The Thin Man’s Diet

What you eat and how much you exercise is not the decisive factor in gaining weight. I think it has more to do with something else:

Eating habits is why we are so full, overweight and obese, thus....

I propose you intentionally sabotage your eating habits in order to lose weight. What are eating habits you ask? You know, what your mama told you - eat at the same time every day, chew your food a lot, don’t drink liquid before or during eating, don’t eat fast, eat methodically and without pausing, don’t eat your desert before the meal, eat all your food, and don’t stuff your mouth. I am sure there are plenty more but those are good enough for now.

Let’s examine why those rules are possibly the main culprits of fat people in America and how we can break them to our advantage without sacrificing arm and leg to lose a few pounds.

EATING AT THE SAME TIMES

If you eat at 4 o’clock today even if not entirely hungry, you will become very hungry at 4 o’clock tomorrow. Your body will start producing its stomach juices and prepare for the incoming food. And so you eat again at 4 and lo and behold you have yourself an eating habit to consume at 4 o’clock a good deal of food since you will be maximally hungry at that time. From an evolutionary perspective this is a great biological ability since it will allow you to get more food into yourself which was scarce back in the jungle. But it plays against us in the current abundance of food. So how can we screw this eating habit and keep it in check.

Let suppose you eat your dinner at 8 o’clock every evening. This needs to change by setting a time range, perhaps from 7 to 9 when you can eat dinner. The first day you eat at 9. The next day you eat at 8:30 and down and down you go every subsequent day until you eat at 7. Next day you will need to keep yourself from eating at 7 and start eating at 9 and go back down again. And you don’t need to do it very rigorously since it is hardly the most important part of our new diet.

CHEW YOUR FOOD A LOT

This is probably the most wildly disseminated fat creator I know of. Why would nobody ever thing logically about things is beyond me. The stomach is a vessel, just like a briefcase. So chewing your food a lot is like packing your clothes with great care. If you do that you can pack far more than just grabbing a bunch of clothes, roll them in a big ball and just throw them in. Same goes for chewing, if you don’t chew your food with much care you can get less in you. Basically you got to chew just as much as it can go in without discomfort. And it is an easy to get used to it, probably you have to think about it for a couple of meals or so and it becomes automatic. Please note that I am not suggesting you gulp your food like a duck.

DON’T DRINK LIQUIDS BEFORE OR DURING EATING

Now, I don’t mean a litter of coke when I say liquids. I mean a small coke, a beer, or sparkling water. Drinking those liquids fills your stomach very fast and kills your appetite. So drink a beer or coke before food and drink another one during. It will greatly diminish how much you can eat and take care of your appetite rather well. Same goes for cigarettes, although they are no liquids.

DON’T EAT FAST

Just as you get a habit for the time of day you eat, your body habituates your meal duration. If your meal goes for 20 minutes today, you will feel hunger for 20 minutes after your first bite tomorrow. If you are finished in 10 minutes today, tomorrow your hunger will last for 10 minutes after starting to eat. So eat like you have a very important meeting you are already late for. If you can set up something pressing for right after you eat that will speed you up it is even better.

EAT METHODICALLY AND WITHOUT PAUSES

Eating methodically with no pauses is another habit designed for maximum intake. Just look at most people while they eat. It is like watching a robot. Each bite is the same size and takes the same time and is chewed the same way. Eerie. And once they start eating they don’t stop until the plate is done. You see satiety is a bunch of chemicals released from your stomach when the first bite reaches it. It takes a certain amount of time for it to reach the brain. This time is calculated dependent on how fast you ate your last few meals as discussed above. Pausing for a second or a minute doesn’t stop the chemical or alter the time it will reach the brain and signal satiety. Having that in mind you can start doing minor pauses here and there while eating: poke at your food more, go get a glass of water (see about liquids above,) check what’s on a few other channels on the TV or start an argument with a loved one. Check your messages or your email. Take a look at a letter, preferably a bill, which is a real appetite killer. As for the methodical part start putting more thought into your food. Try to eat the good stuff first leaving the worst in the plate when you are finished which means you shouldn’t try to ever eat the whole plate of restaurant or prepackaged food. Still, the best way to fight this methodical eating is by frequent short pauses.

DON’T EAT YOUR DESERT BEFORE THE MEAL

Typically, deserts and sweets in general are full of sugar while food is full of fat that needs to be converted to sugar to be used. So having a few pieces of chocolate will give you an immediate sugar boost which is not the case with fatty foods. Back in the day it made sense because after you eat you get really sleepy so you have something sweet which gives you energy boost and wakes you up so you can go back to picking cotton. Today it will be better to have something sweet before the meal so you "ruin your appetite" like mama used to say. And I am not saying not to have anything sweet after...

EAT ALL YOUR FOOD

As I’ve touched on this in another section you should never eat all your food that is in a restaurant or prepackaged. Reason is that in a restaurant they need to make sure everybody is full when they leave. Management doesn’t want a client going off and telling his friends he was still hungry when he left from the restaurant. That would be very bad for business. So this is why restaurants cater to the person that needs to eat the most to achieve satiety. Same goes for prepackaged food. Coupled with the “Eat all your food” your mama planted on your head and you are in a heap of trouble. Chances are if you did follow the other steps until here you are going to have really hard time eating everything anyway but still try to always leave some in the plate. Remember, this came because your parents and their parents and so forth were barely putting food on the table so nothing was discarded. Now we have more than enough as to discard close to half of it every year. It is just not good for anyone to eat everything they are served even if they don’t really want to.

DON’T STUFF YOUR MOUTH

Fairly minor but it can help especially with the chewing. More food, less gets chewed correctly, and the briefcase fills fast.

GREAT APPETITE KILLERS

· Coffee – drink a cup of coffee before a meal

· Alcohol – a beer or a shot of vodka will mess your stomach good especially on empty stomach.

· Cigarettes – before a meal and during works wonders

· Bad food – put too much salt, or a condiment you dislike… you will eat just as much as to fell ok.

· Distractions – distract yourself with everything you can. Read while you eat, check your email and so forth.

· Evade fruits after your meals, they cleanse your stomach fast and you are hungry again.

· Whenever you have a choice gets as little food as possible.

· Make it hard to get food at a moment’s notice, for example by not having anything at home that will take but a moment to munch on. Even frozen food is better as it will take 5-10 minutes in the microwave. Better get food that you need to use the stove to make since they take 20-30 minutes which is nice.

· Don’t eat small things at small intervals. All that this will do is prolong your biological meal duration to hours. Once I got used to eat from about 12 to 5 every 20-30 minutes.

· Learn how to cook food from countries where they had little to work with but with long culinary traditions. Like Eastern European, Middle Eastern, or Indian cuisine are great and sure ways of feeding well.

So instead of punishing yourself with pointless diets and pills, expensive frozen foods, and cult like Weight Watchers you can just give up those pesky planted in your head traditions for which there is no place in a world where 7 out of 10 peoples are overweight.