To me, the main advantage of intermittent fasting is diet adherence. I find it much easier to eat less if I eat less often. Plus, for some reason, skipping brea

To me, the main advantage of intermittent fasting is diet adherence. I find it much easier to eat less if I eat less often. Plus, for some reason, skipping breakfast helps me avoid being hungry around 10-11 AM. So win-win I guess. I've been looking around a bit into diets, and it seems that "all diets work", if they have you eat less calories than you need. But it would seem that that if is a tall order. Apparently people have a tendency to underestimate how much they eat, so just a basic "don't eat more than X calories" doesn't really work in practice, unless people are willing to do calorie counting, which isn't always practical. And if the diet is "strict", as in "you eat these things in particular and nothing else", there's a psychological (for lack of a better term) component that comes into play. On the one hand, there's the calorie deficit. At the limit, you will probably not adhere to a 0 calorie diet. So the deficit should be "reasonable". I guess defining what that means is the hard part. Then there's the "wants" part, and also the effect some foods have on your appetite. Eating X calories from only Mars bars is not the same as eating a "balanced" diet. In the former case, you'll probably be miserable and feel hungry all the time. In the latter, you'll probably feel OK, though at first it will probably be tough. There's also the fact that some foods are very palatable and just make you want to keep on eating. I think this is very, very important to bear in mind. Just because food X is "healthy" and / or has low calories, it doesn't mean you can eat a ton of it without gaining weight. Fruit is one example that comes to mind, bananas in my case.