Just as a student should limit extracurricular activities so their schoolwork doesn't suffer,
we need to pick the food we eat carefully so that we don't eat too much.

We live in a society of overabundance.
We have a million choices to make every day.
We need some sort of internal guide or compass to guide us in those choices or we'll get lost.
We must FOCUS and use self-discipline as we make our choices in life.
In the case of eating, we must remember that we can't eat EVERYTHING we desire.

We must prioritize and pick fewer items or smaller portions of the food we want to eat
if we're going to lose weight and maintain that weight loss.

 It's called self-discipline and it's just a part of being a mature adult.

             
A comment by a DietHobby member directed me to this article, which I found well worth reading.

What Is the World's 'Best Diet'?
By YONI FREEDHOFF   - July 18, 2012

There sure are a great many diets. Low-carb, low-fat, vegan, raw, paleo, gluten-free, and on, and on. Which one should you choose? Is there one diet that's been proven to be head-and-shoulders better than others for weight management? If so, how might you figure out which one it is?

Looking to bookstores won't be terrifically helpful, as it will likely take time to wade through the 124,000 or so diet titles that currently populate shelves. Looking to the internet may be confusing, too, as you'll immediately encounter duelling nutritional gurus—each one loudly discrediting the next. Looking to your friends will only get you as far as where they're currently at, since they'll undoubtedly champion whatever it is they're currently trying themselves.

So how about looking to the scientific literature, will that shed light on things?

Unfortunately not.

The fact of the matter is that despite the $60 billion a year North American weight-loss industry; the incredible desire and motivation of folks trying to lose; and the medical researchers that have published literally tens of thousands of dueling articles on diets and obesity, as far as weight management goes, there is no single "best diet." That conclusion might lead a person to bemoan the futility of dieting, but maybe the glass is actually half full.

What if there were many best diets? What if part of society's struggle to lose weight is the pervasive notion that there's only one right way to go? Could our belief that dietary rigidity, suffering, and restriction are the ingredients to success in fact be distracting us from the truth—that there are innumerable roads to success?

Here the scientific literature is helpful. Looking at an ongoing 18-year-old research project called the National Weight Control Registry—a 10,000-plus member registry of adults who've lost more than 60 pounds and kept them off for 5.5 years—reveals that there are no absolutes to success. Registrants have lost weight every which way there is, from fast to slow, from low-carb to low-fat, both on their own and with programmatic help. And while they do share some habits in common—many eat breakfast and limit TV time—still 22 percent of them skip breakfast and 48 percent watch more than 10 hours of TV a week. Clearly there are different dietary and lifestyle strokes for different folks.

Carefully controlled laboratory studies echo the registry's findings. One such study conducted by Columbia University's Rudy Leibel and colleagues in 1992 followed the impact that diets differing in fat and carbohydrate content had on body weight. What they found was that if they held calories constant, participants' weight remained constant, even in the face of diets that ranged from 15 to 80 percent carbohydrate and from 0 to 70 percent fat. Translation: Irrespective of diet type—whether low-carb, or high-carb; low-fat, or high-fat—in a perfectly controlled laboratory environment, weight stays stable when calories are fixed. Of course life's not a perfectly controlled laboratory environment, and what leaves one person happily satisfied will leave another wanting.

So what does all this mean?

Your best diet is the one that keeps your calories reduced, your hunger ...

I recently read this interesting article in the New York Times. Gina Kolata is an American science journalist, and her book, "ReThinking Thin" (2007) was quite informative.  I'm familiar with Dr. Leibel's research about Leptin and how the "reduced obese" burn less calories when doing the same exercise as someone who has always been normal weight. 

In Dieting, Magic Isn’t a Substitute for Science
By GINA KOLATA

Is a calorie really just a calorie? Do calories from a soda have the same effect on your waistline as an equivalent number from an apple or a piece of chicken?

For decades the question has percolated among researchers — not to mention dieters. It gained new momentum with a study published last month in The Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting that after losing weight, people on a high-fat, high-protein diet burned more calories than those eating more carbohydrates.

We asked Dr. Jules Hirsch, emeritus professor and emeritus physician in chief at Rockefeller University, who has been researching obesity for nearly 60 years, about the state of the research. Dr. Hirsch, who receives no money from pharmaceutical companies or the diet industry, wrote some of the classic papers describing why it is so hard to lose weight and why it usually comes back.

The JAMA study has gotten a lot of attention. Should people stay on diets that are high in fat and protein if they want to keep the weight off?

What they did in that study is they took 21 people and fed them a diet that made them lose about 10 to 20 percent of their weight. Then, after their weight had leveled off, they put the subjects on one of three different maintenance diets. One is very, very low in carbohydrates and high in fat, essentially the Atkins diet. Another is the opposite — high in carbohydrates, low in fat. The third is in between. Then they measured total energy expenditure — in calories burned — and resting energy expenditure.

They report that people on the Atkins diet were burning off more calories. Ergo, the diet is a good thing. Such low-carbohydrate diets usually give a more rapid initial weight loss than diets with the same amount of calories but with more carbohydrates. But when carbohydrate levels are low in a diet and fat content is high, people lose water. That can confuse attempts to measure energy output. The usual measurement is calories per unit of lean body mass — the part of the body that is not made up of fat. When water is lost, lean body mass goes down, and so calories per unit of lean body mass go up. It’s just arithmetic. There is no hocus-pocus, no advantage to the dieters. Only water, no fat, has been lost.

The paper did not provide information to know how the calculations were done, but this is a likely explanation for the result.

So the whole thing might have been an illusion? All that happened was the people temporarily lost water on the high-protein diets?

P...

Reading the forum posts of others is a helpful weight-loss and maintenance tool for me. Most of us share common problems in our quest to follow ANY diet or food plan, no matter which one we independently choose. One of my favorite weight-loss forums is the No S Diet Forum, and I've put a link to it here, under RESOURCES, Links.

One of the threads I read there today talked about feeling resentful because we can't eat whatever we want, whenever we want. This is a common problem for almost everyone … including me. The following quote from a forum member on that thread gives excellent advice.

"The resentment comes from a part of your brain that doesn't work on logic and reason, it's more instinctive than that. I have heard it described on this board as the "tummy toddler". Like a toddler, it wants what it wants, RIGHT NOW, and you can't really reason with it. But also like a toddler, it can't be allowed to do whatever it wants whenever it wants, because that's not good for you (and therefore for it, since it's part of you).

The resentment does go away, but it takes time for that to happen. The worst of it for me was in the first couple of months.

One thing that can help is to keep your expectations reasonable. Don't expect quick weight loss, or to adapt to new eating habits overnight with no resentment or screw-ups. Habits just do not work that way. If you expect them to work that way, you're going to get frustrated, and it's not going to help anything. That would be like dropping a glass and expecting it to hover in front of you, rather than falling down, and getting upset with yourself or with the glass when it doesn't do that. Or, to keep going with the toddler analogy, it's as if you had let your toddler eat only junk food, decided that you were going to try to get him or her to eat healthier food, and expecting the toddler not to complain about the change.

You're changing your eating habits. That's a hard thing to do. It just is. Don't beat yourself up over it if it doesn't come easy- it doesn't for the vast majority of people who have ever tried it." 

                                      
This morning I sipped a cup of tea while I thumbed through a couple of my hundreds of inspirational diet books. My weight has gotten higher up than it's been for a long time, and it seems to be staying up. My fear is that, unless I can reverse this trend, it will continue to climb and climb, first into overweight, then obesity, and then back into morbid obesity, as it has so many times before, and as it does for so many other reduced obese people. I've been feeling like I'm at that in-between place. That place of inertia where the pendulum has stopped, and the task of starting it again seems incredibly difficult… if not impossible.

I read lots of good thoughts about mindful eating, which is an important concept, but struggled again with deciding on the type of eating personal plan I wanted to use today. What is consistent for me is an approximate calorie number that I work not to go over, but most of the other eating factors are usually up for grabs.

There are very few diets in existence that I haven't tried at one time or another. This is all part of my own personal dieting hobby. If I ever found one particular way of eating that I was able to follow indefinitely, I would do that. However, so far, I haven't discovered such a food plan, so my own way is to switch from one to another, and to run personal experiments while factoring in what I have learned about myself and my body and its calorie burning ability. This is not "yo-yo" dieting. This is dieting all of the time, but with different dieting plans.

 This morning an idea came to me that is different for me.. I decided that … for today… I would eat small portions of whatever healthy foods appealed to me at reasonable intervals throughout the day, BUT FOR TODAY, I would divide those small portions in half, and eat only half of what I would normally eat to maintain my current weight, and either save away or trash the rest BEFORE taking my first bite. If I find this effective, and reasonable, then I might continue doing it for awhile. I will still, of course, record everything I eat today in my computer software food journal since no matter what food plan I use, it is important for me to remain accountable for every bite, every day.

Finding something different to try sort of perked me up a bit, which led me to get out my ipod and earphones and spend some time on the treadmill and gazelle right after breakfast. Now, I feel pleased with myself for exercising on Saturday, and for eating a very small breakfast, and I am encouraged by the possibility of a successful weekend food day.

 This is how it is going for me today here in the land of DietHobby.