For many of us, what we eat and how we eat it is an important component of compliance with social customs and/or religious rituals or both. Food is the centerpiece of hospitality and celebration. However, like everything else out there, even all permissible fees can be for both good and bad. What we eat can nourish our body and give us strength or it can cause harm even when it is fresh and well cooked. With all the hype about hundreds of “weight loss” diets being advertised as low fat, high protein, low carb, raw food, and diet recipes of all kinds with diet pills like Hoodia and Phentermine, fat burners, and the like, the People spend billions each year on weight loss programs that help them lose a few pounds, and most gain the weight back after a few months. Also, the fact that diet books seem to be at the top of the bestseller lists every month is a clear indication that there continues to be strong public interest in weight loss.
Overeating is one of the most difficult problems to overcome. It stems from a sugar addiction. Unlike chemical dependency, sugar is a substance that we need. We cannot eliminate it from our diet and expect to live more than a few days. Therefore, we must develop a special attitude toward food if we are to have any hope of controlling our intake. It’s time to just think thin. Have you ever noticed any skinny person in your life? I’m talking about the guys who don’t seem to have a problem controlling their appetite. They don’t run to the buffet like people who haven’t eaten in three days. In fact, it often seems like they couldn’t care less about the food. As a writer, I interviewed several of these people and discovered that they all had a fundamental difference in their relationship with food compared to people who are overweight. The difference is in eating to live instead of living to eat.
To continue, while it’s good to be athletic with a daily exercise program and healthy eating, there are many who for various reasons can’t get much beyond sedentary living. Therefore, we have to look more at what and how much we eat and make our appetites match the needs of our body. The idea of exercise, while vital in the scheme of things, is a separate topic for the purpose of this discussion. Hence we go back to the thin person to learn how he thinks to learn how to think thin. One thing I discovered about skinny people is that they watch little to no commercial TV. If you watch enough TV, you’ll get hungry because there are images, both obvious and sublime, of people eating appetizing food thrown at you in commercials and on shows. Another thing is that the thin people I’ve interviewed stay busy with projects and away from sound images and people who stimulate the desire to eat.
In conclusion, the whole idea of losing weight is a matter of avoiding temptation. Trying to resist the urge to eat beyond our needs is like trying to stop a stampeding elephant because we have this constant struggle with our inner animal and hunger is one of the three great drives. The animal doesn’t know how to count calories and doesn’t care about the unintended consequences of binge eating. Therefore, avoiding temptation is the only way to go. We can achieve this avoidance behavior by staying away from commercial television and engaging in projects that don’t involve a lot of lunch and cocktails. Finally, it would be helpful to reach out to the skinny people in your life and find out more about how their relationship to food differs from yours. Then we can work on learning to say “no” to food.