Follow-up: Tracking intake honestly when appetite is absent posts 61–90

The practical problem is that appetite suppression makes hitting a target genuinely hard, and "eat more protein" ignores the actual constraint.

Timing of protein: spreading protein intake across the day, with some at each meal, is more practical than trying to hit the whole target at one sitting on suppressed appetite.

I would treat that as a working assumption and revisit it.

Narrowing post #76, because the general version has more than one answer.

I have no financial interest in anything named in this thread and I want to say so before I comment on Tracking intake, because it is the sort of subject where it matters.

Everything in post #74 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.

Practical answer on Tracking intake, since the theoretical one is upthread: do the simplest check first, write down the result, and only then decide whether the complicated explanation is needed. It usually is not.

Eating anything at all: on substantial appetite suppression, eating enough total calories to maintain lean mass is the priority. Protein comes second to total intake.

I would rather post the uncertainty than round it away.

I had written a reply contradicting post #78 and deleted it. Here is what survived.

The version of Tracking intake that circulates here is a simplification of a simplification. It is not wrong, but it has lost the conditions under which it holds, and those conditions are where the interesting cases live.

Self-reported intake is optimistic by a consistent margin in the published comparisons, which is worth applying to your own numbers.

I am reporting what happened, not recommending it.

Where intake has fallen a long way, protein is usually the first thing to fall because it is the least appealing macronutrient when appetite is reduced.

Written in the hope of being told what I have missed.

Where I part company with post #79, and it is a narrow parting.

Liquid sources are tolerated better than solid ones by many people here, and that is a practical observation rather than a nutritional principle.

Worth stating the null on Tracking intake before we explain it: the observation may be nothing. That possibility deserves a sentence and usually does not get one.

Published guidance on protein during weight loss is reasonably consistent and is easy to find, which makes this one of the better-evidenced practical questions here.

Not the whole picture, but the part of it I can speak to.

Tracking intake came up in a thread eighteen months ago and was answered well. I cannot find it, which is itself the problem, so here is the reconstruction.

I had written a reply contradicting post #83 and deleted it. Here is what survived.

I read the earlier replies on Tracking intake twice before writing this, because I had assumed the opposite and wanted to be sure I was disagreeing with what was said rather than what I expected.

Confirming post #87 from a second method, which matters more than confirming it from a second person.

Fibre and fluid tend to fall alongside protein when intake drops, and the constipation reported here follows from that as much as from the mechanism.

I read post #87 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.

Checked the Tracking intake claim against the primary source this morning. It survives, with a narrower scope than the version quoted here. Posting the narrower scope.

Useful. I had the fact and not the reason, which turns out to be the important half.