This is my 100th Words of Wisdom Video,
and I found this one appropriate for the occasion.

Just checking in from VidCon in Los Angeles.
I'm having a good time, passing out diet cookies 
as the YouTube Grandma to all my YouTube Grandbabies.

My activity level is very high,
and my injured left wrist/hand and another old injury to a muscle in my right thigh
are acting up and causing me some discomfort.

The past two days I've eaten more than I burned,
and, now that I'm in the situation, I expect that this will also be the case
for the remainder of the time I'm here. I'm going to do my best to limit the damage,
and deal with corrective behavior when I get back home.

So, if any of you thought I was perfect, you are mistaken.

Today's blog lacks inspiration, but I don't have the energy.
It seems like I've talked to a million people
and It's time for me to get back downstairs again.
Today, I found out that they have allowed 2500 people to reigster
and that there are another 2000 hanging around the hotel, hoping to
participate outside the meeting rooms. 

I like cats.

Recently I've been busy making, individually wrapping, 
and freezing tiny diet cookies to give out at a YouTube conference
which I'm attending in LA at the end of this month
together with my web-genuis son.

These cookies' claim to the status of diet, is because they are sugar-free
and only about 1 in square by 1/4 inch thick, and less than 25 calories each. 
I need between 600 and 1200 cookies. 
Making them is easy, because they are bar cookies,
but wrapping them invididually is quite a time consuming task. 

For those who are interested in watching my most recent
Ask Grandma YouTube video, which talks about the cookies and event,
you can find it HERE under RESOURCES, Videos, Ask Grandma.

For decades now, the conventional advice from trainers and weight loss specialists has been this:

"Eat three meals a day plus two snacks."

The big question is whether or not it's true.

And the answer (drum roll and envelope please) is ...... sometimes. But not always. ...

Many people do absolutely great on three meals a day with no snacks, and sometimes, on some days -- (gasp) -- even two.

See, the conventional advice was built upon the "truth" that "grazing" is always a better eating strategy for weight loss than eating three (or, god forbid, two) "solid" meals a day. Eating three meals and two snacks was supposed to keep your blood sugar even throughout the day, keeping cravings at bay.

Well, maybe.
But the truth of the matter is that people are far more variable and individual than we often acknowledge. And there's a downside to the "five meals a day" theory, a downside which may affect some people more than others.

For one thing, eating every two hours guarantees that your insulin is going to go up five times a day instead of, say, three. For many people, that means more hunger, not less.

Insulin is not only the fat storage hormone, it's also the hunger hormone. In fact, the whole "Carbohydrate Addicts Diet" got started when one of its creators, a (then) very-overweight Rachel Heller, found that she experienced a lot less hunger on one particularly busy day when she "forgot" to eat.

Three meals a day -- each with a beginning and an end -- is making a comeback as a weight-loss strategy, snacking be damned. Celebrity nutritionist JJ Virgin now advocates eating three meals a day, the first meal within an hour of waking up and the last meal at least three hours before bed. And recent research has demonstrated-- at least in rats -- that "intermittent fasting" actually has some major health benefits.

The point here is not that the old information was wrong and the new information is right.

The point is ....
that there are huge individual differences in how we respond to food, and no one strategy -- including the "five meals a day" strategy -- works for everyone.

We need to stop blindly following conventional wisdom and start paying attention to our individual differences when it comes to weight loss. (In fact, that's not a bad strategy to follow for everything, but that's another column.)

Ellen Langner, the Harvard psychologist, puts it brilliantly in her book "Mindfulness," when she says that "certainty" is the enemy of mindfulness. When we blindly follow a strategy, for weight loss or for anything else, we often stop paying attention to the individual cues that tell us whether it's the right thing to do in our particular situation.

 "Certainty is a cruel mindset," she wrote.
"It is uncertainty that we need to embrace, particularly about our health.
If we do so, the payoff is that we create choices
and the opportunity to exercise control over our lives."

So if three meals and two snacks per day works for you, great. Keep it up and carry on! But if it's not working, don't assume it's because there's something wrong with you. It just might be that you need to try a different strategy.

And three meals a day -- each with a beginning and an end point, and with no "snacking" in between -- might be one technique worth trying.