But if your body thinks it has just gone though a famine, wouldn't your hunger go into overdrive to the point that what was once your "maintenance" amount of fuel seems to your body to be inadequate for the purpose of replacing the fuel lost during the previous famine and storing up fuel in preparation for the next?
Your experience is that 95% of the people who attain their ideal weight on low calorie/increased exercise diets actually CHOSE to become blimps over simple moderation. Either the human race is almost entirely screwed up, or there is something going on here.
Your hunger goes into overdrive when your stomach shrinks. Worst week of a diet is shrink week, vicious hunger pains, the body does NOT like the stomach to shrink. BUT if you make it out the other side the diet then becomes much more self sustaining because you’ve now shrunk your appetite, your stomach now only WANTS as much food as you’ve been feeding it. Depending on the diet you’re on shrink week is usually in the second month, maybe third. That’s the week a lot of people bail. If you survive til the “end” when you go into maintenance you’ll actually re-expand a bit for the new extra food.