Here at DietHobby there are many articles about my weight-loss and maintenance of that weight-loss.

For more details see ABOUT ME in the Resources section, and various Status Updates etc. in the ARCHIVES.

I've consistently recorded all my food into a computer food journal every day for more than NINE years.

I've also recorded my weight daily or weekly during that time. Those detailed records show a large weight loss, followed by a couple of years holding pattern, followed by about five years of gradual weight-gain while eating a calorie average of around 1050 calories daily.

Despite my careful adherence to calorie budgets, and detailed documentation, people tend to disbelieve this truth. I'm tired of being considered a liar. In fact, involving myself further in discussions on the issue is becoming too exhausting to even contemplate. My records are helpful to me personally, but are generally discounted by others as inaccurate, mistaken, or faulty in some way because … what these records show "simply cannot be true".

This is a common phenomenon.
 
Medical personnel and weight loss gurus get to openly doubt the claims of any and all failed dieters because their fat bodies are the visible proof that they are lying.

Former dieters who claim diets don’t work were probably just doing it wrong all along, or else they didn’t try Guru X, Y or Z, who would have set them straight right away.

However, the bottom line is, diets don’t fail because failed dieters are liars, but because the only diets that yield substantial, noticeable weight loss in a statistically significant portion of the population are the same diets that are largely unsustainable for many, many reasons.

The problem isn’t lying dieters, it’s that the expectations surrounding diets and weight loss are built on lies, half-truths, insinuations, flawed research and cults of personality.

It is important to realize and understand that people regain lost weight due to biological reasons which are totally out of their control.

When a person engages in the kind of severe caloric restriction necessary to lose significant amounts of weight, it triggers hormonal changes in their body that pushes back against that caloric deficit, both physically and emotionally.

The body's response to caloric restriction involves issues involving leptin, ghrelin and adaptive thermogenesis. In a nutshell, one's body does everything it can to preserve what few calories it is taking in. This is the semi-starvation neurosis that is most noticeable in the infamous Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Those continual, ongoing, unpleasant symptoms are the body’s way of trying to urge a person to find more calories. Most people find that kind of lifestyle unsustainable.

The 3500 kcal per pound Theory was derived by estimating ...

Who Cares if 3,500 Calories Don't Make a Real Life Pound?
                      by Dr. Yoni Fredhoff, M.D. 12/12/13 @weightymatters

If there's a more painful discussion in nutrition and obesity these days beyond the one that circles the question, "Do 3,500 calories really make up a pound?", I don't know what it is.

So here are some truths.

• People are not walking math formulas whereby if they have 3,500 more or less calories than they burn they'll gain or lose a pound.
  
• 3,500 calories of one food or type of food will likely have a different impact on health, hunger, thermic effect, and weight than 3,500 calories of another food or type of food.
  
• Different people have different caloric efficiencies whereby they are seemingly able to extract more calories from food or reserves than others and lose weight with more difficulty (and gain with greater ease).
  
• And yet here's the only truth that matters.

From a weight management perspective, the currency of weight is calories. While exchange rates undoubtedly do vary between foods and between individuals, you'll always need your own personal deficit to lose, and surplus to gain.

All other discussion, while certainly academically interesting, given that there are No Other Alternate Measures Available to track, or tests to determine individual responses to different calorie sources, serves to foment confusion.

If weight's your concern, more important than anything else is finding a life that you enjoy that contains fewer calories than before. Getting stuck in the minutia of what type of calories may lead to an every so slightly faster or greater loss, rather than truly crafting a life that's enjoyable (and hence sustainable), might help in the short run, but will almost certainly defeat you in the long.

This accurately describes my own diet
...(i.e way-of-eating / lifestyle / eating-behavior)..
 philosophy

The article below says 
something that really needed saying.

 Real Food

        By Michelle - November 11, 2013 - www. fatnutritionist.com

“Real food” is a term I dislike almost as much as “real women,” and for many of the same reasons.

On occasion, I run into this idea coupled with the concept of intuitive eating. People will proclaim how much they believe in permission and fulfilling your hunger and eating whatever you want (so far, so good)…but with one small caveat (uh-oh.) Permission and eating as much as you’re hungry for and eating what you like are, apparently, only legitimate if the food being eaten meets some mysterious criteria that imbues it with that holiest of all holy contemporary food values, the coveted title of “real food.”

For some people, real food means “food I make entirely at home from scratch [for varying values of 'from scratch.']” For some, it means “mainly plant-based foods with a smattering of dairy and animal protein.” For others, it means “entirely raw foods that have not been cooked.” And for yet others, it might mean anything from “a vegetarian diet” to “mostly meat and certain vegetables and no grains” to “a vegan diet composed entirely of homemade food” to “I grow everything I eat on my own land, including grains which I mill into flour myself and then deep-fry unrepentantly.”

There is a lot of wiggle-room in this term.

Before I go further, it is important for me to make it crystal clear that for people who choose to eat in one of these ways, I say good for you. I sincerely hope you enjoy it and feel great. Rock on. I am all for people making very personal choices about what foods they eat and don’t eat. I think the above are all decent options, but most importantly, it doesn’t matter what I think, because your body belongs to you. Personal autonomy around food is the driving force behind this entire website.

The problem is that I’ve met very few people who make personal choices of the “real food” persuasion without also pressuring those ...

"Be Hungry all the time

so that other people

will like the way you look?

That's just dumb."