Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Eat Less Food Diet

As I have grown older I have learned a few things about diet. When I was younger I had a high metabolism, I ate anything I wanted and never gained weight.

One of the hard lessons a mature person has to learn is that as you get older your metabolism slows down and you don't need as much food. Since one tends to be less active as time goes on the exercise option, which used to burn up all those calories becomes less and less a factor in controlling weight.

So, what happens is that, slowly and surely, if you don't make adjustments to your calorie intake the fat begins to accumulate... in all the wrong places. Because of this I have created a diet that works. It's called "THE EAT LESS FOOD DIET.

The first step in the diet is to cut out a meal a day. Since I was a kid I have heard that breakfast is the most important meal. Now, if people died at the age of forty that might have some validity. However, I'm approaching eighty and have discovered this is malarkey. If after the age of sixteen you spend a life involved in intense physical activity a case can be made for breakfast. The problem is that if one spends their early life running marathons, all that exercise is certainly going to burn calories, but it is also going to lead to a premature wear out of body parts and functions. Then, if after forty, you revert to a sedentary life style... then those pancakes, syrup, biscuits, butter and all those calories don't get burned, convert to fat, and spend the last half of your life poisoning your system and requiring your body to haul around twice the weight it was ever intended to bear. It's the old double whammy. It virtually insures a poor quality of life and early demise.

This was the first measure I took when I went for my annual physical and saw my weight top two-hundred lbs. OMG, I lamented, what have I allowed to happen? Since my body had been skinny the first half of my life, seeing a thiry-five percent weight gain was a sobering revelation... hence my revolutionary new diet.

By dropping breakfast I could avoid many of those calories I no longer needed. So I did.

The next measure is "moderate" exercise. This is not an ass-kick workout, used in preparing for a marathon, but rather a brisk one mile walk once or twice a day. Human beings were built to walk and if you stop doing it, a message is sent to the subconscious that your service life is nearing an end and death is becoming more and more imminent. Using a car analogy, it means shifting down gear where you used to shift up.

The third measure is to weigh myself every morning. If my weight is down, that's good, if it's was up... shame on me.

So ,now the question became, did the diet work? The answer is No... I still gained weight. Then I caught the flu and was so sick for two weeks that I lost ten pounds. Guess what? Two weeks later I had gained it all back. "This is bullshit!" I chided my self. What we have here is a definite shortage of willpower and self discipline. This is psychological and needs to be approached with the same presence of mind used in overcoming an addiction. In this case it isn't alcohol, cigarettes, or pot.... the addiction is food. As soon as what is taken in exceeds the energy required for daily life your body begins to stew in its own juices..

Since weight loss is mental and involves breaking up the routine of a recurring compulsion a life style change is required. That change is getting intake to stay below use. The life style change is to eat less while still staying active.

When someone learns to skip breakfast, what is the first thing that happens.... BINGO! You compensate by pigging out at lunch, dinner and between meals. What it takes is a conscious realization, that every bite you take during the day is important. A person who wants to lose weight must stay below the operating level of energy needs and allow the fat that has built up to be converted to energy for daily use. Now, if you aren't already aware your body screams out in sham agony when you decide to put your foot down to tame the beast.

The strategy is to embark on a plan with the following guides.

1. When the food doesn't taste good, don't eat it... Sometimes your body is telling you there is something wrong with it. However, why eat something that is suspect? Because of habit. The whole point of the diet is to break bad eating habits. Yet often do we feel obliged to eat something because we paid good money for it or someone slapped it on our plate? Since you aren't going to be eating as much make sure that what you do eat tastes good.

2. If you must snack between meals, and you will suffer unavoidable cravings, then snack slowly, and when the craving stops quit snacking. There is a time lapse between a powerful and compelling hunger and the point at which you take the edge off it. Be looking for the hunger intensity to diminish and as soon as it reaches a tolerable threshold quit eating.... Don't eat the whole bag of potato chips just because you opened the bag or can.

3. Take your body off automatic pilot... If you don't and just satisfy needs as the flesh demands... You'll begin to self destruct... and while it will happen slowly, so slow you hardly notice it, you go into a downhill slide that is extremely hard to reverse. If you wait too long it becomes twice as hard as you must then contend with both daily energy needs and the need to burn excess fat.

4. When you sit down for your two meals a day.... make sure they are well prepared and delicious. Eat slowly and savor eating what you like best. When the craving subsides, don't feel obliged to eat everything on your plate. Get up and take a walk.

5. If you have a sleep disorder and find you're napping and still tired after a nights sleep... get a CPAP. This can be a problem with burning calories if you're sleeping and napping ten-twelve hours a day.