3 x 3

For more than 10 years, I’ve maintained a very large weight loss. It took effort to lose the weight, and it still takes effort to maintain that weight-loss.  For detailed info see “My Petite Meals”.

My weight went up over the Holiday season, so now I need to work hard to get it back inside my acceptable maintenance weight-loss range.

I frequently experiment with various “Diets”, “Lifestyles”, and “Ways-of-Eating” randomly depending on my current interests and mindset. I’ve previously experimented with the 5-Bite Diet. For early 2016 detailed info see “Intermittent Fasting via 5-Bites”.

Sometimes I choose to share about my personal diet experiments here at DietHobby, and sometimes I choose not to do so.  Whenever I do share personal information publicly, I limit it to what I feel comfortable with sharing at that time.

For my post-holiday 2016 season… early 2017…, I’m modifying that previous plan. Instead of 2 meals of 5 bites each, I’ll be having 3 meals of 3 bites each.  Instead of “2x5”, I’ll be calling it “3x3”.   I’ll be working to: 

• Eat any kind of food I want, ignoring exact calories.  Take only 3 normal or small size bites each meal.  “My hand goes to my mouth three times and I am done.”  One bite should equal about 1 swallow.  If any meal serving contains food in addition to that amount, throw it away or store it for future meals.

I am posting some photos of my future 3-bite meals here at DietHobby, see: RESOURCES, Photo Gallery.
My Photo Gallery also has a file showing some of my past 5-bite meals.

This 3x3 plan is very much how I ate during the year immediately following my gastric bypass 25 years ago, EXCEPT for the fact that at that time my tiny amounts eaten seldom included sweets or fatty foods because my recovering body couldn’t tolerate them. During that post-surgery year, even a bite or two of those foods made me feel “lie-down-ill” due to “dumping syndrome”. 

During the months immediately after WLS, because of “dumping syndrome”, most of the time my tiny meals consisted of about 3 to 5 bites of some combination of foods like: meat, chicken, fish, egg or cheese; raw or cooked easily digestible vegetables and fruits; bread, potato, rice, pasta with a tiny bit of dressing, butter, or sauce. Occasionally I would have a bite or two of: fried food; sauce or gravy; candy; cookie; pastry, but I tried not to do this unless I had an hour or so of free-time and was near a readily available bed because This was a high-risk gamble.

While my body rejected specific foods during the year immediately after my gastric bypass, my body now accepts those same specific foods.  Since those specific foods are higher calorie, my past 3 to 5 bites of eating resulted in a lower calorie intake than my recent years of 3 to 5 bites of eating. However, 3 to 5 bites is a very small amount of food, so this higher calorie count still results in very few calories.

Anyone who has read very many of the articles I’ve posted here on DietHobby will understand there are limitations on the ability to count calories accurately. For me personally, the benefits outweigh the limitations, and I find knowing the approximate number of calories in specific foods helpful.   For basic information on my perspective of dieting, see my articles: The Essence of Diets - Part One and The Essence of Diets - Part Two.

I firmly believe that … due to many different reasons … EVERY Diet works for SOMEONE, but NO Diet works for EVERYONE.

NOTE:  Bumped up into January 2017. First posted on 12/28/2016.