What seems most likely to me is that being at a reduced bodyweight has hormonal etc. consequences that tend to make us "lazy" and/or hungrier or more interested in food or to have more of a drive to eat, whatever you want to call it. Insulin response both to food just after a meal, and the increased "fasting" insulin if liver glycogen levels are relatively replete between meals is still an important factor. But the lower body fat levels are relative to where they started out (or relative to where they'd "like" to be, preobese is a lot like postobese), the more responsive we are to a given insulin level. I sort of look at maintenance vs. weight loss as a sort of lobster trap. On a given diet, what you eat to lose weight will be less insulinogenic than what you eat to maintain. An exception to this is if you just keep eating what you ate to lose until you plateau, and then call that plateau maintenance. Otherwise if you lose until you hit a certain weight, even if you just increase calories in the same macro ratio as you lost on, the insulin is going to be higher--and paradoxically, this increased food intake might actually make you hungrier.

I maintained at 170 for about a decade, with lots of bounces down to 160 and back up. Since going to ketogenic ratios two years ago--I've maintained at 160. Some bounces down to 154 and back up. There's some debate about whether diets should be keto or not. I don't know if this works better for me because it's more ketogenic, or because it's a lower insulin approach. Some could argue calories--because if I want to keep carbs very low, and protein in a certain range, I sort of have to limit fat, at least to a degree, to avoid getting into 90 percent plus fat intake territory--past 90 percent, it's hard to say how safe things are, there's no human data.

When I first went keto I'd dieted down to 154 and was binging on ridiculous things almost daily. Keto nipped that in the bud, but eating off plan for a holiday, or a bit of booze and peanuts once a week ramped things up.

With psychology, I think it's possible that eating ketogenically makes me more likely to think my mama loved me when I was a baby. It does seem to put me in a better mood, on average. But I think it's more likely to be our body/brain's natural drive to maintain itself, with our feelings about food, "self-medication" etc. trailing along behind. I doubt the idea of self-sabotage that's put out there. Usually self sabotage involves too immediate a reward of some sort, when we're trying to figure out why we do something, we tend to sort of make stuff up after the fact. When I was a kid, "why did you do that?" I didn't have an answer. Now maybe I do. You could take that as an increase of awareness. Or the development of the faculty of just plain making stuff up.