You might find it helpful to read about "adaptive thermogenesis" at federal site citations:
The increasing prevalence of obesity and its comorbidities reflects the interaction of genes that favor the storage of excess energy as fat with an environment that provides ad libitum availability of energy-dense foods and encourages an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. Although weight...
www.nature.com
Suthy is right, that the psychological aspect of weight loss or obesity is powerful and can control your ability to see accurately. The bottom line is extremely ordinary: burn more calories than you take in. That means movement of some kind must be paired with calories eaten.
That's why tracking is important, and that tracking should be done physically, pen to paper. Every bite. Every crumb. Once you know what you're eating, and you're realistic about it, you can change the size or amount accordingly. People who cook or clean up after meals often taste, or clean up leftover bits on the family plates by nibbling. This is the "human garbage can" routine where we are in denial about how much we eat because we only guess about how much is on our plate or stirring spoon.
If we were that able to be accurate, we never would have become obese and needed surgical intervention in the first place.
And starvation dieting is the worst thing you can do, because our bodies kick into adaptive thermogenesis to keep us from starving. The less you eat, the more your body's starvation response will kick in to hang on to calories.
You can pair your hunger pangs with any sort of movement, even walking in place while watching tv or stirring a pot, or sitting in a chair, moving your knees as if walking. After a while, you may even be able to develop an association with hunger and movement, where your sense of pain from hunger goes away as soon as you start to move deliberately.
This was the hardest thing for me to do after surgery, but I did it, and can testify it works. It's a pain in the ass, but after a while, it even becomes comforable.
