The Bearing Diet for Not Eating So Damn Much. (posted here in the form of the "rules" I settled down to for myself.)
It goes without saying that YMMV. I mean, please don't infer from my rule number one that I recommend everyone eat one egg and a half glass of tomato juice for breakfast every morning. It's just a handy, easy-to-prepare, balanced default breakfast, one that I happen to enjoy and that is just the right amount of food for me first thing in the morning. (I take my egg boiled, by the way. Six minutes.) It only has to last me till ten-thirty when I have my fruit, nuts, and cheese (hereafter abbreviated FNC). Monot0ny can be your friend when it comes to weight loss; undoubtedly some of our nation's fat problem comes from too many choices.
A germane point: when I began back in May, my default breakfast was two boiled eggs and a whole glass of tomato juice. It wasn't until I tinkered with it and experimented with different amounts that I found I could do just fine on exactly half that. And what gave me the freedom to tinker was carrying my FNC snack around with me on errands and to the playground and to friends' houses and things, because I knew I could eat it anytime I needed it and wasn't going to go all hypoglycemic on everyone.
Similarly, maybe the way your day goes, maybe you sleep with a baby who nurses all night and you actually get most of your computer time in the afternoon, so you really need a snack before bed and you don't really need an afternoon snack. Maybe you need a big lunch and a tiny dinner. Maybe you need plates that are bigger or smaller than mine. Different rules, see? It took me months to figure these out, paying attention to the times of day when I got hungry and when I didn't. The one-drink rule -- I realized I needed that one, like, four days ago, after finally facing a pattern that became impossible to ignore.
And it's not like I stick to all these rules all the time. (Today, I had a second helping of Chinese takeout for dinner, and one of the kids' cookies at tea time.) But I can face them objectively and honestly at the end of the day, and say "Yes, I followed my good habits" or "No, today I really was following my old bad habits."
And because I know whether I did or not, I don't have excuses. I always have a pretty good idea why the weight loss slows down, and why it speeds back up again. I know that it's ME who gets to say whether I have good habits or bad habits: not my genes, not the food, not the chef. I own what happens here. This realization is incredibly liberating.
That and the realization that I cannot directly control the weight loss: I don't get to simply turn a dial to set the rate of change of my body mass. (I'm an incomprehensibly complex nonlinear system, remember?) But I can control my habits. This is why I say that I had to change habits for their own sake. It wasn't enough to want to weigh less; I had to want to eat less. I had to want to get rid of all gluttony. I had to learn to be disgusted by my own gluttony, repelled by my inappropriate attachments to food; I had to desire to come into correct relationship with my appetites. I had to root out those problems, and find the habits that helped me fight them.
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