I'm not a Guru... a teacher or a guide, and DietHobby is not a place to find every dieting answer.
What I am is a living human being who shares my own thoughts, my experiences, and my opinions
here while I pursue my own personal hobby of dieting as a lifestyle.

I recently read: 

"Getting Information from the Internet is like taking a drink from a Fire Hydrant."

I find that so very true. There's a lot of information available here on the internet.
Something for everyone. There are hundreds, even thousands, of diet plans ... of "ways of eating"
.. including those claiming not be be "diet" plans, such as those which use intuitive eating principles...but all of which deal with the specifics of eating .. how, or when, or what to eat... often including various items and/or amounts to eat and to not eat, or when to eat or not eat.

All of them work for someone, but that someone isn't necessarily me.
Maybe that someone is you, and maybe not.
Many of them interest me, and I can enjoy learning about them.

A great many people seem to believe that an "Ultimate Answer" exists.
I'm not one of them.
My personal position is that a continual search is okay.
The process doesn't have to be an unpleasant one.

I've been fat and I didn't like it.
I didn't like having a fat body, and I don't want to be fat again.
I've worked very hard to get my body to a normal size,
and I'm willing to continue working hard to keep it there.

In a perfect world, I could eat all I wanted, of anything I wanted, whenever I wanted
and while doing that, my body would stay within a normal BMI range
...rather than spiral into morbid obesity.

It's not a perfect world, but I've learned that Dieting can become an enjoyable hobby.
It merely depends on the perspective one chooses. 
We can learn to enjoy the process, the dieting lifestyle journey,
and we don't necessarily have to find an "Ultimate Answer".

This has a lot to do with the issue of "Acceptance".
Acceptance of the reality of life the way it is, rather than the way we wish it were.

                

Like it or not, that Baby is still inside, and part of us.   

 

I grew up hearing, "If you don't have anything good to say, then say nothing."

Nevertheless...
today I spent quite a long time surfing the internet looking for weight-loss and maintenance articles
to inspire myself, but came up empty-handed. I found a great many articles,
but I wasn't inspired by them.
I suspect that this result has something to do with my own frame of mind…
...which currently is well inside the border of pessimestic.
Days like that happen for all of us … including me.

                                        
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.

                                                      
One of the things I choose to do here at DietHobby is give an occasional review of a diet and/or diet book which I’ve read and have found unusual or interesting enough to personally experiment with (although usually only after I make personal and individual modifications to the basic plan). This is one such review.  

 Snack Yourself Slim (2008) was written by Richard Warburg, a lawyer, assisted by Tessa Lorant who is a published author and knitting expert. This diet book is based on the rather unique premise of having tiny snacks every hour instead of meals.

Warburg shares a personal eating plan that he developed and used successfully. He asserts that it is a known fact that the body craves satiety through smaller, more frequent meals. His lifestyle approach is to eat a very small amount of something every hour that you are awake.

Here is his diet plan. Every hour that you are awake you eat approximately 80 to 100 calories of any food. If you arise at 7 a.m. and are awake until 10 p.m. for those 15 hours you would consume about 1200 to 1500 calories. Warburg says that such a plan is destined for success since the body’s caloric needs can be determined through scientific charts which show a person’s daily caloric needs, based upon gender, height, weight, and exertion level.

As an example, the charts say that a six-foot, 40-year-old man, weighing approximately 200 pounds with a moderate physical activity level (five exercise sessions a week), would need about 2800 calories a day to maintain his current weight. Since 3500 calories equals one pound of fat, reducing daily intake to a 2000 calories would equate to nearly a pound of fat being reduced every four days.

Snack Yourself Slim encourages such a hypothetical man to eliminate another 500 calories from that amount for even quicker weight loss.

Based on the conventional wisdom of calories-in calories-out, it would appear that this could be a successful means of weight loss. Warburg cites his own success with the plan, as well as the success of a few of his friends who have used it. The main drawback of the plan, appears to be that it would require giving up eating all normal size meals. For most occupations and lifestyles, this could be rather difficult to accomplish.

Warburg claims no medical expertise, and his knowledge about body functions appears to be based on his own armchair reading about various dieting methods. Current conventional wisdom is calories-in-calories-out, and he seems to understand that basic concept, however he makes the statement that all calories are NOT created equal because “you can have as many as you like in protein form – the body simply excretes those you don’t need”. This inaccurate statement indicates that Warburg is unfamiliar with the concept of gluconeogensis which is the process whereby the body turns extra protein into glucose, which then … if unused… gets stored as fat. Based on this rather egregious error, I would advise a reader not to heavily rely on Warburg’s sketchy interpretation of how insulin and his diet work together.

I have previously reviewed the book “The No S Diet” (2008), which is a 3 meal zero snacking plan. I am very fond of the Habit concepts of the author, Reinhard Engles, and in March 2008, I began experimenting with the No S diet. I was unsuccessful at establishing a 3 meal, 0 snacking habit, probably due to the fact that my entire 60+ year lifetime involves a strong established habit involving small meals with snacking at random throughout the day. However, I am still strongly attracted to the diet and to Reinhard’s habit concepts, and I enjoy and recommend his No S forum which frequently contains the comments of some interesting, intelligent, and courteous people.

With that personal background, I ran across “Snack Yourself Slim”, in mid-2009; I purchased and read the book, intrigued by the idea of All snacks, 0 meals which is actually a reverse pattern of The No S Diet, and a diet concept I’d never tried.

My only experimentation with this diet was for about 10 days in early May, 2009, just a few days after returning from a long vacation in Boston. During that 10 days, I ate …what for me were maintenance calories … divided into approximately 11 to13 snack eating sessions. My average weight went down approximately 1 lb during that 2 week period, but this appeared to be merely due to normal flucuation. I found that I missed meals, plus I was strongly motivated to quickly drop a few lbs of vacation weight, so I quit that all-snacking-zero-meal-plan to experiment with other diet plans.

I have no strong feelings about the personal effectiveness of the diet, either way. Recently I’ve became interested in doing a second experiment with it, and I now have a plan to do that. If I follow through with such a plan, and I have results that I find interesting, I will share those in some later article.