Is food the enemy?

I'm a pretty regular reader of Oprah magazine, there's an article in her November issue that talks about weight loss. Most of the articles I read in Oprah with regards to weight loss are spirituality based, and this is yet another article like that. I'll be honest with you; I don't always get what they mean.  A woman by the name of Geneen Roth appeared on Oprah a few months back to talk about her book “Women, Food and God” and after she spoke for an hour with Oprah I realized I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about.  Maybe I’ve watched too much reality TV but some of the “loftier” ideals with regard to losing weight went right over my head.  So here is yet another article in Oprah Mag, this time by Maryanne Williamson.  She talks about how we eat our feelings and how we disguise what's really wrong with us by eating too much food, etc, etc.   Maybe it's just me, , I don’t enjoy it.   That’s not to say there aren’t some foods that still taste good to me, but most things are just so so, not exciting at all.  I watched the movie “Eat, Pray, Love”; I had the book but didn’t get time to read it before the movie came out on DVD.  Forgive me, but the movie bored me to tears, except the part when she talked about enjoying her food again (that still didn’t justify the rest of the movie, zzz…)  What that snippet of the movie made me realize was that I need to also find my “hunger” again.

I decided to try to eat every three hours because in the past I would drink a cup of coffee or have a bowl oatmeal or grits in the morning and pretty much wouldn’t eat again until very late in the evening.  I believe this has been my biggest issue. I just really don't like to eat very much. So then the question is; why am I so heavy? Why am I overweight?  I have a theory, I believe some of it comes from the fact that I don't eat when I'm supposed.   I rarely see any diet information that talks about your body’s starvation mode (if you don’t eat your body won’t release anything for fear it will starve)   Nobody ever mentions that, nobody talks about the fact that you need to eat to live, nobody talks about grazing and eating all day it's all about losing weight by not eating too much.  I have had absolutely no hunger pangs for longer then I can say, I could literally go all day and if I never put a morsel of food in my mouth, I never get hungry.

This wasn't always the case; I probably was a serious overeater at some point in my life, but I tend to eat too much of the good stuff, avocados, soft cheeses, veggies doused in olive oil etc.  The things I still “do” like tend to me healthier, but since I don’t eat all day, I eat too much healthy stuff.  (YAY QUINOA!) Once I did Weight Watchers and I lost 40 pounds, but I didn't keep the weight off because I thought that I had a handle on how to deal with my eating habits.

What I didn't realize is a lot of the reasons why Weight Watchers worked is because it required me to eat all day long in order to get the points. It never dawned on me that eating all day is probably what helped me lose the weight. So I guess I'm have a unique situation in a world of dieting that is tailored to people who overeat junkie stuff, I just don’t eat at proper intervals which can causes me to binge on the healthy things I like after a long day of NOT eating.   A few years back Jorge Cruise wrote a book called “The Three Hour Diet”; his philosophy was to feed your body all day long to fuel your metabolism.

He is one of the few people in the industry who address the problem of metabolism and eating habits and how they can affect weight loss. I started eating every three hours on January 4, 2011, and I can say that I get hungry now, not starving but hungry and I can tell you I have not felt genuine hunger in years.  So there is something to this I believe, the key however is not to eat too much at any given meal. I saw Bethenny Frankel on an ABC show about weight loss a few days ago and she had some very sage advice, she said when you look at a plate of French fries, take just a few (10 or so) to really satisfy the craving, the first 10 will satisfy the craving, the next 50 or so are counterproductive. I’m sure she said it better then I just did, but I got that!  

I don’t need to “self analyze” my whole life or my feelings every time I eat, I just need to eat enough to satisfy the craving, really ask myself do I need 50 (sweet potato) fries or do I just need 10, I’m still eating fries either way.   So I’ve learned:  1. I have to eat in order to become hungry when I’m supposed to.  2. When I don’t eat all day I am ravenous and will possibly eat too much even if its healthy stuff it’s still too much.  3. If I ever am ravenous again, eat only enough to relieve the craving, not the whole plate because it’s counter-productive. 

Great Advice that I DO get!