People often promote energy restriction without mentioning the key fact - you will be hungry.
The human body has an amazing set of machinery that's dedicated to making you eat when your metabolism needs certain kinds of materials and would rather not break down tissue to get them.
> People often promote energy restriction without mentioning the key fact - you will be hungry.
People won’t simply omit that fact. They’ll often actively argue that it’s untrue, that “you shouldn’t be hungry” when losing weight. This is only true if you simply don’t ever experience hunger normally (in which case you probably don’t need to lose weight).
Losing weight is hard. It doesn’t become easy because we pretend it is.
Happy this is not quite true. There is one therapy which reduces intake without making people physiologically hungry (addiction to food is a different matter) - gastric bypass or sleeve gastrectomy.
True, I wasn't thinking of surgical techniques. Sometimes that works without physiological hunger (or at least much). However, it also typically comes with a host of other problems and should only ever be considered in extreme circumstances, in my opinion.
I have known several people who have gone through this process, and each of them have chronic health issues related to it. Some of those seem pretty miserable.
I'm not sure how this relates to the overall statistics of long-term success, and I suspect all but one of the people I mention would still choose to do it again.
So I guess by extreme I mean something like: a) a significant amount of weight loss, the need for which is (b) driven by existing and worsening medical problems due to the weight and, importantly (c) for someone who has been seriously trying to lose the weight for some time now and repeatedly failed.
If you aren't in that sort of scenario I am unconvinced the surgical risk and risk of ongoing issues will outweigh the benefits...
The human body has an amazing set of machinery that's dedicated to making you eat when your metabolism needs certain kinds of materials and would rather not break down tissue to get them.