Health & Family Always Hungry ?

I agree with this. But for someone who is not an intuitive eater, it takes a long time to learn.

I didn't find this at all. For example with chocolate, once I stopped eating it, I didn't want it anymore. I have still have chocolate from Christmas that I haven't finished. Back in the day it would have been gone the day I bought it.

Mediterranean diet is good. Healthy fat is great!

You have good eating habits and your are raising your kids to have good eating habits too. I was raised to overeat. Growing up, I regularly ate until I felt sick. As an adult, I found this a very hard habit to break.

 

The only solution to this is to plan ahead, buy what you know you should eat and have it ready when you need it.

I switched to a smaller plate, ate slower and chewed my food. At first I didn't feel full after a meal, so I ate some fruit as well but over time this has become a normal sized meal for me. Eating slower and chewing more helps me feel full sooner.

Walking isn't too hard. Start there and work up. I took up running. I'm not a natural runner, so I had to learn how to run (google helped) and then build up slowly. My first training session had 30 seconds of running. I timed it, so it was literally 30 seconds. I built up from there.

Can't help you with that one. For me, my motivation was that my lifestyle made me very sick. I had a choice of say sick or change my lifestyle. For you, operating on fat people should be enough motivation.

 

My understanding is the number is around 95% of diets fail. This is because of the mentality of "diet", lose weight, resume "normal" eating, regain weight. What is needed is a permanent lifestyle change. A healthy lifestyle incorporates sufficient portions of healthy foods, sleep, water, exercise and stress management. I find it difficult to manage all of these aspects in a modern world.

I think that eating low nutrient value foods, lack of sleep, dehydration and stress all make us feel more hungry than we should and drive us to eat. I'm sure this contributes to the problem we have with overweight and obesity in the western world.

 

I can help perthguy - my address is below.

 

My lifestyle too.
I don't drink alcohol - I just don't like the taste but will have a cocktail once or twice a year.
I love making cocktails and drinks for friends though

 

I have done it. It's not easy. The hardest was changing my mindset. Second hardest was breaking lifetime habits of reactive eating, eating very quickly and chronic overeating (eating until feeling over full).

Having been formerly borderline morbidly obese, I don't agree with this at all. For me it was a combination of bad habits (eating sweet junk food when bored, tired, stressed etc), eating very quickly so I couldn't tell when I was full and eating until I felt over full. Also my food choices were very poor in nutrition but very high in calories. When I switch to nutritious food, my hunger problems and reactive eating disappeared. It took a long time to break the habits of eating fast and overeating though. Something that helped with this was the whole foods take a lot more work to eat. You can't quit food cold turkey but you can quit processed junk cold turkey.

I can confirm this works. In my case, processed foods made me feel hungry and I felt driven to eat more. Once I switched to less processed foods, my calorie intake actually dropped but I felt dramatically less hungry. I agree with the basic premis and have found that swtiching what I ate worked in my case.

 

Great to hear your story, inspiring.

 

Has anyone radically overhauled what they eat? What did you find most difficult?

If you think of foods as energy dense (processed foods) or nutrient dense (fruit, vegetables, legumes, whole grains etc), I find energy dense take no effort to eat and nutrient dense foods take a lot of effort to eat… all that chewing! I can chug down a big slice of cake in no time, with minimal effort. Cake has a lot of calories (energy) but virtually no useful nutrition (vitamins, minerals etc). Conversely, it takes so long and a lot of effort (chewing), to eat a big salad with legumes and lots of vegetables, which has a lot of nutrition but is low in calories. This was the biggest adjustment for me.

When I first switched from mainly processed food to mainly minimally processed foods, I was not prepared for how much effort it would be to actually eat all that food, or the volume of food required to get an adequate energy intake. I remember one day in the first week sitting down at the end of the day to eat my final snack and sighing because I was actually tired of eating! My jaw ached for a few days until I got used to all that chewing. It’s funny to think back about that now but at the time it wasn’t very much fun.

The other thing I found hard was being organised and preparing food in advance. This is something I still struggle with. I didn't find the transition easy at all.

 

I lost 15kg last year on the 5/2 (115kg to 100), and slipped to 6/1 to maintain that. A bit of work is needed after a month on holiday as I put another 5kg or so back on.

I heartily recommend the 5/2 (or 6/1 lol) to anyone as you can eat what you want the rest of the time but my wife and I found it shrunk our stomachs so we'd gorge out much less than before.
If you use the SlenderSlim rice or noodles you can have a great stir fry with 2nds and still be under 600 cals for the day.

My wife is a GP and has also overhauled what we eat - much less, if any, carbohydrate - far more salad and meat type meals and more fish. But much less bread/pasta/rice.

If only I'd get up at 6:30am with her and do the tabatas I might actually be getting in good shape too!

Anyway just my 2c and vote for 5/2. I do agree with Cliff though that you can get tired and grumpy on the diet days, especially when you start. After 2 years I'm used to it and it's worth it to not have rules on the other days.

 

I changed my diet after watching one of the myriad of sugar documentaries out there. Sugar is seriously scary stuff.

Since then, I've avoided pretty much anything that comes in a box. Bottle or can. I still eat as much as I want, when I want but because it is all fresh produce it doesn't add any weight.

In fact I feel great.

It is the laziest diet in the world but it works great.

@See Change I highly recommend watching a few sugar docos on YouTube and scaring yourself senseless.

 

Scaring doesn't work for me re diet and it doesn't seem to work for many people . Last week I had someone who has had a heart attack and still wasn't able to get the motivation to quit smoking .... WTF !!!

For me , there has been a lack of basic scientific information about why many people get obese and most of those have problems keeping it off .

This appears to fill that gap in a very comprehensive and scientifically based way .

Cliff

 

It's now known that people with obesity issues have leptin (hormone that makes you feel full) levels that don't peak when they've eaten a normal meal. Thin people get a peak of leptin when they've had a bit to eat. http://circres.ahajournals.org/content/101/6/545.full

 

Dr Ludwig raises Leptin in Always Hungry , but apparently using Leptin as a treatment only is of benefit in an incredibly small percentage of people with Morbid Obesity .

Cliff

 

That's interesting because when I was obese I pretty much felt hungry all the time. I had to eat until I basically felt sick to actually feel satisfied and that didn't really last very long. I wonder if that tends more towards the leptin resistance side of things because I know now if I eat a meal that is half the size I used to, I can feel like I have overeaten. I reckon my stomach capacity is a lot smaller than it used to be but I wonder if I have managed to become leptin sensitive again. I really don't experience hunger at all like to I used to, which makes me wonder about being sensitive to leptin again. I find quite a modest meal satifying now.

Working in tandem with the concept of leptin resistance is the physical effects of eating nutrient dense foods on perceived hunger levels. There has been research conducted that confirms that people who eat a nutrient dense diet experince less hunger, and experience hunger differently to those who do not eat a nutrient dense diet.

Changing perceptions of hunger on a high nutrient density diet

I certainly experienced significantly reduced hunger levels after switching to a nutrient dense diet. Following that, smaller and smaller amounts of food make me feel full, perhaps as my leptin sensitivity improved?

I am thinking it is a combination of leptin sensitivity and a nutrient dense diet that mean I don't feel hungry all the time and much smaller amounts of food make me feel full.

 

Even though there has been extensive research into the actual mechanisms of obesity, I still don't think this is very well understood. Physically, what changes occur in a person to take them from a 'normal' weight to 'obese'. Obviously overeating plays a part in this. However, if you understand homoeostasis, the normal response to overeating is increased metabolism. I am guessing at some point this fails and some kind of disregulation causes the body to store fat instead. I wonder if some of that is related to insulin resitance? Then appetite becomes disregulated due to leptin resistance. It would be interesting to see these ideas followed up with further research.

 

@Perthguy what you say is interesting. They say that brain chemistry has a lot to do with obesity. They've discovered that they can change brain chemistry (that is, change leptin peaks and troughs to normal) when they perform gastric by-pass. They don't know why that is the case.

 

This is certainly an area where there has been a lot of research but not really (IMO) a lot of definitive answers. What I mean by this is that while many pieces of the puzzle are well understood, such as metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, leptin resistance etc, I feel like no one has really managed to put all the pieces together to help us really understand why people get obese, stay obese, having problems losing weight and have problems keeping it off.

It may be true that peaks and troughs are reset to normal after gastric by-pass. However, this does not explain a long term failure rate of gastric by-pass of 20.4% for morbidly obese patients and 34.9% for super obese patients.

Weight Gain After Short- and Long-Limb Gastric Bypass in Patients Followed for Longer Than 10 Years

This is where I think promising research is not always translating into real world results. It is not understood why these patients initially lose weight and then in the long term revert to overeating and gain the weight back again.

 

There was an awesome reality series on dieting where they separated the dieters into groups depending on whether they were comfort eaters, banqueters or had the leptin issue. Each required a different diet.
Was interesting stuff and shows there is not just one answer for everyone.

 

I've never really been overweight; the product of an active life and growing up in an era without much take-away and or other junk food I guess.

However; I went to Ireland for 4 weeks in 2000, and put on about 5kg's - unheard of for me...loads of stogey Irish food, loads of drinking, and no exercise..hey presto!

When I got back; my brother - who was a Personal Trainer at the time - put the wind up me by saying "You're the wrong side of forty; get cracking on the diet and exercise or you'll be massive in a few years".

This scared me a bit, and shocked me into action.

But; the action was nothing too dramatic; just cut out a lot of the high carb stuff, cut out a lot of the rubbish food such as icecream after dinner and so on, and went hammer and tong on the exercise again.

Amazing; a decent diet of healthy food, and loads of exercise.

I found I was eating more, but losing weight.

Good bye.

 

I'm a shade short for my weight. Maybe I might have to grow up.