I Lost the Weight without Hunger

A simple journey but no easy answers

I won’t go into my long struggle with weight loss. I assume it’s similar to yours.

Chubby kid, always hungry, vegan in my twenties, tried every diet known to man…yawn. I was always exercising, too, playing sports from childhood to college.

I’ve weighed about 140 lbs most of my adult life no matter what I did. While that isn’t huge, I am a small-boned 5'4" female, and at times my weight climbed beyond 160.

It wasn’t comfortable. Clothes weren’t comfortable. I didn’t wear short shorts. I hated shopping.

I have a simple explanation for why I’m 30 lbs lighter today, right around 110, even though I’m post-menopausal and exercise only sporadically.

Although the answer is fairly straightforward, I don’t think you’ll like what you are about to hear.

If you are familiar with NOOM and Weight Watchers (WW), you know calorie counting is a popular way to lose weight. When I did WW, I was ready to gnaw off someone’s arm by the end of the day.

On WW, I got 29 points a day. I still remember the number of points, fifteen years later. I still resent not getting 35 points.

Sounds like a lot of points, right? That’s a cheeseburger and fries with a diet soda or a Cobb salad with 2 TBS of real salad dressing and a small piece of bread with a pat of butter.

Here’s Why I Could Never Lose Weight

Being hungry all the time is like walking with a pebble in your shoe, except emptying the shoe, trying another shoe, or going barefoot only helps temporarily.

The pebble never goes away. I was always very hungry before meals, and if I waited too long to eat, ravenous.

If you are hungry and overweight — a condition most of us can relate to — it’s even more annoying. This pebble makes me look fat!

People didn’t see me as fat, but I never felt comfortable with food or my body. I spent way too much time thinking over what to eat, regretting what I just ate, and restricting calories so I wouldn’t gain weight.

I didn’t enjoy food so much as careen from one meal to the next.

On 29 WW points, I couldn’t lose weight because I was always hungry.

A person can tolerate hunger, like loneliness, for a little while, but it’s not sustainable. The experience of gnawing hunger leads, inevitably, to surrendering and snacking, binging, or nibbling — just like loneliness leads to online chat rooms and picking up hookers.

So every few days I’d overeat. Truthfully, even if I ate 33 points a day, I was still sometimes hungry.

And with months of effort, I could only get down to 133 pounds.

I’m not knocking WW or NOOM, just describing why eating plans that include daily hunger cannot work. Ever.

I’m Never Hungry Anymore

A few years ago, I took a stab at a laughably complicated diet called AIP (Autoimmune Protocol), which excludes a long list but basically you can’t eat anything processed or calorie-dense: sugar, nuts, grains, potatoes, and dairy products. You are left with meat and veg (except nightshades) and yams.

I lost weight, down to about 123, but as soon as I added rice and white potatoes back, portion creep set in.

If I ate 100 grains of rice on Tuesdays, I’d want 114 on Wednesday — not that I was counting grains of rice.

It turns out I have a sensitivity to carbs, like nearly everyone.

How do I know almost everyone has carb sensitivity, like me? Check out women in my age category (56) in the grocery store. Go to Walmart, Costco, or anywhere the average American woman shops. They are usually overweight.

So are the men. Statistics show that 80% of American men between 50 and 60 are overweight or obese.

Then, out of the blue, I thought, why not try keto?

It seemed crazy, but I was almost there anyway, except for yams and tragically overpriced cassava chips.

After three days of no veg, fruit, or yams I discovered a Hungarian program that proposed a carnivore diet. A what?

Doesn’t that cause scurvy?

The Hungarians and Epilepsy

Seizures aren’t that well understood. Although modern drugs help, many children do not respond to drugs. About 100 years ago, a doctor figured out that a restricted, high-fat diet could cure most cases of epilepsy.

It is now known that epilepsy is a metabolic illness.

The Classic Ketogenic Diet (CKD) has been used ever since to treat epilepsy, although it fell out of favor in the US for a while after the newer seizure drugs hit the market.

So these Hungarians have loads of data on treating epileptics using CKD. They began to experiment with CKD (no plant foods, ever) on other illnesses, and the diet had an extraordinary effect.

I had some hope CKD would reverse my thyroid disease.

It’s gotten a lot better. My symptoms are 95% gone, but I still drink coffee and have heavy cream daily, and sometimes eat cheese — and I am told people with autoimmune disease should stick with fatty meat from ruminant animals and avoid dairy products and ALL plant foods.

I ate only lamb and beef for the first four months, and I lost 17 pounds. I got down to 106, which wasn’t that important to me, but it was a shock.

Now I eat dairy products and I’m around 110.

My weight loss is entirely due to not being hungry all the time. I eat twice a day, usually not till 11 am.

I do not have scurvy. I am never hungry. I’ve learned to eat more slowly.

The last time I was 106 pounds, I was 7 years old.

This Isn’t For Everyone

A lot of people believe eating a vegan diet is the only thing that will help the planet, but others say that harvesting grains and growing nuts have just as much potential to negatively impact ecosystems. I’ve read meat can be farmed using regenerative methods, which help rather than hurt ecosystems.

My opinion is that we have far too many people on the planet. I’ll buy my 1/2 cow, raised on grass, down in Chidester, AR, and continue feeling what I assume metabolically normal, thin people feel: not hungry.

Metabolically healthy Americans are in the minority. A recent University of North Carolina study indicated that 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy.

I was a vegan once. It didn’t go well. After several years of veganism, I developed thyroid disease. My mental health suffered.

This diet has reversed:

— Depression (since age 12) — Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) — Anxiety — Poor Sleep — Low thyroid (Hashimoto’s) — my lab numbers are near normal and I have no symptoms, so I consider it controlled as long as I eat carnivore — All menopause symptoms — Lifelong weight problems

So, I guess you could say weight loss is simple. I think a lot of people eating a keto diet can relate.

It is not an easy answer, but I won’t go back to being hungry all the time. I didn’t realize how annoying that pebble in my shoe was until I got rid of it.

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Jean Campbell recently started her first Substack newsletter to laser focus on getting her book, City of Lies: A Street Hustler’s Omaha Story published.