Eating. Yes, eating has been the hardest part of every attempt to lose weight. Eating the right foods in the right amounts and at the right times based on the diet you are following can be very tedious. Eating becomes confusing and difficult when we have many external rules to follow and we aren’t following the wisdom of our own bodies. We have been sold a bill of goods about why we are overweight. Every new diet sells us a new reason why we can’t lose weight and how, for a small price, their diet is the answer. The best suggestion for you is to forget every food combination fad scam you have ever heard and just remember the truth.

The reason you are overweight is because:

YOU EAT MORE THAN YOUR BODY REQUIRES FOR FUEL.

Period.

End of the story.

Though it seems basic, but it is amazing how easily we forget the basics. We start believing the sales pitch for the diet products and stop believing the truth. There are two parts to this basic truth that we need to evaluate. The first part is that you eat more than is required.

There are two reasons why people overeat and both reasons include ignoring your body:

The first reason people overeat is due to too much deprivation. They restrict their food intake for a period of time by going on a crash diet or trying not to eat at all. Inevitably, they end up overeating because for each unrealistic restriction there is an equal and opposite “overeat.” By going on a highly restrictive diet you must disconnect from your body’s signals of hunger and feed it according to some external plan. This is painful for both you and your body. Once the disconnection has been maintained for a certain amount of time, the urge to eat becomes unbearable for your body, whose job it is to keep you from starving. You end up eating much more than you need. The disconnection from your body has now exacerbated this issue because the denial of the hunger signal now leads to denial of the full signal and the overeating is rampant. This is why you end up eating much more than you normally did before you went on the diet.

Your body is primal. It thinks you live in a cave with limited food available.

When we don’t honor our hunger and eat accordingly to our body, we create problems with our metabolism. When we deprive the body of food, it’s designed to slow down, conserve energy, and hold on to fat. It does this to protect us and to keep us alive when there is little food available. It’s a brilliant design. When we were cave dwellers, our body needed to adjust between times of feast and times of famine. When there was no food available, our cave-dwelling body adjusted its metabolic rate, the rate at which it used up food. Our metabolic rate, the rate at which it used up food. Our metabolic rate went down and we hung on to every calorie we got to use and store nutrition for later. Fortunately, we aren’t cave dwellers any more and we have plenty of food to eat (and we don’t use up the calories trying to catch it). For example, when we choose to strictly diet and eat very little food, our body turns into a cave dweller and adjusts our metabolic rate downward. We hold on to every calorie. When we keep our bodies reasonably fed, they know that there is no need to keep extra fat around because there is plenty of food coming at regular intervals. Your metabolism speeds up and the fat comes off.

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