> Do you have any idea of how many calories you eat per day?
My baseline was in the ballpark of 3000-4000 cal/day. I'm losing about 5 lb/month, or 1.25 lb/week; assuming it's all fat, that's a 4400 cal/week deficit or ~625/day. 600 cal a day less is kind of a lot! Some people starting fatter than I was take bigger doses and have bigger deficits.
> Are they exaggerating?
In my experience: I'm not hungry for breakfast at all. Lunch: I try to have it, definitely have it if I exercised. (But if I didn't exercise it's pretty easy to just ignore hunger signals and eat my first meal at dinner.) Dinner is like, smaller than it was when I wasn't on the drugs. And then some post-dinner snacking.
I'm on the low end of the Rx dose range (2.5-15mg/week); on a higher dose, eating even less is plausible.
> Or do they talk about not eating dinner, but that's because they had 1,700 calorie lunch at the burger place?
1700 cal meals are mostly out of the question for me on these drugs. Your gastric emptying is slowed down, so you just can't house big meals in the same way.
> Or is that just during weight loss, and then once a target weight is hit, they're eating like a normal (healthy-weight) person again?
Yes, I think this is a big piece of it. To actually lose weight, you need to eat less than the sustainable steady state.
My baseline was in the ballpark of 3000-4000 cal/day. I'm losing about 5 lb/month, or 1.25 lb/week; assuming it's all fat, that's a 4400 cal/week deficit or ~625/day. 600 cal a day less is kind of a lot! Some people starting fatter than I was take bigger doses and have bigger deficits.
> Are they exaggerating?
In my experience: I'm not hungry for breakfast at all. Lunch: I try to have it, definitely have it if I exercised. (But if I didn't exercise it's pretty easy to just ignore hunger signals and eat my first meal at dinner.) Dinner is like, smaller than it was when I wasn't on the drugs. And then some post-dinner snacking.
I'm on the low end of the Rx dose range (2.5-15mg/week); on a higher dose, eating even less is plausible.
> Or do they talk about not eating dinner, but that's because they had 1,700 calorie lunch at the burger place?
1700 cal meals are mostly out of the question for me on these drugs. Your gastric emptying is slowed down, so you just can't house big meals in the same way.
> Or is that just during weight loss, and then once a target weight is hit, they're eating like a normal (healthy-weight) person again?
Yes, I think this is a big piece of it. To actually lose weight, you need to eat less than the sustainable steady state.