Immeduiately after eating, one's metabolism rises temporarily to digest what has been eaten. It's called "thermogenesis." We all do it. (It's helpful to harness it.)

That means that if you get the amounts right, and the time frame right, you not only get a constant-fuel state and are never really very hungry (unless you've exercised your buns off), you ALSO burn not only what you ate, but a bit more. You burn off weight most efficiently when you can balance all of that.

It does not compute for food addicts, but if the weight did not come on as a result of addiction, it can come off with a few scientific tweaks. Absent addiction, what is hard is not doing it but learning enough about it to make it work in your favor.

The ideal mini-meal components as explained to me long ago by a diabetic friend are: a fruit, a carb, and a protein. Always. ALWAYS. The fruit will start to burn first, and then the carb will kick in, and the protein will keep it all burning slow and steady. Amounts, picture a half a tennis ball (or half a pingpong ball) for each component and adjust as needed for activity level-- for example more carb for more activity, less fruit if it's a concentrate like jam or juice, etc. Again, the trick is to balance them correctly to one's activity level and food preferences.


It's not well known, but (absent food addiction) it is not a practical necessity to undergo gastric bypass in order to reduce meal sizes significantly. One can study the nearest bariatric program, see what they are doing and eating, and simply emulate it.

The change is mental-- eat to live instead of live to eat, and eat what is needed for the actual situation at hand-- remembering always that if one is hungry in ten minutes or 2 hours, one can always eat another mini-meal.


Treating food like an enemy only reinforces the "power" the food has. We're so much smarter than that, really. The more likely real culprit-- the rationale for this thread, right?-- is the activity level. When I am doing the workouts I LIKE to do, I can easily burn 3000 calories a day, eating as much ice cream as my digestion will allow.

All this of course does not fit popular cultural ideas about food, but, "Who's shrinking?" I reply, "and who ain't?"

~Susan
(Apol for typ[os: vision issues)