>If you want to lose weight, put less food on your plate. Most of what we know of as self-control is really having the skills to avoid temptation.

Funny you mention this, because I have the personal experience to answer your question, yes there is a distinction. I've told the story here before, but I'll tell it again. As a teen / young adult, could eat as much food as a wanted and burn it all away. A daily food intake might be a sandwich and chips for lunch, 2-3 full bowls of cereal and milk for an afternoon "snack". Dinner, with seconds. And then depending on the evening, cookies, chips, cracker and cheese or icecream for an evening snack. I left high school on the "needs a few more pounds" side of the weight scale. And that ability to eat that much food (and the appetite to back it up) never left. But the burning of the calories did. As I got older, weight kept climbing. Oh sure, I did the "put less food on the plate" thing. I did calorie counting. Even managed to lose some weight doing it. A whole 30 pounds at my best over an agonizing year. Every day was a constant battle with myself to look at the goals of where I wanted to be and fight every fiber of my being to not eat more food. I was hungry all the time. And it never stuck. No matter what I did I couldn't keep up with it.

And I assumed it was a lack of self control. A lack of will power. I assumed I just needed to try harder. And try harder I did. Time and time and time again. Nothing. Then recently I started a medication, with a side effect of reducing your appetite. Suddenly, I'm losing weight with ease. And I learned something interesting. The first week, I was convinced I was having anxiety attacks. Like clockwork every day, around 6 hours after taking the meds, my stomach would start knotting up. I'd start feeling this weird feeling like something was wrong and I needed to do something about it. And then it hit me, ~6 hours after taking the medications was also lunch time, or dinner time. I was getting hungry. And what was novel was realizing I'd never NOT been hungry my entire life since I was a teenager. I thought I was having anxiety attacks because I had never once felt the feeling of not being hungry turning into hunger. I stopped eating when I physically couldn't eat any more food, or the food ran out, never because I was satiated by the food. "Getting hungry" again was just the feeling of being stuffed going away. But I was always hungry.

Since starting the medication, I've lost close to 50 pounds. And it's SOOO much easier than it's ever been in the past. I can eat a normal meal, and just be satisfied with that. I can think to myself "I'm hungry, I should get a snack", and then follow that thought up with "I'm about to have lunch/dinner in an hour, I can wait" and actually follow through on that. I can stop thinking about that snack. I can count my calories for the day, see that I'm at my limit and just make the decision to stop eating any more food. Heck there are days where I have to make the conscious decision to make and eat more food because I'm too far under my limit for the day, but I've just not been hungry that day.

So yes, I'm putting less food on my plate, just like I could and did before the medication. But let me assure you that doing the things to "avoid temptation" is a hell of a lot easier when your body and mind aren't actively working against you.