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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried very low carb diets? I maintain a strict keto diet (<20g carbs/day), and when I'm in ketosis the hunger impulse is almost entirely gone. I'm very active - I train Brazilian jiujitsu and lift - and despite that, there are days that I'll just forget to eat because I'm not hungry unless there's food in front of me.

My brain is absolutely addicted to sugar, though, and if I start eating it I get just insatiably ravenous. The combination of sugar/fat/salt together is a perfect storm of "put all that into my face and don't stop until there's no more left" brain chemistry triggers, and how that's most of our prepackaged food is constructed now.

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We're similar, but I'm not strict keto. I do IF and will often forget to eat. For example, Saturday I wake up, weight workout, train jits for 2 hours, then it's ~12-1pm. If I don't think about eating right then and I get closer to 3pm, I'll just wait until dinner.

Before people say I'm weird and never get hungry, not true. Before IF, I used to wake up in the morning because I was hungry. Early in IF it was hard. But, the body adapts. You push through, and now I feel at my best mentally and athletically before my first feeding of the day.

Also like you, while I don't follow a strict keto diet, I cook most of my meals and stay pretty healthy including rice or potato only sometimes. If I go crazy and have a carb heavy meal, I do end up hungry the next day. Understanding one's body is the advantage of getting old I guess :D

Yup, I definitely think that IF is part of the magic. Ketosis makes IF easier, in my experience, because of that elimination of the hunger impulse. Even on the days I do eat, it's usually not til mid afternoon - I don't intentionally practice IF anymore, but my eating patterns tend to fall naturally into an 16/8 window.

It's very hard to adapt initially, especially if you grew up religiously starting the day with breakfast, but the difference is pretty evident once the adaptation happens!

I've tried, didn't work for me. The best results was on a special diet I've created myself (based on weighing myself+food and slowly driving that sum down), but after going 116 -> 104kg I felt REAL hunger, where you feel that every cell of your body craves for energy, it was a month after ability to ignore normal "empty stomach" hunger. I went back almost all the way. No other diet came even close to any results, I couldn't even stick to most of them.

Dumb question, but do you drink coffee? Black coffee is a great appetite suppressant. For me, the "aha moment" was finding those specific foods which provoke or reduce hunger in me. Black coffee can keep hunger at bay for a LONG time for me, while even a small amount of white bread or processed sugar will turn on all the "feed me and don't stop" signals.

I definitely do think that the best diet is the one you can stick to. I've tried a bunch, but I've learned that the thing that works the best for me is learning how to eat to manage hunger rather than managing calories. Managing calories while being gnawingly hungry is just miserable, as you've attested to.

> Black coffee can keep hunger at bay for a LONG time for me, while even a small amount of white bread or processed sugar will turn on all the "feed me and don't stop" signals.

I drink a lot of coffe, but with sugar. I've tried slowly quitting sugar in coffee, but that only made my stomach ache and drinking it was very unpleasant. Without coffee, I would have to make some other caffeine providing solution, without it it's too hard to focus on coding for me (I can live without coffee just fine, I go cold-turkey for two weeks every year, but it's holdiays and I'm away from computer, so no need for coffee).

Yeah it's a hunger suppressant but it can wear out your adrenals if you use it that way regularly and very often. (spikes cortisol if you drink it on an empty stomach; I think it's either the chlorogenic acid).

Coffee is best with a meal; it raises the stomach acid, which improves digestion of the meal. Plus you don't get the cortisol spike when it's taken with a substantial meal.

Definitely wean yourself away from adding sugar to coffee. I have it without any sugar, but a bit of cream, and nible a pastry along side drinking the coffee. So if you can nibble on something sweet, absolutely skip the added sugar in the coffee.

I thought exactly like you for 20 years. That lower weight meant EXTREME hunger.

But what changed for me is the following, losing weight is HARDER than gaining weight. Gaining weight typically happens for me at a maximum of 2 pounds per month, over the course of a year with no dieting.

Why would losing weight, something that is harder than gaining weight, be expected to happen faster than gaining it? I set my goals to 2 pounds a month weight loss, and I almost never hit that goal. I usually come in about 1.5 pounds lost per month. I also get WAY more nutrients and vitamins than my body needs by eating lots of liver, and taking athletic greens. That way my "hunger" is always for calories and never for nutrient deficiency.

I've kept this up for almost 5 years now making it a life changing amount of weight loss.

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