Hunger is a normal body signal.  The body uses hunger to signal when it needs fuel.  It’s possible, however, to mess up this natural and adaptive function and many people do it by stringent, yo-yo dieting and subscribing to dieting myths.

If a person has never dieted they don’t give a second thought to hunger.  They simply eat when they feel hungry and stop when they feel satisfied.  When a person listens to their body’s hunger, they start eating before the hunger gets too uncomfortable for them.  The more intense the hunger, the more the body pushes a person to eat.  After all, it’s the body’s job to try to keep the body alive and food is essential to survival.

The problem comes in when people get in the way of this natural system by doing things like ignoring hunger to avoid eating and or confusing other things such as thirst or emotions for hunger.

Most people can remember a time when they had natural control of food and ate primarily when they were hungry instead of fighting hunger.  Psychologically, the more we try to ignore hunger, the more preoccupied we get with food and the harder it becomes to keep from overeating.

Simple Steps to Control Hunger

There are simple ways to control hunger and they involve paying attention to hunger rather than fighting it. Just follow the simple steps below:

1. Use a hunger rating scale from 0 to 5.  Zero represents no hunger at all, while 5 represents a level of hunger when we feel “famished.”  This is when we have trouble thinking of anything else but food, we might even feel lightheaded, shaky, and irritable.
2. Several times per day, stop and rate your level of hunger at that moment.
3. The goal is to eat whenever your hunger gets to  a 3.  You feel hunger but it’s not intense and you feel in control.
4. Try to prevent hunger from going beyond a rating of 3.
5. If you find your hunger level to be above a 3, eat as soon as possible but focus on eating nutritious combinations of carbohydrates (such as whole wheat crackers) and protein (such as peanut butter, cheese, of low fat meat).  The combination of protein and carbs helps to get your blood sugar back up to a normal level and keeping it there longer rather than spiking up and then crashing again.  Eating only carbs or sugary foods tends to  leads to intense levels of hunger and compulsive overeating.

Hunger is nothing to be afraid of nor should it be ignored.  Controlling hunger is simple.  Feed your body when it’s telling you it needs fuel rather than when it’s screaming at you.  Enjoy.

Recently, on the Dr. Oz Show, diet pills were discussed.  Dr. Oz had several guests on the show who had used different types of diet pills and found the experience to be a disappointing one and, in some cases, a potentially dangerous one.

Appetite suppressants are a popular diet aid these days but it’s not the first time they have been popular.  Appetite suppressants resurface every decade or so.

The diet pill industry is currently a two billion dollar per year business so it’s obvious many people are using them in their attempts to lose weight and many people are making money on their popularity.  But are they safe and are they effective?

Dr. Oz points out that prescription appetite suppressants can be risky to use.  Some of the common side effects of such medications are problems with sleep, heart palpitations and an increase in heart rate.  These can result in an increased risk of heart attack and stroke.

The Psychology of Using Diet Pills

From a psychological perspective there are also problems with prescription appetite suppressants that make them a poor choice for lasting weight loss.

• Crutch Effect – People tend to use appetite suppressants as a crutch.  The suppressant effect is real but it tends to make the individual have a false sense of security.  It feels so easy to lose weight that the person wants to think that it’s natural when it’s not.  The focus is on the weight being lost rapidly rather than the behavior changes that need to be made to make the weight loss permanent.
• Temporary Effect – Appetite suppressants are drugs that are not supposed to be taken for a long period of time and definitely not for a lifetime.  Their suppressant effect is also temporary.  As soon as the drug is discontinued, the appetite returns leaving the person back where they started and in a position to regain the lost weight.
• Denial Effect – The unnatural suppressant effect tends to make people want to deny that they are vulnerable to regaining their weight.  Instead, they tend to believe that “this will really be the last time” they fail at a diet.  In reality, the effect usually ends up being another cycle of weight lost and regained.
• Failure Effect – It’s a fact that 90% of dieting attempts fail.  It’s no less true with prescription appetite suppressants.  People on appetite suppressants tend to not  work as hard on behavior change as those that don’t use appetite suppressants.  Without behavior change, any weight loss is going to be temporary and disillusioning.

Natural Appetite Suppressants

If appetite suppression is what you’re looking for, there are some natural things that can be used in a healthy weight loss program that can help.

1. Aerobic exercise – this type of exercise is known to have an appetite suppressant effect when used on a regular basis.
2. Fiber – having a high fiber diet causes the sensation of more fullness and, therefore, faster satiation and less eating
3. Nutrition – a highly nutritious diet supplies the body with everything it needs and reduces cravings from the body that is trying to get us to eat what it lacks.
4. Water – water is filling and also eliminates cravings to eat that are mistaken for hunger rather than thirst.
5. Active lifestyle – a lifestyle that is active and fun leads to emotional balance.  This in turn prevents emotional cravings to eat.

Most people who are successful at managing their weight loss for a lifetime have done it by using the above five points rather than prescription appetite suppressants.  It’s in the overweight person’s best interest to become knowledgeable about the truth about diet pills.

Is it time  to set a New Year resolution to lose the weight again? All the TV shows that give advice to people are having segments on starting your 2010 diet, how to lose those pounds from the holidays and so on. This could be the first year in a long time that you will decide that you will not buy into the gimmicks anymore. This time you will focus on gradually changing your lifestyle to one that will take you, not only in the direction of getting leaner and fitter, but more importantly, in the direction of making these changes last a lifetime. Remember the tortoise and hare? The hare is like the people who go on diet after diet only to lose weight and regain it time and time again. The tortoise knows exactly what he is doing and keeps his focus even when the hare seems to be passing him by. The tortoise will reach the goal before the hare even if at a slower pace. The tortoise wins.  This year make the resolution to not make another New Year resolution to lose weight. Make it a lifetime resolution to be fit and healthy the right way.

Does It work to Set Resolutions About Weight?

People get tons of messages at the year’s end that making resolutions to lose weight is a worthwhile endeavor.  If the commercials, the talk show hosts, and the advertised new diets are believed,  making a resolution to lose weight during the new year will guarantee success. Making a New Year’s Resolution implies sincere intent and motivation to “make it really happen this time.”  If there’s ever a time to look to the past, it’s when thinking about making another resolution to lose weight at the start of a new year.

This is the time to ask,

1. Have I made this resolution before?
2. How many times have I made this New Year’s resolution?
3. Has it really worked to make New Year’s resolutions about weight?

If resolutions about weight have been made before and another is being made now, then it probably means the strategy hasn’t been successful.  If it hasn’t been successful, why wasn’t it?

Sometimes people will rationalize by saying, “Yea, but I did lose weight when I made the resolution.  It’s just that I regained it.”  Success with weight is not about how much weight is lost, it’s about losing the weight and not regaining it.  It’s about managing weight well.

The secret that no one is revealing, but is obvious, is that New Year’s resolutions to lose weight don’t work.  Why?  Here are some reasons:

Why New Year’s Resolutions About Weight Don’t Work

1. Most New Year’s resolutions about weight are about the weight itself (“I’m going to lose weight,” “I’m going to lose 20 pounds,” “I’m going to lose enough weight to fit into my wedding dress”) rather than the behaviors that will produce the weight loss such as exercise, eating nutritiously, or reducing portions.
2. Most resolutions about weight are followed by diets that don’t work.  Usually these are diets with quirky names that require the dieter to follow rules that can’t be followed for the rest of their lives.  It’s no wonder that 90% of dieting attempts fail.
3. When deadlines are set for losing weight such as when a person expects to lose weight for an event like a wedding, the focus is temporary and so will be the weight loss.

What Kind of New Year’s Resolutions Work?

It is good to take stock of our lives periodically and the New Year provides a reminder to do just that.  However, the more rigid and overwhelming the resolutions are, the more likely it will be that the goal will never be reached only to be readdressed again the next year.  It’s time to stop spinning wheels and approach life in ways that are positive, long-lasting (even if not fast), and logical.  Here are some tips:

• Set goals about behaviors, not numbers (e.g. “I want to work on increasing my exercise,” “I want to take a nutrition course to learn to eat more nutritiously,” “I want to focus on increasing the amount of veggies and fruit that I eat”).
• Set specific but small goals that are gradually increased.  For example, “I want to add one more day of exercise each week until I reach at least six days per week.”  “I will make a list of different activities that I want to try for exercise and I will try a different one each week.”
• Forget about perfection.  Perfectionism has no place in managing weight.  Actually, it leads to loss of control and failure.  Instead, be ready to learn, accept set backs, but continue on.  It’s about a lifetime of managing weight successfully not about yo-yo dieting for the rest of your life.

So, what’s the best resolution to set this New Year?  It’s the one that says, “I resolve not to set anymore useless resolutions that don’t work.”

If I’m not strict with myself I feel that I will lose all control and never be able to stop eating. What do I do?

This is a fear that many people have. They fear that if they let go of their rigid dieting ways that they will compulsively eat forever.  However, the data doesn’t support it. In practice, when people work on letting go of their restrictive rules of dieting that tell them they cannot eat certain foods and that they are bad if they break a rule, the opposite happens; their compulsive eating goes away. As you get rid of the psychological deprivation that you have set up through constant, rigid dieting, you become more and more of a normal eating person who’s body signals when you’ve had enough and tells you that it doesn’t want any more. It grows to be satisfied with less and less food until it reaches a normal appetite level. In my book, Mind Over Fat Matters: Conquering Psychological Barriers to Weight Management, I explain what psychological deprivation is, how we create it through rigid dieting and rules, and how to eliminate it so that you can follow through with eating in a way that will cause fat burning instead of leading to compulsive eating.

Most people don’t stop to think about the relationship between weight control and the brain.  One of the major reasons that diets fail and that the dieting industry doesn’t have it right, is because of the psychological side of things. I’m not talking about deep seated emotional issues. No, I’m talking about something we all share – the way our brains naturally think.

The brain resists us when we try to make it do something that is inconsistent with the way it normally thinks. Think of the brain like a child. If you want to teach something new to a child, what is the most effective way to do it? I don’t think you would say that threatening the child, abusively punishing her, or chastising her would work well. It also doesn’t work to give the child such large and awesome tasks that he will feel overwhelmed. Add inducing guilt and you have the perfect formula for the child to fail. Instead, if you treat the child with compassion, patience, praise, and help them to focus on one small step at a time, you will have a child who is motivated, relaxed, and enthusiastic. This child will succeed. It’s the same with ourselves when we’re dealing with weight control.

The more flexible, positive, praising, and patient we are with ourselves the more successful we will be. So don’t waste your brain with methods that will lead to failure, use it in ways that it can succeed. If you want weight control, don’t forget what the brain likes.

Check out these articles to learn ways to do what the brain likes and be more successful with your weight loss efforts:

Easy Dietary Nutrition

Fat Americans and the Dieting Industry: This Just Doesn’t Compute!

What Should I Weigh?

Sweet Cravings: How Do I Stop Them?

Who Are the Experts on Being Thin?

What is an Effective Food Plan?

Why Diets Fail

Obesity is officially an epidemic in the United States.  Today I viewed a webcast from Washington, D.C. about the obesity epidemic.  It looks like in the near future we will be experiencing many cultural changes in order to help rid our country of this dangerous and costly epidemic.  Some of these changes may include banning transfats from restaurants, taxing unhealthy foods such as sodas, making healthy foods more available to the public and making healthy foods cheaper than unhealthy foods.

None of this would be necessary, however,  if our lifestyles had not changed so drastically in the past 30 or more years.  Today the average American is 23 pounds overweight.  Americans are more dependent on their cars to do even the simplest chore outside of their houses.  People have become more dependent on other people and machines to do things for them that people used to do themselves such as housecleaning and car washing.  Preferred pastimes, hobbies and recreation have become more sedentary activities.

It’s only been 38 years since I was in high school.  Due to an upcoming reunion I was looking through old pictures of my classmates and noticed something interesting.  No one in my school was obese and I was hard pressed to find someone that would be considered overweight.

I’ve done many unscientific studies of the percentage of overweight people I find while going about my daily life  such as waiting in line for something.  In every instance in the past few years the majority of people I encounter are overweight or obese.  This is a drastic difference from when I was in high school.

What was different about my generation at high school age?  For one thing we were outside more than we were inside if we weren’t in school.  We walked a great deal.  We had no computers or computer games.  In addition, we had less fattening foods available to us.  It’s easy to manage weight with an environment like this.  We wouldn’t even need gyms and formal exercise anymore as life itself would take care of things.

What Can You Do About the Obesity Epidemic?

The government is going to institute changes in our society in order to combat the obesity epidemic but everyone can do something to start the ball rolling in their own lives.  Here are some tips for doing just that:

• Do chores around the house yourself.
• Walk as much as  possible.  Be creative.  You can probably walk to more places than you thought.
• Take the longest route when using foot power.
• Use a bike instead of the car whenever possible.
• If buying a house, buy a house with stairs if you’re able.
• Have more active get-togethers.
• Whenever possible, do it yourself.
• Wash your own car and do your own gardening.  It will take the same time that going to the gym will take, no more.
• Always choose the method that uses the most energy.
• Reduce consumption of processed foods.
• Shop primarily the outside aisle of grocery stores where the less processed foods are located.

These are just some suggestions.  With some thought and research many more can be discovered.  The government can help with the obesity epidemic but each individual has the most control over changing their lifestyle to one that is naturally fat burning.

Few people who are trying to lose weight find learning about dietary nutrition to be fun despite their desire to eat better.  Along with exercise, eating in a highly nutritious way is important for a lifetime of fitness.  How can someone learn to eat better without getting bogged down by all the nutritional information, however?  Nutrition can be made easy.

It’s as simple as one, two, and three.

One:  The Basic Food Groups

Become familiar with the basic food groups.  These are basically, the Protein/Meat Group (e.g. eggs, chicken, beef, beans), the Fruit/Vegetable Group (e.g. apples, celery, potatoes, kiwis), and the Bread/Cereal Group (e.g. breakfast cereals, whole wheat bread, pasta).

What we want to do here is strive to include all food groups daily.  There’s no need to worry about the number of servings each day.  The goal here is to improve as time goes by.  By focusing on trying to include each food group daily improvement in nutritional intake is achieved.

We also want to try to improve our daily nutritional intake by trying to eat fresher fruits and vegetables, whole grain cereals and pasta, and lower fat proteins.  Perfection isn’t required – just improvement.  Taking small steps from wherever the baseline is will get a person to where they want to be.  Focusing on perfection will get in the way of the goal.  As one focuses on these small steps while eating fresher and heartier foods the caloric content will automatically go down.  There’s no need to be preoccupied with that.

For the brain’s sake, I’ve added another group to the basic food groups that is important because if you’re brain isn’t satisfied it will make it difficult to improve dietary nutrition.  I call this group the Comfort Group.  The Comfort Group includes all favorite foods despite their nutritional qualities.

What we want to do here is to allow ourselves to have something from this group whenever we have a desire for it; however, we also want to improve the nutritional quality of whatever it is we’ve chosen.  For example, if ice cream is the item chosen from the Comfort Group we would strive to increase its nutritional content by adding berries.  By adding berries one increases dietary nutrition, adds another food group to the daily intake, and adds fiber to the chosen food.

Two: Color

By focusing on color a person increases their nutrition with little thought.  The most nutritious foods tend to be colorful.  By choosing foods that have greens, oranges, yellows, reds, purples and black the quality of what is eaten is increased without having much knowledge about the nutritional content of the specific foods.  Now that’s making nutrition easy and simple!

Here are some tips on what to focus on a daily basis with respect to color:

• Strive to make your plate as colorful as possible.
• At each meal ask, “What colors haven’t I included yet?” “How can I make my plate more colorful?”
• Praise yourself for adding more color to your plate.
• Try to create a plate that is at least ¾ colorful as compared to brown, white and beige colors.

Three:  Experiments

Be willing to experiment with foods.  Nobody likes everything.  Instead of discounting a nutritious food because it’s disliked, it’s best to experiment with different recipes to disguise the unpleasant flavor.  There might be a way that the food can be made to taste good.  If a good try with experimenting doesn’t end in a positive result, it’s OK to forget about it.  There are plenty of other nutritious foods to eat even ones with the same color.

Increasing nutrition shouldn’t be frightening or complicated.  Dietary nutrition made easy involves simply focusing on basic food groups, color, and experimenting.

Why do men lose weight faster than women?

In general, men can lose fat faster than women because they have more muscle mass than women. The more muscle mass one has the higher the metabolism because muscle requires more calories to be maintain by the body than fat. Rather than saying, “That’s not fair,” however, it’s better to focus on what one has control over. A person can increase their muscle mass by being more active and doing specific exercises (such as weight resistance exercises) that will increase muscle mass and, therefore, metabolism. When a person has more muscle,  they can eat more without gaining fat and weight can be lost faster.

Instead of just asking why men lose weight faster than women it makes more sense to ask what you can do to start burning more fat.  It’s a more productive question.

“Fat Americans” – that’s how we’re referred to in other countries.  Look at the facts:  Americans keep getting fatter; no other country comes out with more diets, diet programs and dieting aids; and the dieting industry is making tons of money. Does this sound right? Who is benefiting here? It doesn’t seem to be the consumers. If diets work, why are Americans continuing to get fatter each year? Why are our children fatter than ever before?

Perhaps it’s time for consumers to get smarter about choosing what or who they are going to believe when it comes to how to get lean and fit. What we’ve been doing is just not working folks. What the dieting industry is selling isn’t working. It’s time to stop depending on the dieting industry to tell us what we should do since we aren’t getting what you want from them.

This is the reason I wrote my book, Mind Over Fat Matters: Conquering Psychological Barriers to Weight Management. I want people to be smarter consumers. Yes, I do want people to be healthy, lean and fit, but I also want them to learn what works and doesn’t work. The first step, however, is to face up and admit to yourself, and to the dieting industry, that if it hasn’t worked after so many years, you are going to have to let go of it. Let go of attempts that haven’t ever worked. It’s time to find another way – maybe it won’t sound like the panaceas the dieting industry has been selling, but maybe if it sounds like the panaceas that the dieting industry is selling, that’s the indication that it’s not going to work.  The “Fat American” needs to be a thing of the past.