The stupid thing is that I was only hungry once or twice early on, and
never had shooting hunger pangs.

For years I thought getting back to 180lbs would require months of
agony, but that was IMO the low-fat mafia's brainwashing.

I'm not a low-carb / ketosis proponent but counting calories and making
sure I ate ENOUGH food was just as important as making sure I didn't
eat TOO MUCH.

It's a fine line, and John Walker's Hacker's Diet's lessons on using
the scale as a feedback device to tell you how the diet is progressing
was an important component. I think there is a strong temptation to
shoot for accelerated losses, but IME I think losing too fast leads to
stalls later on and this messes up the long-term loss process.

Slow & steady worked for me, and since breaking the old habits means a
lifelong new commitment, I don't think people have to hurry to get to
their target weight. Just take every week as it comes, and a week with
a real 1lb loss is win, a big win. Granted people with hundreds of
pounds to lose probably need to be more aggressive, but even losing
400lbs can be done over 4 years at 2lbs/week. For a 6' man at age 35
this is about 2000 kcal/day, not counting any exercise outputs, which
is a rather large amount of food if you choose the food wisely.

With 400kcal of activity/day over 12hrs that's an average of
200kcal/hour of caloric budget. Sure, a pint of ice cream isn't going
to fit in that window but a lot of good, filling food can.