"I think the biggest benefit I've gotten is that I enjoy food very much now, which I didn't before. Because by sticking to 3 meals a day with at least 4 hours between them, I eat when I'm hungry, but not so much that I eat everything in front of me. So I feel a real pleasure after eating that lasts for hours afterwards.
I am relieved of the guilt I used to feel when I ate something very filling, I now know that if I am hungry I have to eat and, as you rightly said, when I swim 2 km in the morning I cannot eat 2 slices of pineapple... The other thing is that I have learned to trust my body even more because the advice you gave me was things I had already sensed but was confused by various misconceptions I had about what is healthy and what is not.
Finally, I have enriched my diet with things that I either avoided because I thought they were high in calories (olive paste), or I hadn't thought about them (legumes with cereal and ginger) or I didn't know they existed. I haven't lost all the pounds yet, but the ones I have lost (and they are not a few) I didn't even understand how it happened and in no way felt like I was trying to lose weight."