Excellent article about hunger as the focus of diet

All I want to eat diet by Psychologist helped him lose 50 lbs (link)

My comment in purple:

Excellent article.  I have a similar approach.  I have sad news for the author.  He is only in the 8 month of the reduced obese.  He will learn this inconvenient truth (link).  For the long term treatment of his chronic obesity he will need lifelong diet medicine to maintain weight loss.

“All-I-want diet full of moderately fat comfort food.”

The hunger mood

Hunger isn’t in your stomach or your blood-sugar levels. It’s in your mind – and that’s where we need to shape up

by Michael Graziano

"Whatever else it is, hunger is a motivated state of mind."

"Hunger is a process that’s always present, always running in the background, only occasionally rising into consciousness. It’s more like a mood. When it slowly rises or eases back down, even when it’s beneath consciousness, it alters our decisions. It warps our priorities and our emotional investment in long-term goals."

"The hunger mood is hard to control, precisely because it operates outside of consciousness. This might be why obesity is such an intractable problem."

"Taking all this together, the evidence suggests that a low-carb diet doesn’t make you lose weight because of its effect on your energy utilization.

It makes you lose weight because you eat less.

Or (perhaps more accurately), the ridiculous, super-high death-carb diet stokes up the hunger mechanism and your eating goes out of control."

Below is the "all you can eat" portion of the authors diet

"Third, I could eat as much as I like at each meal.

That last proposition was the hardest.

When you want to lose weight, it’s hard to wrap your mind around the concept of eating more.

I simply had to trust a bizarre psychological twist: if I try to eat less, I’ll end up eating more.

I could give a list of foods – salmon, peanut butter, pork chops, apples, tomatoes, chicken with the skin, tofu, eggs, and on and on – but really the concept is more revealing than the details. The diet had nothing to do with standard health advice.

It had nothing to do with how those particular foods chemically affect my body.

I wasn’t thinking of my arteries or my liver or my insulin.

The approach was designed to speak to my unconscious hunger control mechanism, to encourage it to eat less.

And it worked at a slow drip of about two pounds a week, trailing off finally to a much more comfortable weight. Twenty years of accumulation, 50 extra pounds (I cringe to admit it) went away in a few months.

There is no effort in an all-I-want diet of moderately fat comfort food.

I simply sat back and watched my brainstem do its thing

The beauty of the method was that it required no effort."

My comment:

The only problem I have with this very interesting article is that the diet ends at 8 months.

 
 I suspect the author has not seen the above chart. 
The problem is not losing weight.
The challenge is maintaining weight loss.
I took the obesity boards in Dec. and plan to return to practice medicine in the field of obesity because I believe the four new diet medicines   will help the reduced obese maintain most of their weight loss.  
The author, Michael Graziano, will find that he will slowly gain weight on his diet because his leptin level is low.  
He has his theory, I will look forward to see how he does over 5 years.  
I have data since 2011.  I have not been hungry since 2011 when I started LCHF or Atkins. 

I also did a short term experiment in which I carefully did LCHF with blood nutritional ketosis and one hour exercise a day. I gained four pounds.  

I then decreased exercise to walking 20 minutes a day and went on Qsymia diet pill.

I think after 9 months Mr. Graziano will hit a plateau as I did in this link.

I am on Qsymia, Victoza, and Invokana and I believe I will be on these drugs for the rest of my life just to maintain my weight loss.