by Howard Farkas

Created on: February 24, 2009   Last Updated: June 29, 2009

Waiting until you're hungry before deciding to eat is like waiting for the collection agency to call before paying your bills. It catches up with you in the end. So rule number one for losing weight is to never let yourself get hungry.This may seem counterintuitive when you're trying to lose weight, but getting too hungry leads to mindless snacking and overeating. When you consider that changing eating behavior is really a series of choices, allowing yourself to get hungry is simply setting yourself up to make a bad choice. You're not giving yourself a level playing field in that particular competition.

It takes much less food than you think to avoid getting hungry. Eat five times a day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner, plus two healthy snacks between the main meals (about 150 calories each). Cut down significantly on most liquid calories. Sugary soft drinks and fruit juices add no nutrition that you can't get from water and fruit, but add loads of "stealth" calories that sneak in under the radar. Instead, choose non-caloric beverages, and make sure to have 2-3 servings of your favorite fruits each day.

Getting sufficient fluid is important, although you don't need the eight cups of water eight times a day that most people have been told they need, because most of what you need is in the food you eat. This "8x8" dictum seems to be based on a misreading of a statement by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council decades ago.

The Board recommended approximately "1 milliliter of water for each calorie of food," which would amount to roughly eight to ten glasses a day. People focused on that part, but overlooked the next sentence, which said, "Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods." It was thus mistakenly interpreted as a recommendation for how much water you should drink every day rather than how much total fluid you need.

Caffeine is often discouraged because it can work as a diuretic. That is, even though you're drinking you're also losing water from your body and that may cause a net loss of fluid. However, this is only true of very large amounts of caffeine, beyond what most coffee drinkers get. Regular coffee drinkers retain about half to two-thirds of the fluid they drink.

Stick to certain rules, but keep them simple and easy to maintain over the long term. For example, don't bring food into the car, don't eat while working on the computer or watching television, and always eat meals while sitting at the kitchen or dining room table.

If you write down everything you eat over the course of the day and keep it up for at least two weeks, you'll
have a much better understanding of where and when you're having difficulty. Plus, the process of recording what you eat will itself make you more mindful of your behavior and you'll think twice before choosing.

Eat until you're satisfied, not until you're full. It should take you at least 20 minutes to eat a meal, so your body has a chance to communicate to your brain that you are comfortably satisfied. It's like when you have to wait for the fuel gauge in your car to point to "full" even though the pump has already shut off.

In the end, adopting better eating habits is all about making better choices when faced with options. You can break them down to either/or decisions: "Should I choose this or that?" "Should I have more or stop?" If you start making those "good decisions" more frequently than you used to, you're going to lose weight. The more you do it, the more you'll lose.Allowing yourself to get hungry is like putting another devil on your shoulder; it's just that much more difficult to make the better choice. Losing weight is hard enough; you don't need to make it more of a challenge than it is.

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