1. Eat only when hungry
2. Eat only enough to feel full
3. Stay on this plan for three days.
The first two steps might sound like normal eating, but it wasn't normal for me for many years. Doctors are now discovering that obese people have brain chemistry that triggers binge eating. This doesn't surprise me since I have long concluded that it is an ancient survival mechanism to eat as much food as available and store it on your body as fat (energy) to use when food is not available. Since food is always available in America to people who can afford to buy it, which I always could, the result was never losing the fat and becoming obese.
I'm getting older now and as we age we don't need the levels of energy we needed when we were younger. So the plan I tried to stay on many years ago is the way I'm eating now. That's not to say what I eat is necessarily less fattening but I don't eat as much of it as I used to. So I've lost some weight and am maintaining my weight in the low 200's. That's hardly thin for my height, but it is no longer in the morbidly obese range.
If I lose another 20 or 30 lbs., I will be merely fat. I'm not sure if that would make me healthier, since I have been healthy even when I was very obese. I am programmed to be obese and except for the judgements of others, including my mother and brother who either criticized my weight or ridiculed me for it, I have been healthier than either of them for years.
My Grandmother had a younger sister named Laura. She was heavy most of her life. We called her "Little fat Aunt Laura." She was a wonderful cook and baker. She was one of the few relatives I liked to visit because she made such good dinners and usually finished with strawberry shortcake slathered in freshly whipped cream.
My Grandmother had a photograph of Aunt Laura when she was about 20 years old. She wasn't fat in that picture and was very beautiful. Aunt Laura lived to be 95 years old at a time when the usual life expectancy was about 65 to 70. She lost weight in her later years and it seemed to me she just faded away. Grandma was also heavy in her middle years, and lost it when she was in her 90's. She lived to be 98. My mother, who yo-yoed the same 40 lbs. for at least 40 years, will be 100 next year. Long life runs in my family.
