If you eat a 16 to 20 oz ribeye (1200 calories) in the morning you won't want to eat until at least dinner time. If you eat 3 donuts (1200 calories), you'll be ravenous by noon. What you eat effects when you want to eat and how much dramatically. Why run against a headwind?

Oh boy, I regret commenting in this thread.

I feel like people keep either inventing things to argue against (olive oil) or bringing up scenarios that are purposefully missing the overall point of what people are actually saying.

Again, sure, if you zoom in, eating donuts is probably a bad strategy because you'll be hungry again, and thus eat more calories. But in the grand scheme of things, you CAN eat a donut if you remain below you calories. That is all people are saying. Nothing more. Nothing less.

fwiw, we weight lifters regularly put this into practice. Bulking? add more food. Cutting? less food.

Yes, there are details (gotta hit those macros!), but overall, the strategy boils down to calories in/out.

This is basically the equivalent of the "why does it matter what programming language you pick as long as it's Turing complete, which means you can do anything with it" argument. Losing weight by eating a donut and starving yourself is like writing a web application in brainfuck.

Not at all. It's like saying "it doesn't matter what programming language you pick, the computer is still only going to execute the code you told it to".

Neither the GP, nor the original root of this thread are proposing that food choices are automatic, obvious, or don't have bearing on your weight/happiness/whatever; they're saying that food quantities (in calories) are the primary determinant of how much you weigh.

That's it. Narrow ruling, specific point; no "why don't you just"-ism or anything of the sort--or if it's there, I'm not seeing it.

OK, OK, you're just better than us mere humans. We still experience hunger. And we don't like it. And being dumb animals, our behavior is influenced by that.

You say that like measuring calories in/out is an easy thing to do :-) For most people it absolutely is not, on either end of that.

Case in point: I’ve not met a single person who (in addition to measuring calorie intake) captures all the content deposited in their toilet, and measures it all every day in a bomb calorimeter :)

You off-gas a lot of carbon when you exhale, so it's not a fair comparison.

I've found my body feels hungry simply based on when its used to eating, not what I've eaten earlier in the day. So if I eat breakfast every day, I start feeling hungry at breakfast time, if I eat lunch every day I start feeling hungry at lunch time. Prior food consumption doesn't matter, at least in my case.

I never ate breakfast as a kid, so I carried that habit into adulthood. I started eating breakfast once in a while at some point and that caused me to start feeling hungry in the morning. I shut that shit down right away, I don't need to add more food to my diet. Years later I gave up lunch, which I thought would be really difficult, since I always felt hungry at lunch time, but now I don't feel hungry at all during lunch time, because I'm used to not eating lunch.

YMMV, of course, that just has been my experience.

As somebody who has eaten three normal-sized donuts in the morning (even early morning) a few times, I can tell you I've never been ravenous by noon, or even hungry. Maybe I'd start getting hungry around 3 or 4, which proves your point some, but certainly not by noon.

The question is how you eat fewer calories.

Eating fewer calories is a function of two things:

1. Reducing the number of points in the day in which you eat. 2. Changing the kind of food you eat at each of those points. 3. Changing the quantity of food you eat at each of those points.

From the amount of emotional energy or willpower necessary to do that, it seems like an intermittent fasting regimen is a technique that helps people do that.

This is kind of exhibit A of willfully missing the point...

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