one of the driving factors of "hunger" (when people eat high-sugar foods) is the insulin spike and associated cravings. Cutting out all carbs gets rid of sugar, which results in no more insulin-spike-driven "hunger". But really, all you needed to do to do that was to reduce your sugar intake. It's also quite hard (though definitely not impossible) to load up on lots of calories without carbs. Most high-calorie food is also high in carbs, because refined carbohydrates are ridiculously calorie dense and it's hard to find something that's easy to eat lots of that matches it. You can't really eat a whole tub of butter, but you can eat a whole loaf of bread or plate of pasta.
> aside from abstaining from all your favorite sugary foods
That is the hard work I was referring to. While it might be a slog when you start out, exercise can be surprisingly addictive thanks to the rush of endorphins you get. But you don't need to exercise to lose weight, nor is exercise alone sufficient -- you can't out-exercise a bad diet.
Back when I switched to the paleo diet some 10 years ago, I was ready for a huge fight with my cravings as I gave up all the sugar and grains etc. But nothing of the kind happened. I just started eating other food that I liked just as much, and felt fine. Lost 25 pounds over 6-9 months.
Maybe it was unusually easy for me. And paleo does allow some carbs, though I definitely cut down a lot.
Agree 100% about your exercise point!
Given that calorie counting (or rather, being in a caloric deficit) emphatically does work[1] (it's roughly just a matter of thermodynamics), I would (respectfully) argue that your research was insufficient.
It is true that the vast majority of people underestimate their calorie input, and there are some special cases (such as diabetics) where calorie counting doesn't give you the results you expect (insulin resistance increases the amount of energy required to "burn" a certain amount of fat because insulin is used in fat expenditure). A disturbing amount of weight-loss studies depend on subjects to self-report the amount of calories consumed -- which almost always invalidates the conclusion (people always underestimate their calorie consumption, doubly so when they've just started a diet!).
However, for the vast majority of people, the standard formulas for total daily energy expenditure[2] are more than accurate enough for accurate weight loss (especially for people who are >15% body fat -- once you get really lean there are other considerations when trying to reduce body fat). They definitely aren't perfect, but they're usually accurate to around ~5-10% (more than enough to get a good idea of how many calories you should be consuming, and how much of a deficit you need to be in in order to lose a certain amount of fat at a certain rate).
> Certainly, I always struggled with a calorie-restricted diet, so I knew that if I always felt hungry, anything I did wouldn't work.
Did you change what kinds of food you ate when eating with caloric restrictions? Usually you want to eat very low-caloric-density foods like broccoli (your body's "fullness" reaction is determined by the volume of food you eat, not the nutritional content). A common mistake is that people will try to eat the same types of food (high-caloric-density), just less of it -- this is a recipe for disaster because it will lead to inevitable hunger tautologically (not to mention most high-caloric-density food has lots of sugar which triggers an insulin response -- causing more hunger after you've eaten it).
The primary reason why people lose weight when doing intermittent fasting is because they consume less calories as a result (you would have to actively stuff your face to get the same amount of calories in 8 hours). Have you tried counting calories now that you intermittently fast, and compared it to how many calories you ate beforehand? You might be surprised to find that's where the real change lies.
All of that being said, feel free to do whatever works for you. Personally, I found it easier to count calories and eat higher-density food. Then again, I usually skip breakfast so you could argue that I also intermittently fast.
> I know it sounds crazy that you can eat as much as you like and still loose weight but it happened.
I very strongly doubt this is true, purely due to thermodynamics. If you ate 10k calories every day (with intermittent fasting) you would gain weight (if you don't believe me, try it for a month and see what happens -- you should gain a few kilos a week depending on your existing weight). I would guess it's more likely that you simply felt that you ate more (but actually started eating less). Do you weigh your portions of food (most people are awful at estimating even how much mass of food they eat, let alone the caloric content)?
[1]: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/does-calorie-counting-w... [This goes through common tropes in papers which are often misunderstood to say that calorie counting doesn't work.] [2]: https://tdeecalculator.net/