My brother-in-law lost 15 lbs. in about a month. How did he do it? By eating less. That's what he told me and I believe him. I would like to lose about 7 lbs. and I haven't made any great progress. But, reading Prof. Brian Wansink's "Mindless Eating" and other books and sources as well, I have become interested in paying attention to my feelings of satitation when eating. Wansink relates truly surprising results from his experiments at his Cornell special eating place where he conducts research on why people eat more calories than they should for their own good.
The basic idea is to pay attention to the signals from your insides about being full, satisfied. This article mentions the likelihood that Americans will eat until their food is gone or their plate is clear - visual clues, while the French tend to eat until they are full.
Once in Hawaii, we were told (jokingly, of course) that people should eat until they are tired from eating, until their arms are tired from lifting the spoon and fork to their mouths. I have read that our skin can make vitamin D, which research has been finding to be more important to us in more ways that previously known, but that the skin is less able to do so as we age. I think I have read similar effects of aging on our thirst, our ability to detect when we are short of moisture in our bodies. Maybe our ability to perceive being being full also gets less sharp as we age.
I feel stupid when I overeat. I don't like feeling stupid and I am trying to be more aware. I think it can take 15 or 20 minutes before the impact of some meals is felt so eating slowly and being sensitive to how much I have eaten as well as how satisfied I feel may help me be a little more accurate in taking just the calories needed and no more.
Modern foods, modern variety of both foods and things available in a given meal and modern marketing techniques all conspire to try to get us to stuff one more delicious mouthful in. Michael Pollan says somewhere in "The Omnivore's Dilemma" that we are structured to be able to eat sweets whether or not we are full. So, sweet desserts can be appealing after a big meal but they can easily add calories and sugar that is not good for us and which we would be smarter to avoid, whatever our childhood memories. I realize that our hips and legs, our vision and hearing may all deteriorate, leaving the pleasures of fudge and cookies as one of the few continuing pleasures. At some age, it may not matter but for now, it is a good challenge.
(Copyedited by L.S.Kirby, who suggests that the pleasure of the taste in the mouth sometimes overrides the perception of fullness in the belly)
