I was talking to someone about dieting a few days back. Something they said brought back memories of where I was for many years. I was explaining that dieting really means going hungry. If you are never hungry, you can not expect to lose any meaningful amount of weight. Dieting and hunger go together. Feeling hungry is one of our bodies attention getters. The discussion had been going on for about fifteen minutes and I was talking about my experiences.

I reminded them as you are dieting to lose weight, you will become hungry. Dieting in essence is a well planned form of long term starvation. Feeling hungry is not an unbearable all consuming feeling, but it is powerful feeling never the less. For the first few weeks it can be bothersome, but after a time it is just a feeling our body is giving off. It is best to accept the idea that you are going to feel hungry.

When you eat is very important. Generally you wish to follow that old adage, eat breakfast like a King or Queen, lunch like a Prince or Princess, and dinner like a pauper. In simple terms this means eating most of your daily calorie intake early in the day so your body has food energy available. This helps your body to burn up those calories before you burn up your day and end up in advanced relaxing positions before bed.

If you do not wake up hungry, you are not dieting. If you do not wake up hungry, you ate too much the evening before. Your morning schedule should be defined by your appetite as you diet. You can not expect to lose any weight of you do not wake up hungry in the morning. If you are seriously dieting, you may find yourself waking before your alarm in the morning. There is nothing abnormal about it, as it is your body’s natural response to being underfed.

Some people have trouble limiting their last meal to a sensible portion. I am raising my hand here as one of those people. A good solution to this is to eat your last meal earlier in the evening. No matter what your diet plan is you should never be eating your last meal within a few hours of going to sleep.

Your body barely has time to do anything with the food you ate, let alone use any of the energy you will consume. Energy consumed and not used is energy stored and that really gets in the way of a successful diet. Eating is the way we bring energy into our body.

What was the comment that brought back so many memories? I heard another person say, “I can’t eat any less!”

I think that is a common handicapping statement for anyone who is more than a few pounds overweight. I am sure many people share this sentiment with everyone else who wants to diet and does not know how. We generally feel as if we are not eating that much food to start with. I know I didn’t think I ate much each day, and if I added up what I thought were all the calories I consumed in a day, I would feel I was not consuming that many calories.

Perhaps in general I would eat reasonably well. What I failed to do was account for those times when I ate more of the wrong foods than the right foods. Those days when without thinking about it, when the day is one continuous grazing session. I never really felt full, nor hungry, I would just feel like eating.

Those are days that hurt good diets. The second problem I had was I really did not relate portion size and what the food was to how many calories it contained. The biggest miss with this problem is fat calories. A cup of rice and a cup of macaroni and cheese are not even in the same arena when it comes to calorie counting. Neither is two slices of bread when weighed against a slice of chocolate cake. Substituting food by guess is not a successful diet aid.

To help you with diet success, as you weigh out portions and measure foods, pay close attention to what the thin people around you eat. Pay special attention to how often and how much. I found I can live on less. I can survive on what the thin people in my life eat in the same amounts. If you want to be a thinner person, you have to act like one when it comes to meals.