What If Eating Less Isn’t the Answer?
For most of his life, Sheldon believed weight loss came down to one basic rule: eat less. If the scale was going up, he needed to cut back. If the scale stopped moving, he needed to cut back even more. That idea had been reinforced so many times, and over so many years, that it became almost impossible for him to imagine another way.
The problem was that Sheldon had already taken restriction about as far as a person can take it.
When Weight Loss Becomes a Test of Endurance
At one point, Sheldon followed a medically supervised liquid diet that provided only about 600 to 700 calories a day. He lost more than 150 pounds and eventually got down to around 195. On paper, it looked like an extraordinary success.
But the experience taught him very little about how to live once the diet ended. He was hungry, he thought constantly about food, and he remembers watching food shows while drinking his meals and imagining what he would eat when he was finally allowed to eat normally again. Once regular food returned, so did the old struggle, and over time the weight came back.
That pattern left Sheldon with a powerful lesson, but not a helpful one. Whenever his weight increased, he assumed the answer was to eat less. Hunger became something to tolerate, and dieting became an exercise in seeing how long he could endure it.
Years later, even after discovering keto and then carnivore, that old thinking was still there.
The Strange Idea That He Might Need More Food
By the time Sheldon joined our coaching group, he was eating around 1,500 calories a day, often waiting until six o’clock in the evening for his one meal. He had lost weight initially, but he had stalled around 335 pounds. He was tired, hungry, and spending much of the day simply trying to make it to dinner.
His instinct was familiar: lower the calories again.
Instead, he kept hearing me talk about people who were undereating. He heard other members talk about reverse dieting and increasing their food after long periods of restriction. None of this sounded reasonable to him at first. If eating less had always been the way he lost weight, how could eating more possibly help?
I understand that fear because I have lived it myself. When you have spent years believing that your body is too large because you eat too much, increasing your food intake can feel reckless. The number on the scale may already frighten you, and now someone is suggesting that you deliberately do the thing you have been taught to avoid.
Eventually, Sheldon decided that what he was doing clearly was not working anyway.
He Ate More, and the World Did Not End
Based on his calculations, Sheldon decided to increase his intake by roughly 700 calories a day, bringing him to around 2,200. He added another meal instead of waiting all day to eat. Almost immediately, one of the biggest changes had nothing to do with the scale.
He was no longer ravenous.
He had more energy. He was not spending the entire afternoon negotiating with himself about whether he could make it until dinner. For the first time in a very long time, eating did not feel like a daily battle between hunger and willpower.
His weight did go up at first, by roughly 10 to 13 pounds. Then it leveled out. Sheldon stayed there for several months, eating considerably more food while maintaining roughly the same weight, and that gave him space to ask a question he had never really considered before: What if chasing the lowest possible number on the scale was not the same thing as becoming healthy?
After all, he had already been 195 pounds once. He had reached that weight while consuming a tiny amount of liquid calories and thinking about food constantly. A lower number had not necessarily meant a healthier or more sustainable life.
The Goal Became Health, Not Hunger
From there, Sheldon began paying more attention to how different foods affected him rather than simply trying to shrink the amount he ate. He removed cheese and noticed some improvement. Later, he replaced the bacon he loved with more ground beef while keeping his overall calories fairly similar.
His weight began moving down again.
Eventually, he reached around 210 pounds while still eating roughly 2,000 to 2,200 calories a day. But the most meaningful part of his story is not that he lost weight again. It is that he described himself as no longer being at war with his body.
His thinking about exercise changed, too. Instead of seeing movement mainly as a way to burn calories, he began thinking about muscle, strength, metabolism, and how he felt. The scale became one piece of information rather than the final verdict on whether he was succeeding.
That is a very different way to live.
Perspective matters.
Coaching gives us a place to talk through stalls, hunger, food choices, fear, and all the practical questions that come up along the way. There is accountability, but there is also support, perspective, and the reassurance that you do not have to spend the rest of your life obsessing over food.
