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And a diet that causes hunger and lethargy can never be sustained in the long term. If your body is fighting to return to a higher set point, then you need to fix that somehow. Otherwise you must either be fat or miserable.
At this point, I'll mention that the best diet is never to become fat in the first place.
In a perfect world, yes. Ah, if I only knew growing up what I know now.
Can't say I ever hit the lethargy you're describing when I lost weight, however. Not sure if it was my overall slow path toward weightloss or not. If anything, I ended up with more energy, not less.
As for the hunger, eh. I just sucked up and dealt with it. I doubt that's good advice for other people, though.
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My experience as a formerly obese person was that the surest way to fix that issue of hunger and lethargy caused by a low calorie diet was to continue the low calorie diet and push it even harder. The exact same diet that caused hunger and lethargy on day 1 can be entirely fulfilling on day 10. Of course, days 1-9 might not be pleasant, but day 9 was significantly less unpleasant than day 8 which was significantly less unpleasant than day 7, etc., and it's not like going a couple weeks while suffering from hunger and lethargy is particularly difficult or painful, compared to going even a month of simply living while obese, much less the many years I lived as an obese person before the dieting.
This, I agree with. One thing I've personally noticed about having been obese is that I'll never be "un-obese." In the roughly 15 years since I came down from being obese, I've stayed within healthy-to-underweight range while keeping active and even athletic at times. Yet not once have I felt fit or, in fact, as if I was anything other than an obese person, even during the height of my fitness when I was sprinting about on the field with the best of my peers. Being obese an experience that can stay with you forever, no matter how you physiologically modify yourself out of it. It's one of those things that can irreversibly, permanently, change you, and I don't think in a good way.
You are an outlier. Congrats!
The probability of an obese person attaining normal body weight is very small.
I do think there is model where anyone can go from obese to slim within an extreme amount of exercise. If you're training for long-distance ski races or endurance swimming, you will burn so many calories that no amount of eating can overpower it.
I'm an outlier in terms of an obese person successfully becoming normal body weight, but I don't know that I'm an outlier in terms of an obese person who experienced a loss in appetite due to just reducing caloric intake. That study doesn't - and can't - say anything about that. I don't know how many obese people have really committed to even 10 days straight of strict caloric restrictions to see how their appetite, energy levels, and mood would react and how the experience was like for that subset of obese people who did try that.
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