Diet does not mean a diet plan…
…a brief term alteration of regular eating habits.

Diet means the everyday, day after day,
...for all the days of your life...WAY that you eat.

For a few lucky people losing and maintaining weight
is a easy matter of cutting down portion sizes
to move from “bad” eating to “good” eating.
However, this is not true for most of us.

An important key to sustaining an effective diet is planning,
and one of the biggest barriers to weight-loss and maintenance
is lack of planning.

 The best benefit of planning is control over our future eating environment.
Our weight loss efforts will succeed or fail based largely on our food environment.
We set ourselves up for success by taking charge of that food environment
which is:

when you eat,
how much you eat, and
what foods are available.

For some people the planning will involve specific advance menu planning,
and some people find a more general plan to be workable.
No matter whether our planning is specific or general, planning our future
food intake involves our shopping process, and what foods we choose to buy.

  When we cook meals at home,
we have the control over exactly what goes into the recipe
and therefore into our bodies.
However without a meal plan,... for some people ...
the longing for inspiration on what to cook may prove to be too much.
This results in take-out or eating-out again, and when doing this
someone else decides what goes in the meal,
and our control becomes far more limited.

There are plenty of small but powerful, changes we can make
that add up to lasting weight loss success.
The key is to create a plan that we can individually live with.
Part of planning is understanding that occasionally the plan will fail.
We must not let a failure discourage us.
Cheating with one snack or at one meal does not mean
that the whole diet plan has failed.
Keep in mind we have an every-day-forever diet plan,
not just a few-days diet plan.
For me,   planning involves the use of tools that help me track my progress.
I keep a food journal and weigh myself regularly.
Tracking my food-take, along with my weight loss efforts,
shows me the results in black and white, which helps me stay motivated.

During an online discussion of fasting in a forum I frequent,
one of the participants wrote:

"I don't think fasting works for everyone. ..
some people find that they are so hungry the day afterwards
that they eat more that day to compensate for the fast.
I suspect that, for people like this, fasting is simply not a helpful tool.

I've talked to lots of people about fasting
...which is a common practice here in India...
and I've never run across someone who found it difficult
and was hungrier the day after who ever really got used to it."

Based on my own intermittent fasting experience..which is extensive...
and my observations of others,
I tend to agree.

Although intermittent fasting has sometimes been useful to me as a maintenance tool,
my body has never become accustomed to it,

I have to be EVEN MORE CAREFUL to consciously moniter my food intake while doing this,
because I am always more hungry during for a day or two following a fast,
no matter whether the fast is 19 hrs, 24 hrs, or 36 hrs,
and if I left it up to the desires of my body, I would always overeat after a fast.

Of course, if I overeat the day BEFORE a fast,
I'm not as hungry as usual at the very beginning of a fast,
because my body is still digesting the food from the day before.
However, this does NOT mean that fasting is beginning to reduce my desire for food,
and I am always more hungry during the following day or two.

It isn't how hungry I am at the beginning of a fast that is predictive of overall success.
It is how hungry I am during the day or two AFTER a fast, when I return to eating.

Anyone with a tendency to have binges..
...by which I mean short unrestricted, uncontrolled high calorie eating episodes...
must watch and moniter their subsequent food carefully,
or intermittent fasting will simply become a "binge-fast" cycle...

In time, when it becomes extremely difficult (almost impossible) to fast,
this pattern can easily transform itself into a cycle of "normal eating & bingeing".
This "normal eating-binge" pattern is also a major difficulty
many very obese people have when following a "vanilla" No S Diet plan
and...in my own experience, and my observation of others...
this is NOT ALWAYS self-correcting...even after a lengthy trial period.

                
Today I choose to be Hopeful
about the difficulties in my life.
You can choose to join me in doing this.

  Wisdom from a member of a forum I frequent:

“Situations don't MAKE us eat,
stress doesn't make us eat,
being exposed to certain foods doesn't make us eat, etc.

They all increase the DESIRE to eat even when there is no true hunger.
It would be nice to be able to avoid situations that make us desire food,
but good luck.

Just having the desire doesn't make us eat, either,
anymore than feeling the urge to urinate makes us relieve ourselves
as soon as we feel it. And just because relieving themselves
(after waiting until an appropriate time and place) feels good,
most people don't purposely drink more and more
just so that they can feel that good feeling again. “