> some of us have far wider margins for how generously our body will burn off or otherwise not hold on to those calories.

That’s always seemed like a nonsensical rebuttal.

Nobody is actually measuring how many calories they burn per day or the actual content of their food down to 4 decimal places, but you can quickly get a baseline based on comparing rates of weight loss and total calories consumed because the difference in died aren’t subtle. If 2100 calories doesn’t work fast enough try 2000...

The missing measurement is how many calories you poop, and what relationships exist between what and how much you eat to the amount of calories you poop

You just track calories in, and weight. If you stop losing weight, reduce calories in.

It doesn't matter if you "have a slow metabolism" or whatever, because that just means you don't get to eat as much as someone else who weighs the same as you.

There are confounding factors so that you can't predict how much weight will be lost by a given calorie deficit. But that doesn't matter.

You will lose weight if you eat less.

And here’s where the problem comes in for me - when I reach that level, where weight loss begins to be measurable, I am so miserable I can’t think about anything but food 24/7. It’s like being in a staring contest where the other person never, ever blinks.

I'm not a massive proponent of regular fasting but, having done it long enough, I've learned what hungry really means. The experience was invaluable because of that.

I had (and still have to some extent) that same feeling you have but that's not hunger. For me, sometimes it was boredom, sometimes it was routine ("it's 6pm, dinner time!") or just straight up gluttony but that's not real hunger. Want to eat and need to eat are very different.

I'm saying all of this with a bag of cheezits next to me at 12am.

What's your diet like though? I found satiety only roughly correlates to calories in. That is to say, some foods I could eat a ton of calories worth and still feel hungry. Other kinds of food would have me feeling full with far fewer calories.

This, and I get into weird blood sugar deficits where I feel like I'm going to die! It makes it very difficult not to grab some food so you can keep working.

I am not diabetic btw, before hn not a doctor chimes in.

I think it is something to do with high cortisol levels caused by stress. I am currently experimenting with an extreme low carb diet, early results are showing some promise. I am using the better management of blood sugar to eat less early in the day, hoping this will force a lower calorie consumption

Just mixing in salads with some protein I love doing. We grow lettuce- you can dress it and then spend time chatting and crunching lettuce. It passes the time. No idea if it’s actually low calorie but a lot of roughage may help you move stuff out too?

People who feel hungry fail at eating less in the long term.

No diet gets around hunger because the human body tracks how fat it is not just the contents of the digestive system.

Long term weight loss requires you to accept being hungry.

>Long term weight loss requires you to accept being hungry.

It does but there are degrees of hunger. The hunger I feel in the day before I eat is much easier to deal with than the hunger I feel after I have eaten a meal. The hunger I feel when on a low carb diet is easier for me to deal with than if I have had bread/pasta/sweets.

I'm pretty sure that for me blood sugar levels, insulin, and hormones play a big part.There is an optimum diet and amount/type of exercise for me to feel less hungry and similarly there are foods and activities where I am almost certain to feel ravenously hungry despite eating more calories.

> The hunger I feel on a low carb diet is easier for me to deal with

That’s a short term effect. Low carb diets are no more effective long term (3+ years) than calorie restriction.

Most people who lose significant percentage of body weight eventually start dreaming/fantasizing about food etc. It’s possible to push through this and maintain weight loss, but it’s relatively rare.

Short term is what counts when you are trying to avoid snacking. Low carb for some people is what allows them to restrict their calories because they don't feel ravenously hungry.

If you’re fine yo yo dieting where you gain and lose lots of weight then sure use whatever you are comfortable with.

Just don’t be surprised when it takes the same effort over time to avoid gaining weight again. Because it might take slightly longer to kick in, but the same hunger will be back.

Actually you lose most of your mass through carbon dioxide, through breathing. (And similarly, trees and plants get almost all their mass through carbon dioxide, not the soil.)

exactly, I don't get why so many people who are presumed to be smart always default to this oversimplistic assumption, ignoring that food consumption and calorie burning are as biologically-driven as almost everything else in life.

The reason is that it works well enough, most of the time, for most people. If you are trying to lose weight, you do not need an exact formula to compute the derivative of your weight with respect to time; you need a mental model of your diet and metabolism that moves you toward your goal. CICO basically tells you to look at your two most important levers for doing that (how much you eat and how much you move) and adjust them until your weight moves in the right direction.

But people have an extremely poor mental model of calories out.

In particular there is a great misunderstanding with respect to the role of exercise. It’s not the calories you burn during the period of exercise, rather it’s the changes to your body that exercise causes that encourage weight loss.

You don't need to have a good model of calories out. Just keep track of calories in and your weight over time, and reduce calories in until you're losing weight at an acceptable rate.

All models are wrong, some models are usefull.

The (over)consumption industry is trying to hammer home a message that basically boils down to 'calories model is not perfect, please do not moderate your consumption'. If forced hey are ok with you consuming 'different', but not with consuming 'less'.

The results can be observed every day on every street.

People also seem to think that "calories out" == "exercise" which it doesn't.

For example, if you ate gasoline encased in glass marbles, you'd be eating a lot of calories. The body wouldn't use much of it, though!

It's not really widely understood how much the caloric content of our food is actually converted to fat.

Calories out means exhaling carbon dioxide (that's the end of the chemical reaction chain of burning fat). So exercise certainly helps.

Yes, exercise helps. But it also can have the side effect on making people hungry. So if the other nutritional inbalances in the people are not kept within limits, the exercise might not be as effective.

Some types of exercise help me to mitigate hunger. Other types make me ravenously hungry and are detrimental to reducing caloric intake. The same goes for different types of food. Finding out what works and what doesn't took a while.

Your metabolism doesn’t use 100% of the energy content of food. It’s actually quite hard to tell the true calories you will get from any give food, it probably depends on many individual factors of both of the human and the food.