For many of us, what we eat and how we eat it is an important component of complying with social customs and / or religious rituals or both. Food is the centerpiece of hospitality and celebration. However, like everything else out there, even all allowable fees can be for both good and bad. What we eat can nourish our bodies and give us strength or it can cause harm even when fresh and well cooked. With all the hype about hundreds of published “weight loss” diets like low fat, high protein, low carb, raw food, and diet recipes of all kinds featuring diet pills like Hoodia and Phentermine, fat burners and the like. , people spend billions every year on weight loss programs that help them lose a few pounds, and most regain their weight after a few months. Also, the fact that diet books seem to top the bestseller lists every month is a clear indication that there is still a lot of public interest in weight loss.
Overeating is one of the hardest problems to overcome. It arises from an addiction to sugar. Unlike chemical dependency, sugar is a substance that we need. We cannot eliminate it from our diets and we hope to live more than a few days. Therefore, we must develop a special attitude towards food if we are to have any hope of controlling our intake. Time to just think slim. Have you ever noticed thin people in your life? I mean the guys who don’t seem to have a problem controlling their appetite. They don’t run to the buffet like people who haven’t eaten in three days. In fact, they often seem to give a damn about food. As a writer, I have interviewed several of these people and found that they all had a fundamental difference in their relationship with food than overweight people. The difference is in eating to live rather than living to eat.
To continue, while it is great to be athletic with a daily exercise program and eat healthy foods, there are many who, for various reasons, cannot go much beyond being sedentary. Therefore, we have to look more at what and how much we eat and make our appetite in line with the needs of our body. The idea of exercise, while vital in the scheme of things, is a separate topic for the purpose of this discussion. Hence we return to the thin person to find out how he thinks to learn to think thin. One thing I found out about thin people is that they watch little to no commercial television. If you watch enough television, you will be hungry because there are images, both obvious and sublime, of people eating tasty foods thrown at you in commercials and on shows. Another thing is that the thin people I have interviewed stay busy with projects and away from sound images and people who stimulate the urge to eat.
In conclusion, the idea of losing weight is a matter of avoiding temptation. Trying to resist the temptation to eat beyond our needs is like trying to stop a stampeding elephant because we have this constant struggle with our inner animal and hunger is one of the three great drives. The animal does not know how to count calories and does not care about the unintended consequences of binge eating. Therefore, avoiding temptation is the only way to go. We can achieve this avoidance behavior by staying away from commercial television and taking an interest in projects that don’t involve a lot of lunches and cocktails. Finally, it would be helpful to reach out to the lean people in your life and find out more about how their relationship with food differs from yours. Then we can work to learn to say “no” to food.
