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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.

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