Skip to main content

Recalibrating Your Hunger

Managing hunger and self-control is the main difference between skinny and overweight people. Like any new workout plan, the worst pain comes when you first start out but it quickly becomes a lot easier.

Overweight people tend to think that skinny people just won the generic lottery and just don't crave food like they do. Or, they think they have some superhuman willpower or metabolism that allows them to eat crazy amounts of high calorie food and burn it all off. In most cases, this could not be farther from the truth.

I didn't used to eat 3500 calories a day just because I was bored. I just ate whatever my body craved at whatever time and in whatever quantities it demanded it until I was full and my body got used to this way of life.

In the Intro thread, I compared your current hunger cravings to a lazy relative who spends his day stuffing his face on the couch and that disrupting his slothful habit was akin to wacking a hornet's nest. This really is something you need to be ready for. If you're not ready, wait until you are before starting this plan or you will fail. I've given you some tips in other threads and will have some more blog posts with how to manage your body's temper tantrums. Use them to get you though those times.

Your body will readjust after the few week freakout period. I no longer get the ravenous hunger pangs like I used to. I'm not a doctor, but I suspect that in medical terms, your body perceives the sudden shock diet change as oncoming starvation and is trying to tell you to protect it. Once it realizes it's not starving, it starts trusting you to feed it enough to keep the lights on and the trains running and just gives you gentle reminders to feed it. That's how I knew I was going to succeed and that this would be a livable permanent plan.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Second Look at Exercise

I'll be a first time dad in the next week or two, and I'm already dealing with the time crunch and cheapo routine disruptive life events. Being a cheapo means improvising, so sometimes you need to rethink methodologies to adapt to changing circumstances. My 9 month pregnant wife has been joining me on my dog walks in order to get some exercise herself, and she can't go as far as I can for as far along as she is. Also, she has a hankering for dining out more often than we normally do, so it adds a little more guesswork to my calorie estimates when my margins are already running pretty thin. Add in doctors appointments, chores and other prep tasks, and a lot of my extra time for walking is just vanishing. It's only going to get harder once this baby gets here. It's my fault for allowing my weight to run away from me such that I'm in a position now to where I'm trying to lose a lot of weight quickly before the baby arrives. I'm losing weight steadily...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mechanics

Ok, now that you've read through the high level stuff, let's get down to brass tacks: The reality is, you're going to want to make some changes to your daily routine, but how much you do depends on how much you want to lose and how quickly you want to lose it. There's nothing wrong with going at a slower pace, but I would just advise that you adjust your diet enough that you're seeing enough consistent enough gains that you stick with it. Remember, as long as you're still logging food, odds are you're still losing weight. I've already mentioned that you'll need a pedometer or fitness tracker. That needs to become a permanent extension of your body. You don't need to be a gym rat (in fact, you should have already cancelled your gym membership by now), but it's hard to be completely sedentary and still run calorie deficits. Or, put another way, a little bit of activity will give you a lot more wiggle room in your diet every day. A 10,000...
Post a Comment
Read more

Chopping Down Costs & Fat

I've spent a lot of time talking about how gym memberships are a complete waste of time and money. For most people, they make about as much sense as skipping all your errands to spend the day taking joyrides up and down a toll road. The fact is, we all have chores that need to get done around the house which all represent opportunities for exercise and cost savings by not paying someone else to do them for you. They may not be as physically demanding as splitting wood, but they all involve doing things that need to get done anyway and, more importantly, occupying your time by doing something other than eating, the leading cause of fatness. Now, I'm not proposing that you start tilling your garden with a fork just to keep yourself out of the kitchen. There's always a delicate balance between efficiency, exercise, cost savings and enjoyment of the task at hand when deciding where to spend extra money for efficiency's sake. For example, I know that I could get my...
Post a Comment
Read more