Most diets leave a person battling with hunger yet the most effective way to lose weight should not involve any struggle with hunger.

The body needs food to survive and one of the ways the body makes sure that it gets this fuel is through the feeling of hunger. For most people in developed countries, not having enough food is not a problem. Instead, people are more concerned with losing weight and controlling their eating. The body has a fine balance, however, and eating too little by ignoring hunger can lead to gaining weight rather than losing it. This is often what is behind the yo-yo pattern of weight loss and regaining typical of most dieters. Successful weight loss is not a matter of how little a person can eat, but how they balance their eating.

Not only does the body’s metabolism slow down if it’s not fed enough (leading to a body that stores fat readily and burns it more slowly), but ignoring hunger to the point of excess leads to out of control eating. Almost everyone has experienced the feeling of ravenous hunger at one time or another and its resulting feeding frenzy. A slower metabolism and overeating spell weight gain, not loss. Clearly, careful care of hunger is important in any plan for losing weight.

How to Eat Healthy Food Without Measuring, Weighing, or Counting

Diets that involve rigid measuring, weighing or counting never last. But there are simple and fun ways of improving nutrition without becoming a scholar on the subject.

Who wants to be bothered with studying up on nutrition to eat better or lose weight? Learning about vitamins and minerals, number of servings, and what food qualities affect what body functions can get tedious and boring.

Isn’t There an Easy Way to Improve Nutrition?

You don’t have to be a nutritionist or a biologist to improve your nutrition. All you have to do is:

1. Want to eat better.
2. Understand that learning to eat better is a process and needs to be done one step at a time.
3. Strive for continual improvement rather than perfection.
4. Be willing to experiment.

The 1-2-3′s of Better Nutrition

• One: Food Groups

The first thing to do to improve nutritional intake is to have a general knowledge of food groups. Most people are familiar with what these are:

• Protein/Meat Group-foods such as meats, eggs, beans
• Fruit/Vegetable Group-all fruits and vegetables
• Grains/Cereals Group-breads, pasta, cereals

Although the particular food groups differ depending upon the source, concentrating on the three basic food groups above will get you started in a good direction and keep you from feeling overwhelmed about how much to know. Remember it’s about increasing nutrition, not about perfection. Later, if you wish to learn more and continue to consume higher quality foods you can get into more details. For now, keep it simple. The psychology of change is important to success.

• Two: Color

The most nutritious foods have bright colors. Instead of boring ourselves with what vitamins and minerals are in different foods all we have to do is focus on color in the following ways:

1. Look for foods that have bright colors such as green, yellow, red, orange, and black. Fruits and vegetables are the most colorful foods.
2. Strive to make your plate colorful. A plate that has mainly beige and brown foods is not what we’re looking for. Make it look like a beautiful color wheel.
3. As you approach each meal ask yourself, “What colors have I eaten today? What colors am I missing?”
4. Strive to have a meal where most of the plate is composed of bright-colored foods.

By following the above, your nutrition will improve significantly and you will have had fun doing it. It’s that easy.

• Three: The Comfort Group

These are the foods that give you warm fuzzies – your favorite foods. It’s important to include comfort foods in any eating program as trying to eliminate them completely makes it more difficult to succeed at your goal. It’s one of the main reasons most diets are broken sooner or later. However, the focus here should be to see how your comfort foods can be made more nutritious. For example, if your comfort food is ice cream perhaps you can add colorful berries to add more nutrition and fiber. Experiment with your favorite cookie recipe to see what can be added or eliminated to add nutrition and still keep the flavor. Don’t eliminate these foods – just make them more nutritious.

Finally, experiment with different recipes to see if you can find ways to eat those nutritious foods you don’t like by disguising their flavor with other tastes. Sometimes mixing foods you don’t like with those you like a lot will make the whole dish taste good. Chopping less liked foods into tiny pieces to mix with other foods, also can be tried. Just don’t give up on something nutritious just because you feel you don’t like it. If nothing makes a disliked food taste good don’t eat it, but search for the same color elsewhere. It’s about making nutrition easy and fun.

Disclaimer: The above tips do not replace the advise of your health care professional. Consult with your doctor.

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.

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.

Food problems and addictions are  similar only on the surface.

“Overeating and drug addiction may converge on some of the same neurons,” says Endocrinologist Barbara Kahn. “but other pathways are also involved. And from a biochemical point of view, the two are not the same thing. Drug addictions are much stronger.”

Unfortunately for people who have weight and food problems, theories about  food addiction are not only inaccurate, but they do a disservice to people who are struggling to lose weight.  Sure, some people eat compulsively and some even binge.  This type of eating behavior can be chronic.  It can really look like it’s an addiction.  The “food addict” experiences strong cravings and feels out of control when the compulsive eating is taking place.

There are more differences, however, than there are similarities when it comes to compulsive eating and true addiction.  Here are some of those:

• A person can live without addictive drugs but they cannot live without food.
• People can recover completely from compulsive overeating and binging problem without having to deprive themselves of any particular foods.
• Humans have always been drawn to sweet and salty tastes.  It is a universal trait.
• When people are deprived of the foods they like, it creates a state of psychological deprivation that leads to compulsive eating.

It’s not addiction that causes addiction-like behaviors of compulsive eating and binging – it’s psychological deprivation.

By only looking at the surface of a problem, it can mislead.  Thirty years of experience treating the most severe cases of eating problems (eating disorders) and seeing that they can completely recover from losing control of food is evidence that food addiction is a myth.

That should sound like good news.  Who wants to think that they have an addiction to food that in incurable?  Isn’t it better to think that the addictive-like behaviors can be a thing of the past and that a person can once again become a normal-eating individual?