Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

This is self-defeating and untrue. Many people, myself included, have kept weight off for decades. But you don’t get there by thinking of your new lifestyle as “dieting”. You need to learn to love eating healthy foods in a healthy amount, and getting exercise. Eventually you can get to a place where the old foods and habits are simply unappealing.

> in a healthy amount

That's the crux! Constant hunger starts nagging me as soon as I try. I've tried several times for several months, with nice results from the weight's points of view, but I never got to the point where my quality of life globally increased, and that was always due to the constant hunger.

I'll only retry when I'll have found a way to stop the hunger now.

That’s pretty useful info! If you were feeling uncomfortably hungry beyond a short adjustment period, that makes me question if your caloric deficit was too aggressive. And/or if your diet didn’t include enough fiber and protein for satiety. (It’s also possible to be confusing other signals for hunger, like thirst, boredom, or anxiety.)

Losing weight does not have to be so hard. You can lose a lot of weight gradually over time with a small, consistent deficit. Measurement accuracy is critical, though - you will absolutely fail if you aren’t logging your food like a lab scientist.

But it is definitely possible to succeed without that constant sense of privation. In fact, if you want to succeed long-term, you HAVE to find that balance because nobody can force themselves to feel deprived indefinitely.

I found that sugar free hard sweets/candies helped to try and satiate some of the pangs. It's still hard, and you might end up "chain eating" like 5 or 6 of the things in a row, but I figure better that than bingeing chocolate or whatever.

Yeah, what you said is key - and I can also vouch that it's absolutely possible to keep it away for good, aside from small setbacks that almost everyone experiences, since we’re not robots.

The word diet is problematic because most people see it as something temporary. But you can't just eat healthy to lose weight and then go back to old habits, expecting the weight to stay off. That just doesn't make sense.

Also for many people, food isn’t just about pleasure - it’s also a way to deal with boredom, stress, depression, and so on. So even if someone sticks to a diet, if the psychological root causes are still there, it's going to be hard to stay away from junk food.

This is not untrue.

Look at the long term numbers for successfully keeping weight off, 5, 10 years out.

They’re abysmal.

Just live with the hunger? Been starving for last 3 hours but idc really. Thats how i never went above 75kg all my life

Its because people treat it as a DIET and not THE NEW NORMAL.

When you stop a diet, you go back to eating shit. The new normal just keeps you at the same place because you get used to the fact that you don't need to eat breakfast, and a 500 calorie lunch is perfectly satiating, hell maybe a bit too much.

I wonder how much of that is due to a sedentary lifestyle? If you're running and biking and strength training it makes a big difference vs trying to maintain a healthy weight with a low TDEE.

It doesn't help everyone but some people find it more useful to try and "enjoy" feeling hungry rather than spending as much mental effort trying to ignore it or not feel hungry. Sort of like how body builders learn to enjoy the muscle ache from heavy lifting.

    > Many people, myself included, have kept weight off for decades.

To be clear, more than 80% of people eventually regain weight lost during a diet. While your statement might be factually correct: "many people" can be 20% of the millions of people who diet each year, but it overlooks the main point: Keeping off weight after a diet requires near superhuman control. Most people cannot do it. Thank god I was born with good genes that makes it easy for me to control my weight. It looks and sounds like hell trying to diet to lose weight.

Bingo. In my experience most people dealing with obesity are dealing with an underlying addiction problem. It requires a huge change at a deep level that is impossible for some and not hard for others. Hence the widely varying responses to GP in this thread.

> Keeping off weight after a diet requires near superhuman control.

No. This is wrong.

Keeping weight off requires retraining your habits and relationship with food so that it becomes natural and even enjoyable to stay healthy. It also may require addressing some emotional and psychological issues that are keeping you stuck.

The path to that point may be challenging (not always!), but it is simply false that you must exert “superhuman control” forever to keep your progress. In fact, the opposite is true: if you view yourself in an adversarial posture with your diet, and are relying on willpower to “win”, then you are likely to fail because nobody can deprive themselves forever.

Circling back to that 80/20 statistic: I think it’s evidence that most people are not approaching this problem in the right way. And part of the problem, in my opinion, is defeatist beliefs like the ones I am criticizing here.