The Lie That’s Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals

With all the dieting fads and endless health content online, the implication seems to be that we want to be snatched without experiencing the hunger that naturally comes with an energy deficit. In other words, we want to have our cake and eat it too, while still losing weight. By all means, you can try protein-maxxing, intentional eating windows, volume eating, high fiber, low-intensity steady-state cardio, the works . There’s no reason weight loss has to be a punishment. You don’t get a reward for suffering. But if these things aren’t doing much in the way of managing hunger or at least not abolishing it to your satisfaction, it may be time to face the truth: your expectations could be unreasonable. Reframe Your Hunger Eating in a calorie deficit and experiencing hunger at night? Welcome to biology. Expecting no hunger when you’re depriving your body of energy is like lying out in the sun for hours without sun protection and being shocked that your skin burns. We only have so many calories to work with (especially if you’re short ), and when you’re eating less than you’re burning, hunger is often the signal that what you’re doing is working. Instead of dreading hunger, maybe we should change our relationship to it—even appreciate it for the positive feedback it is. Food will always be there, but we need to stop pathologizing modest discomfort. Maybe if we taught women that a little hunger is to be expected and not the end of the world, they wouldn’t catastrophize at the first sight of it. We don’t treat modest discomfort as a crisis in other contexts. When you lift weights at the gym after months of being sedentary, you would expect to feel sore the next day. Instead of dreading hunger, maybe we should change our relationship to it—even appreciate it for the positive feedback it is. You don’t fear this pain signal. You might even enjoy it. Sure, it’s uncomfortable and limiting, but you know it’s only temporary and that it’s positive feedback. Your workout really hammered those muscle groups. We consider pain in this context as a form of reward. Hunger is just the nutritional version of that, and yet, so many are unwilling to make peace with it. The difference is only a matter of perception. We’re conditioned to view “feeling the burn” as a sign that we’re working hard enough to reap the results we want, whereas dieting suffers from the opposite framing: if you’re feeling the pinch of need, you’re doing something “unsustainable” or “dangerous,” so the rhetoric goes. This is a trap to keep women fat with placating (and insulting) lies about how restriction is disordered or unsustainable. Restriction has become an alarmist stand-in for dieting or eating in a calorie deficit, intentionally conflated with the obviously unhealthy extremes of anorexia. Thankfully, there’s some middle ground between eating everything and eating nothing. Tough Love: Expect Discomfort and You’ll Be Unstoppable Women need some tough love and a reality check, because they’re living in a fantasy world where things that require discipline to achieve are somehow supposed to magically happen without any discomfort. The sooner you welcome the discomfort, the less power it holds over you. You become desensitized to it in the same way those squats in the gym won’t produce the same level of soreness every time. You’ll no longer cower to the challenge of dropping five pounds because you can’t fathom giving up your nightly snacking habit. You won’t die if you don’t eat the chips or the Snickers bar (not because we’re cutting out food groups or creating forbidden foods, but because it doesn’t fit within your daily caloric allowance). Saying no isn’t a disorder or a crisis. You’re probably just not used to denying yourself anything. You can absolutely make room for foods you're unwilling to sacrifice from your diet, but if they take up more space than they're providing in nutritional value and satiety, it might be worth reassessing their place in your diet while your calorie allowance is (temporarily) lower. Our modern food kryptonite isn’t scarcity, but abundance . The access to caloric excess that the average American has today would send a Victorian child into a coma. In this context, it should be no wonder you’re hyper-sensitive to “restriction.” You’re on disciplinary training wheels. That’s okay. You’ll learn and you’ll build that disciplinary muscle. What’s not okay is continuing to complain about wanting your dream body while staying delusional. As someone who’s lost weight several times, I can tell you that you won’t succeed unless you’re mentally locked in. I always know whether I’m serious about getting snatched or indulging in performative fantasy. There’s a mental lock-in switch I can see in my head, and it’s up to me if I want to flip it. It’s kind of like the problem posed by The Matrix . Do you want to take the blue pill, which will keep you in a comforting delusion, or the red pill, which will wake you up to the unpleasant, but liberating truth? Weight loss is most about choosing to take the red pill every single day. It’s facing the uncomfortable truth instead of swallowing comforting lies (which have extra calories). Avoiding the scale? Why? Is it because you’re afraid of the number it will reflect back at you? Afraid of tracking those extra calories you snuck in the middle of the night, as if not logging them in MyFitnessPal will somehow reverse the physical reality that you ate them? Convinced you know the caloric value in your pasta dish without a food scale or any point of reference? These are the low-grade delusions that try to work their way back into our lives even after we've freed ourselves before. We get cocky and start to slip. The sooner you welcome the discomfort, the less power it holds over you. If you’re regularly engaging in these behaviors, then weight loss will feel impossible. You’re not giving yourself any meaningful chance to impact the scale in the right direction. And on top of that, some of you are engaging in psychological warfare on a daily basis. If you know you’re in a fragile state right now, stop surrounding yourself with external food noise. You don’t need to be watching mukbangs or scrolling through indulgent food recipes on Instagram or watching Masterchef or stocking up on your most tempting snacks that you find most difficult to eat in moderation. Create an environment that makes the choices you want to make the path of least resistance. If you deal with intrusive thoughts about food (like thinking about what to eat for your next meal while you’re eating your current meal) you’re probably participating in hedonic eating and need to find an alternative reward pathway that’s more conducive to your goals, like taking up a physical hobby or throwing yourself into an immersive pastime that occupies your time, mind, and energy. Surround yourself with content that aligns with your goals. My favorite fitness creators are Whitney Holcombe , Minazalie , Amanda Dobler , and Sugar Free Sorority . They give me no-bs, tough love, motivating fitness content that pushes me to make decisions in alignment with my goals. But if you don’t respond well to that sort of content, seek out what you’re receptive to, and feed off that energy. While I would never claim everyone has to abide by the same tough love approach that I find appealing, I would caution against content that is overly placating if the energy you really need is accountability. Housekeeping: Get Your Priorities In Order What I find most frustrating is when I see people in a weight or fat loss phase doing things rather foolishly. The fewer calories you have to work with, whether because you’re a small person who requires less energy or because you’re sedentary, the more strategic you have to be. You should be developing hacks that will work for you, not against you. For instance, if your basal metabolic rate is a measly 1185 calories a day, why on earth are you drinking your calories and complaining about being hungry? This is a matter of confusion. You think you can be a person with low caloric needs who behaves like someone with high caloric needs. It’s time to reassess. Do you really need that 400-calorie Starbucks drink first thing in the morning? Because that’s an entire meal’s worth of calories for you. For a taller athlete who burns 2,500 calories, that drink is just a morning pick-me-up. Depending on your stats, that could be a third of your calories wasted on a liquid sugar bomb that provides no satiation or nutritional value. This is where most people blow their deficit without even realizing it. Most Americans have no sense of their caloric needs , as evidenced by their regular consumption of excess calories—so easy to do if you’re undiscerning about what and how much you eat. In 2023, per capita caloric availability in the U.S. was just shy of 4,000 calories per day. A single restaurant meal can be upwards of 1,000 calories. Caloric drinks can add up to hundreds of extra calories per day. Confusion between “health” and “caloric load” leads to dizzying choices like salads loaded with creamy dressings as dieting meals, not realizing half a cup of dressing can rival the calories of a burger and fries. If you’re serious about fat loss, this cluelessness is a liability. Our modern food kryptonite isn’t scarcity, but abundance. Before you even start, you need a plan. Hope and vibes won’t get you anywhere. Take stock: Where are you now—your weight, measurements, and current daily calorie intake? Where are you going—your goal weight, body fat percentage, or target measurements? How will you get there—what’s your maintenance calorie level, and how much do you need to cut to make progress? Once you know those numbers, the “how” becomes obvious. You decide how comfortable versus how fast you want results. A 500-calorie deficit is the classic target for losing about a pound a week, but if that pushes your intake too low, expect ravenous hunger and inadequate nutrition—a combination that can trigger bingeing when deprivation becomes extreme. Binge eating disorder is a whole other can of worms, driven by factors beyond simple hunger, so I won’t get into that here. If your calorie needs are already low, opt for a smaller, sustainable deficit and accept that progress will take longer, or pair it with more daily steps and workouts to speed things up. The formula is simple: weigh yourself, plug your stats into a calorie calculator to find your maintenance, then subtract 250 calories for roughly half a pound per week or 500 for a pound per week (fyi: this is a meaningfully true estimation but not an approximation because of factors like water retention, inconsistent energy expenditure, and metabolic adaptation). Know your limits: under 1,200 calories is too low for sustainable loss, eating at maintenance (whatever your maintenance calories are) will keep you where you are, and eating more than that will cause you to gain weight. Superficial vs Genuine Hunger In an ideal world, dieting wouldn’t make us hungry. At least, that’s what I used to think back when my diet was loaded with hyperpalatable foods that kept me on the hamster wheel of perpetual cravings; when I grazed all day instead of eating timed meals; when food was a dopamine hit to soothe stress rather than a mindful, intentional act. I learned discipline from going vegan. My motivation wasn’t dietary but ethical: I no longer saw animal products as food, but as products of an industry I didn’t want to support. That “why” made abstaining easy. I wasn’t battling willpower over a block of cheese, because it simply wasn’t on the menu for me. (Plus, there are excellent dairy-free cheeses now.) Once I paired that discipline with actual nutritional knowledge, I was unstoppable. I learned to build meals around protein and fiber for satiety and blood sugar regulation , add low-calorie high volume foods like vegetables to make plates more satisfying, get eight hours of sleep to reduce hunger spikes, and manage stress to avoid emotional eating. I learned that high-intensity cardio often backfired by spiking my appetite, that water can blunt mild hunger, and that three spaced-out balanced meals kept me fuller than random snacking. I learned to prioritize whole foods over ultra-processed, hyperpalatable ones designed to override satiety cues and keep you eating past fullness. All of that helps. It really does. But expecting hunger to vanish while you’re in a calorie deficit or training harder is delusional. That inevitable hunger, the one that creeps in late at night and whispers for you to get out of bed, will still come. The difference between you and the women who actually lose and keep off the weight is they simply roll over and ignore it, while you let it drag you to the kitchen. Early humans used to go days without seeing their next meal. Do you think they catastrophized at the first pang of hunger or acclimated out of necessity? Making Peace With Discomfort To achieve your goals, you’ll need to put your head down and focus, and stop getting sidetracked by your body’s cheap tricks to maintain equilibrium. Your body has a natural set point : its biologically preferred weight range where it feels “comfortable.” Dip below it, and it’ll push back by ramping up hunger and dialing down energy through lethargy. Go above it, and you may get the opposite signals. However, persistently overeating and ignoring those cues will lead your body to adapt to a higher set point. Now you’ve got more friction to get back to where you started, let alone your real goal. That’s the real price of being hyper-sensitive to hunger cues and overly placating to your impulses. These are trainable muscles. Sit with your (modest, not starvation) hunger for a few weeks. Give it a sincere effort. Think of it like a mindfulness exercise in self-control. When you come out the other side having lost weight and realizing nothing catastrophic happened, just some temporary discomfort, tell me it still feels as hard as it did on day one. Master this, and you won’t need Ozempic, convoluted meal plans, or Olympian workouts. A recent article in The New York Times reported that restaurants in major cities are shrinking portions to match the smaller appetites of GLP-1 users, offering miniature meals and tasting menus. The irony? If you chose portions like that on your own and stuck with them, you’d train your appetite without needing a prescription to suppress it. GLP-1s like Ozempic are great tools for people with unmanaged diabetes and severe obesity, but they’re not a substitute for discipline. At some point, you have to get off the drug, and then what? Your thinspo probably doesn’t have a magical hack or an expensive prescription. They’ve just mastered sitting with hunger and delaying gratification. Master that, and you don’t need Ozempic, convoluted meal plans, or Olympian workouts. My tough love advice, should you choose to accept it? Get over yourself, or make peace with a higher body fat percentage.