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...

I recently read a helpful forum post about maintenance, which quotes a statement
frequently used by me. This post is quoted below:

"Being fat is hard.
Losing weight is hard.
Keeping off weight is hard.
Pick your hard."

If you want to keep off the weight you lost, you can never go back to exactly the way you were before. You have to keep living a changed life.

You have to figure out what you're willing to "pay" to keep off the weight. You're not going to pay in money but you're going to pay in time & in having to consider your choices. You will likely pay in some loss of spontaneity and thoughtlessness. Others will be able to eat unthinkingly and you probably never will.

That is, of course, if you like your life at a lower weight, and you are willing to make the tradeoff to stay there.
 

                                                                                                                        
DietHobby exists because I've found being online helpful in my success with weight-loss and maintenance …. and this has become part of my Dieting Hobby.
I enjoy visiting, and sometimes participating at, other websites and in various diet forums, and over the past seven years, I've developed some online relationships that I value highly. A problem I've discovered during my years of such participation on other websites happens when someone asks a question or makes a comment, or a discussion occurs about topics that are of ongoing importance to me. I'll spend a very long time researching and preparing an answer or a comment on such issues, but the nature of online websites and forums is for new data to replace old data, and so a few months later, when I'd like to refer to my previous answer or discussion, to help someone else with a similar issue, my answer is buried and difficult or impossible for me to find. Also, other websites are not under my control, and those websites can change their formats and/or delete or edit posts.
After a few years of online participation, I began creating word files, and saving my own posts, along with helpful posts of others, but this was rather a cumbersome task, and saving posts in no particular order still made them difficult to find when I wanted to refer to them.

DietHobby was my solution to that problem. It contains place for me to put my thoughts on issues related to dieting and maintenance in an organized, searchable way which is helpful for me, and also for others. My past articles can be found in a list within the top ARCHIVES heading, or individually by previous months in the right-side-page-Blog Archives. My recipes and inspirational videos are categorized and readily available for review by me or by others. My personal history is a part of RESOURCES in the About ME section.

Some of my articles and videos are specific and some rather general, but most of them are timeless… and old entries are as relevant now as they were when I first made them. They are a reflection of me and my values. Who I am and what I think. I hope that this collection will be helpful to others, but I KNOW that it is helpful to me…. and that's really the point, isn't it?