The white castle was hyperbole, of course :) I understand what you are talking about as I have lost a lot of weight and gained a lot of muscle mass in the past

The white castle was hyperbole, of course :) I understand what you are talking about as I have lost a lot of weight and gained a lot of muscle mass in the past few months. I used MyFitnessPal to keep track of my diet for the first month or so. It's great because you can scan the bar code and 9 times out of 10 the nutrition facts are already there. I go back and track my food one day every other week or so to make sure I'm still sticking to good eating habits. However, starting with only the concept of calories in - calories out actually winds up being more difficult. If you have a candy bar and a soda today, you just wasted 400 of your calories. You mentioned a 1,000 calorie deficit, which is where I was at and I was eating 1,200-1,400 per day. So, you essentially just ate 30% of your calories on items that will not make you feel satiated at all. In fact, they often times will make you feel more hungry and lead to sugar spikes. Now, compare that to someone who cares about healthy eating. You could eat: 6 ounces of chicken with salsa on it, grilled bell peppers, a piece of whole grain bread, a handful of almonds, and more broccoli and spinach then you could feasibly eat in one sitting. Eating healthy makes you more full (which makes the 16 hour fasts very easy to follow through on) and gives you better macros for fat/carbs/protein. I eat more now than I have ever eaten before, and all I had to do was change the contents of my meals a bit.