Remember, other people's expectations are NOT an excuse to overeat.
We cannot be held hostage to other people's food issues.

 One of my most difficult areas is overeating between meals.  
I've never...(yet)... been successful at having only Three meals a day.  Despite many, repeated efforts at sticking to a 3 meal a day plan or even sticking to a 6 mini-meal a day plan, I have not been able to break my "grazing" habits.  My lifetime habit of eating all-day-long started for me in childhood, and although it has been a hindrance to my weight-loss and maintenance efforts, it sometimes seems impossible to overcome.

Eating between-meals was the subject of recent posts on a forum which I often visit.
A new Forum Member commented:

"i think also the fact that in the USA it is encouraged to snack all day, eat all kinds of things like desserts just randomly because 'someone brought it' etc, is just so acceptable here.  Crazy how that works. Anyway, would love to know others' thoughts on this."

A wise "old-timer" Forum Member responded:

"Last night I was reading “Outside the Box: Why Our Children Need REAL FOOD, Not Food Products” by Jeannie Marshall. She is a Canadian living in Rome. She wrote some about food culture:

Jeannie Marshall wrote:

A food culture has something to do with recipes and something to do with the ingredients, but there are also rules. A food culture organizes your eating instead of allowing you to graze, nibble and snack all day long. Yes, spaghetti al ragù might be part of the culture, but you don't eat it at any time, and you don't get a plastic container and then eat it on the bus on the way home from work. By the traditional rules of this food culture, you eat at a table at the appropriate time of day with other people. (Italians feel sad when they see someone eating alone.) The food culture sets rules for consumption that puts limits on our tendency to overindulge. When I first came to Italy, snack foods were still fairly limited. We didn't see the racks of packaged snack foods that have since appeared in the coffee bars and tabacchi. If you went into a shop that sold slices of pizza at around four or five o'clock in the afternoon, the person behind the counter would offer to cut you a very small piece, about six to eight bites in size, and you'd have to coax and persuade him with stories about the meagerness of your earlier lunch before he'd give you anything bigger.

Generally a food culture sets prescribed mealtimes. Yet you don't feel deprived because you're really not thinking about food all the time -- which might seem counterintuitive since you're surrounded by all this great food. but if you don't constantly see advertisements reminding you to eat, and if you don't see people eating all the time, if it's not acceptable in the culture to walk around eating and drinking, you don't do it. For instance, a good friend of mine, Brenda, came to visit us from New York shortly after we moved to Rome, and she really wanted to try a creamy pastry that she saw in a pasticceria. The man who sold it to her wrapped it beautifully in paper and ribbon. Brenda took it outside, unwrapped it on the street and started to eat it as we strolled around Trastevere. Within two bites she became extremely self-conscious, aware of the disapproving glances directed toward her, and she realized that eating a wonderful creamy pastry on the street wasn't really done. It's not culturally acceptable. It's not that Italians disapprove of pastry, but there is a time and a place for it, and that is after dinner. This might be why American adults associate chocolate cake with guilt while the French associate it with celebration.

A food culture is also about community. In Italy there are special food festivals -- le sagre -- that run from fall through spring to celebrate single foods. In the late fall there are olive festivals to celebrate the olive harvest and in spring you can find celebrations of the artichoke.

Those are the elements of a food culture,as far as I've observed. But there's more below the surface. Just as the slow-cooked mingling of freshly chopped tomatoes; green, fruity, fresh olive oil; and sea salt produces a flavourful sauce that defies those simple ingredients, so too do the health benefits of a food culture go far beyond the nutrients in the food. "History" and "tradition" are other words for the accumulation of hundreds, sometimes thousands of years of food and health knowledge contained in a food culture. But this knowledge is not always (or even often) consciously understood, and it's not the main point; rather, it's the flavour, the aroma, the pleasure, the sense of hunger satisfied in the company of people close to us that keep a system like this going. Italians don't eat the way they do because it's healthy, but because it tastes good and because it tastes familiar. Health is a side benefit.

I didn't become so fascinated by the food culture of Rome because of its health benefits (there are many cultures that are even healthier). I was attracted to it because of the and the sociable aspects of the culture. While I was out smelling the fruit and admiring the vegetables, the fact that this food is linked to the health of the people who eat it never really entered my mind.

Our food culture is whatever, whenever. And the food is generally linked to our increased weight and lack of health. Like Michael Pollan has written, "What an extraordinary accomplishment for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!

 

  One thing that I do here in maintenance, is continually work to keep my calories down.  It has become clear to me that a firmly entrenched Habit to eat only at specific scheduled times would be extremely helpful to me, and ... despite my current and ongoing....lack of success with this way of eating ..... I still work toward establishing such a Habit.

                                        
A member of a forum I frequent left me the following message:

You have a great website there.
It's very interesting to read the perspective of one of the exceptions,
who has lost a large amount of weight and kept it off.
I love your honesty about how little you have to eat to avoid regaining.
But I also find it quite scary!
I find it very difficult to imagine myself eating like you
(in terms of calorie intake and portion size) for the rest of my life.
It worries me that the amount I should eat to maintain
is actually less than the amount I'm currently eating to lose weight.
No wonder maintenance is difficult for people who have been very big!

It IS scarey how little I need to eat to maintain in the normal weight range.
Those weight charts that connect calorie needs to bodyweight
are inaccurate for a great many people...including me.

One thing that people often don't get .... is that THE REALLY SCAREY THING
is how little my body needs in order to maintain my weight ANYWHERE...
even in the morbid obesity weight range....

I didn't get to eat everything I wanted to eat whenever I wanted to eat it,
and still not gain, even at 220 or even 250 lbs.
As a short, older, sedentary woman I was only averaging around 1600 - 1800 calories a day
during that couple of years when I gained from the 160s up into the 190s.
AND my weight was still slowly climbing.

Evidence indicates that is very difficult for me to maintain at any weight.
I can choose to work to maintain in the "normal" range,
OR
I can choose to work to maintain well inside the "obesity" range.

Since I have to work hard anyway, to maintain anywhere,
If it is at all possible,
I'd rather do what it takes to weigh in the normal range.

                                                       
A fresh start?

Recently I've been thinking about the concept of a "fresh start" as it relates to dieting, weight-loss, and maintenance of weight-loss.

My own belief is that every diet works for someone, and every possible type of eating is actually a diet… including all of the intuitive eating, "non-diets" etc. Just SAYING it isn't a diet, doesn't change it's nature. As far as I'm concerned, despite all of the factors like total amount eaten, timing of eating, or micronutrients eaten, if it's food, and if it goes into one's body, it's some type of diet.

Most people begin each new weight-loss diet, "healthy" diet, or new food plan, with some emotional energy, hope, and enthusiasm. Over time, Reality intrudes, and that energy grows dim, and sometimes fades away. At that point, many of these people "take a break" from their diet, or food plan, and return to their former eating habits. This break can be for a short time or a long time, but almost all of them will eventually decide to again alter their ongoing way of eating, telling themselves they are getting "a fresh start".

My personal choice, at present, is to change maintenance food plans frequently…but without allowing any "free" space for overeating, between plans. For the past 8 years I've recorded all of my food every day into a computer software program, no matter what food, how much food, or when that food was eaten. This has been my bottom line consistency factor.

My take is that there needs to be a balance between consistency, patience, endurance, and effort and keeping our daily experiences from getting "stale". "Stale" is the opposite of "fresh", and means tasteless or unpalatable from age; tedious from familiarity, or impaired in vigor or effectiveness.

Although we all share common factors as human beings, each of us is an individual, with genetic, cultural, and behavioral history differences. Weight-loss is hard for almost every overweight or obese person, and maintenance is even harder yet.

The science behind why we weigh what we weigh is hugely complicated. The number of physiological factors governing our ability to maintain, lose or gain weight is staggering. Leptin, leptin resistence, ghrelin, insulin, insulin resistence, and a whole host of other chemicals and chemical reactions in our bodies come into play.

Here's an interesting article I recently read in Big Fat Facts, written by a long-time weight-loss maintainer that talks about the tremendous problems involved in success with losing and maintaining weight.

The Truth About Long-Term Diet Success

An oft-quoted but rarely cited statistic is that diets fail 95 percent of the time. That figure dates back to a 1959 study of 100 people. The study was conducted by Dr. Albert Stunkard, now a researcher with the University of Pennsylvania, and Mavis McLaren-Hume. It concluded that "(m)ost obese persons will not stay in treatment, most will not lose weight, and of those who do lose weight, most will regain it." It was a brazen statement at the time, when doctors and other experts thought that treating obesity was as simple as handing a patient a "plan," and it was likely accurate. It may still be accurate, though we do not know.

Two 1992 reports from the National Institutes of Health have been quoted as corroborating this 95 percent failure rate. The executive statement of one report asserts: "Data show that many individuals regain one-third to two-thirds of intentionally lost weight within 1 year and regain the rest of the weight within 5 years." While this report stops short of stating a figure, it has been used in support of the 95 percent assertion because it references several studies with different but dismal results, some even worse than 5 percent success:

Kramer and colleagues (1989) found that less than 3 percent of subjects were at or below posttreatment weight on all followup visits.  Other researchers have documented similar findings (Graham et al., 1983; Stalanos et al., 1984). With respect to obesity treatment in adolescents, Rees (1990) reported that 85 to 95 percent of patients regain at least as much weight as they lost and Stalonas and colleagues (1984) found evidence that patients regain even more weight than the initial weight lost.

This NIH report also references the analysis of David Garner and Susan Wooley, a 51-page review of diet research and diet failure, that has also been used to support the 95 percent claim and concludes there is no "scientific justification for the continued use of dietary treatments of obesity. . . . Most participants regain the weight lost. The inevitability of this result is often obscured by the use of follow-up periods insufficient to capture the later phases of weight regain."

Many have marginalized the 95 percent figure, but few scientists have challenged it directly with original research or analysis, and that is likely because few are so motivated. The wise people who tell us that "diets don't work" have no interest in finding a different figure. This one proves their point sufficiently. The researchers funded by the pharmaceutical industries want a low benchmark to beat when they finally find the "wonder pill" that will reverse obesity in, say, 12 percent of the population as opposed to 5 percent. They'll tout it as "more than twice as effective as conventional dieting." The people who run the commercial diet programs are not interested in learning that the real rate of success might be 8% or 10%, which might mirror their own success rates compared to that 5% figure.

 The researchers at the National Weight Control Registry (a project dedicated to documenting diet success stories) have recently challenged the 5 percent figure, but they have done so by redefining "success" modestly  as "intentionally losing 10 percent of initial body weight and maintaining that loss for at least a year." They assert (though they stop short of saying they have proven) that under this new definition, the "success" rate is probably closer to 20 percent.

We must conclude that we don't know the long-term success and failure rates of diets, but what we do know is depressing. Do we really embrace the idea that just one year of maintaining 10% weight loss is success? (We would want to ask a "successful" dieter who has regained all her weight plus ten pounds, and who started that humiliating process on day 366 or shortly thereafter.) Moreover, regardless of how diet "success" is defined, even the most cynical researchers, who support weight-loss dieting for health or social purposes, agree that diets fail at least 80 or 90 percent of the time.

This fuzzy problem has implications for both scientists and everyday citizens. For scientists there is an implied challenge to define "success" using fair language that average citizens would embrace if they were to achieve it, and then test that definition and give us a real number to work with. For everyday citizens, even lacking a solid number, the knowledge that diets do "fail," by even the weakest definition, 80 percent of the time or more begs a question: would we board an airplane that had only a 20 percent chance of landing safely? 

One dieting issue to be faced is the question of whether or not blind restriction is a personally sustainable, long-term strategy.

My own experience says that it isn't, 
and there are many "dieting experts" who say that blind restriction,......
...the belief that if you're trying to manage weight you simply don't eat
nutritionally bereft, but hedonically wonderful foods, (i.e. junk foods), …
...........is one of the reason why there are so many failures in dieting.

For me, personally, thinking that I'm going to live a life where I'm not allowed to take pleasure from food, is unrealistic. I'm working toward the healthiest life that I can enjoy, not the healthiest life that I can tolerate.  This means I work toward eating the smallest amount of bad-for-you-indulgence that I need to enjoy my life, but ….for me…that amount is definitely not "none".

Thus far, all of my efforts to do otherwise have always wound up being an extremely temporary state of being. I admire people who are able to get themselves to successfully function with food in this manner, and I'm open to the possibility, but after a lifetime of dealing with overeating, obesity, and experimenting with every different form of dieting I've ever heard about, I feel fairly certain I'm never going to be one of them.

Here's an amusing video about the difficulties involved in many common food restrictions.

I find the information in this graphic: "Serving Sizes Around the World"
to be interesting enough to share here.