You still haven’t detailed what a common week of eating looks like, what a normal day at least. What do you classify as a ‘good’ meal, what did you eat yesterday?
There is so much in what you are saying that doesn’t make sense. You have always been lean, and by your admission still have a six pack. So at what stage did you need to go on a extended weight loss journey dropping so much weight?
Of course there comes a point where self preservation kicks in when you get into the single digit body fat levels..
Also, you have changed the topic from just normal day to day eating and putting on weight to now arguing about hunger during a cut. Two very very very different things…
Yesterday’s food - and I’m NOT on a weight-dropping diet now.
Half a bagel + cream cheese for breakfast
Lunch: Chicken salad sandwich my wife made with me. Yes, it has mayo, no it’s not almost all mayo.
Dinner: Leftovers from a roast-chicken we made a day ago (hence chicken salad for lunch). Green beans. I added a bowl of pasta with olive oil and parmesan on my own as my wife avoids carbs. It was a generous bowl, probably close to half a box of dried pasta equivalent.
Snacks: Coffee+soy creamer, 1 CLIF bar after my workouts.
I also swam for 54 minutes, and biked for 1:30 with intervals. Caloric burn on that was 600 kcal for the swim and the bike burned 1032 kcal per my powermeter+strava.
In comparison, on my weight dropping diet it looks like above, but minus the entire lunch chicken salad, and half the amount of pasta I ate. 1500 kcal for a daily total is really low, even with the exercise burned calories on top. I was routinely burning more than 1500kcal through workouts alone, as I am now, so my workout calories exceeded my allotted daily calories nearly every day through that period.
Even though I’m not on a weight-loss diet now, I’m generally a good eater. Almost no fast food or fried foods - my wife and daughter really don’t like it. But I have days where I eat a LOT on my non-diet phase as I am on right now.
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Those meals aren’t all that great. Bagels are very calorie dense, as is cream cheese. Mayo is a calorie bomb, the for dinner more empty cals-why olive oil? Cliff bar is rubbish. You could cut a lot of this stuff out and have another huge meal for the same calories, and feel completely full.
Yep, I still have a six-pack. I had one by 3rd grade, my classmates called me a ‘superhero body’ back then because of it (dont’ be fooled though, I was really thin/small, and NOT an athlete until high school, always picked near-last, etc.)
I’m just genetically born with good muscle insertions and definition. Weight training helped for sure once I was a teen and older, but I haven’t lifted weights meaningfully in at least 20 years, and I still have better muscle definition and shape than the vast majority of men who lift of a lot, and even take steroids (they def have more muscle mass though, often by a lot.) Even my +20 lbs weight gain from 30-50yrs old is invisible to everyone around me, even when I show them pictures of myself where I’m clearly leaner. I have no ‘love handles’, no cellulite, but any pinch/caliper test for body fat % instantly shows I’ve gained a lot there, and my old clothes not fitting confirm this in spades. But I’m lucky - I still have the six pack you can still see all my triceps/etc. even with that subQ fat, but nobody will think I’m remotely close to ripped/low fat any more, even if you can see all the right bulges.
My weight loss had zero to do with appearance and everything to do with seeing if I could gain more run performance and bike climbing performance for the hilly StG course. It helped only marginally, which is why I’m not killing myself on my diet now. About 1-2sec/mile on the run as the experts say, which is signficant, but not game-changing. Hill climbing on the bike marginally better as well. Not worth it to me to continue such a lower weight state year-round where I had to avoid all restaurants and nearly all delicacies.
I’ve gone too much into detail about what i’ve tried. Trust me, I’ve tried everything. Cabbage, apples, tons of every vegetable, so many clear broths (which I do love), high quality meats, you name it, I’ve tried it.
As I said and will reiterate - NONE of these dietary choices willl meaningfully drive down your hunger once you’re more than a few pounds under your body’s true set point. I’ve eaten an entire head of cabbage in a single sitting in hopes the bulk would make me less hungry, but nope - I just end up feeling both hungry and ill because my stomach is distended.
Again, this is COMPLETELY EXPECTED. Hunger and thirst are amongst the most powerful urges known to man, confirmed by science. You can’t overcome them after a certain point. If you’ve never gotten there to believe it, then you haven’t walked the walk.
I’m actually quite certain that I could do that exact -1500kcal diet using nothing but fast-food and no healthy choices. And I could do it with nothing but ultra-healthy no-fun choices like zero salt, zero sugar/sweeteners, and things like plain white rice and plain tofu. Once you’re that hungry all the time, it almost doesn’t matter what it tasted like. And if you have the discipline to maintain it for months, you’re used to eating foods that taste good like cream cheese, but not overdoing because you’re going to have to log it in the total. I could have easily eaten 1500kcal of Mcdonalds as my diet, and still lost weight, it wouldn’t even have been hard compared to what I was doing.
Model: General defense framework (2026 consensus):
Mechanism: Range of weights with hormonal/metabolic defense varying by direction; influenced by genes, development, environment
Implications: Modifiable but with effort proportional to deviation from defended range
It’s all just random debate at this point as the sides have been locked in. I’m just saying I hear ya, and I think you’re partly right, and I believe you’re mostly doing it right from what you said too.
But I also think the sauces, etc. stuff is both about calories of the sauces themselves, but I suspect more importantly about that mind-dominating hunger urge you’re talking about.
That is what you’re trying to tame, right? That’s what the GLP1s are helping with in people that are losing weight (I think at least).
The sauces, etc. make food more palatable. And that not only allows you to eat more of it in any given sitting, but more importantly continues that addiction-like craving to come back for more later.
Now, in your case, you’re saying you were restricting calories and you weren’t seeing the results you’d like or expect. I believe that. I do think it takes time. And the problem is that time runs right up against the next meal with even a tablespoon of bbq sauce, or whatever, that encourages you to not only eat a little more than you would otherwise but come back sooner later on too. In my experience, my body really does say, “I’m full, stop, I’ve got plenty stored already” and I don’t need to keep eating if I’m basically eating chicken and veg and salt. The more rice and potatoes I add in the mix, the harder that gets. Adding in sauce, is basically like a lubricant for your tastebuds to keep demanding more.
Anyway, the issue is complex, but I think at the heart of it, is we are so good at making food taste amazing which is a trigger for eating more volume and more frequently.
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Now this thread has drifted away from the Peptide Debate, probably irretrievably so, and onto diets/dieting, it has come time to post the following, yet again
Hopefully my last post off-topic, but just to comment -
You’re sort of right in that sauces and tasty toppings etc make it harder to stay on a diet to maintain a weight a lot lower than your setpoint, especially with the hunger kicking in regularly. It certainly isn’t easy, and at the start it often feels next-to impossible.
But I’ve learned that if I stick it through, I come out on the other end with a more ‘highly trained’ hunger discipline resistance. It’s sort of like muscle training, even though it’s obviously not a muscle - after 2 months of doing it, I can resist almost everything and eat what seems to be barely anything during the day. The hunger still absolutely sucks yes, but at that point, it’s almost like my brain has a lot more control of the body, meaning that I can actually say “NO” to anything delicious that comes up and the temptation for me to cheat is manyfold lower than earlier in the diet phase.
For sure, I was NOT ‘spoiling’ my diet or making tolerating my diet unnecessarily hard by using sauces, oils, etc. As I mentioned before, once I was in the groove - I was eating so little that I could just eat straight white rice, uncooked raw carrots, and pieces of a boiled potato straight up (no oil,salt, etc) and it was completely fine. Because when you’re in that much of a deficit, even that hits the spot.
not a peptide but something under these research chems… someone caught recently in tri:
Isn’t one of the drugs she got busted for one of those body builder lean muscle mass drugs that Imogen ingested via bodily fluids? Maybe she should have tried the Imo defense.
But anyway, here’s the lady’s Instagram page
Curious to see an age grouper busted like this at a low key triathlon (I assume it was a “state championship” race).
In any case, looking at her IG profile, it’s sad that there’s likely a bunch of women assuming they can get all lean and fit looking like her and there she is cheating with drugs.
It’s almost as bad as the China influencer lady going sub-5 with the help of a bike at the Berlin marathon.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7668098/2026/10/07/berlin-marathon-influencer-bike/