| Fortunately,
we now have a much better way to understand why people gain excess
weight and how they can lose it again.
Here's what really happens
You get fat because you regularly eat too much food energy -
Calories. But you eat too many Calories because you are chronically
hungry for something else you need from food and aren't getting
enough of. You are chronically hungry because your body is chronically
low on one (or more) of the vital nutrients that you must get
from food in order to be healthy. Food energy (Calories) is one
of those vital nutrients, but it's never the one you are low on
- as you can see in any mirror. Your hunger makes you eat food
- which always has Calories - but this food often doesn't have
much of the thing you really are low on. So you quickly run low
on that thing again and quickly get hungry again - too soon. Then
you eat more food with more Calories - but again not much of what
really made you hungry. You repeat this sequence over and over
- usually without realizing it - for weeks, months, and years.Your
body thriftily stores the excess Calories and you get fat.
Looked at from this point of view, the problem of "overweight"
becomes both easy to understand and easy to solve. To solve it,
you do exactly the opposite of what made you fat. You learn to
deliberately eat things that give your body enough of all of the
nutrients it needs - except for Calories. This means that you
still eat to deliberately make yourself run low on Calories. But
much more importantly, you also eat to deliberately make sure
you never run low on anything else. Both are necessary and neither
by itself is sufficient .
When you can successfully do both, your body simply pulls its
energy needs out of its ample fat stores - which themselves won't
run low enough to make you hungry for a long time. And when they
finally do - by definition you're thin again! And that was the
whole point of the effort, wasn't it?
It's not hard to learn how much of what foods and supplements
you should eat in order to both eliminate hunger and maintain
a constant Calorie deficit. It requires some reading and understanding,
but there's no longer a deep theoretical mystery here.
And it's not rocket science to put this method into effect either.
It takes some time, attention, and practice - but so did learning
to drive a car. And learning the right way to eat is no more difficult
than learning the right way to drive.
In my next article, we'll begin to discuss some of the food strategies
that you can use to manage nutrition and lose weight successfully
by this method.
-Anderson A. Anonymous, M.D., Ph.D.- Copyright
(c) 2000 Hamilton/Wolcott Publishing
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