For many of us, what and how we eat is a major component of the fulfillment of social customs and/or religious rituals, or both. Food is the centerpiece of hospitality and celebration. However, like everything that exists, even all permissible rent can be for evil as well as for good. What we eat can nourish our body and give us strength or it can harm even if it is fresh and properly cooked. With all the hype about low fat, high protein, low carb, raw food, and hundreds of published “weight loss” diets like hoodia and all kinds of diet pills with phentermine, fat burners and similar diet pills, billions of people spend every year on weight loss programs that help them lose a few pounds and regain the weight after a few months. Furthermore, the fact that diet books appear at the top of bestseller lists every month is a clear indication that there remains a strong public interest in weight loss.
Overfitting is one of the most difficult problems to overcome. It stems from addiction to sugar. Unlike chemical dependence, sugar is a substance that we need. We cannot eliminate it from our diet and expect to live more than a few days. Therefore, we must develop a special attitude toward food if we are going to have any hope of controlling our intake. It’s time to think only thin. Have you ever noticed a skinny person in your life? I mean those people who seem to have no problem controlling their appetite. They don’t run to the buffet like people who haven’t eaten in three days. In fact it often seems like they couldn’t care less about the food. As a writer, I have interviewed many such individuals and I have found that they all had a fundamental difference in their relationship to food compared to people who were overweight. The difference is in eating to live and not living to eat.
To continue, while it is great to be athletic with a program of daily exercise and eating healthy things, there are many people who are unable to lead a sedentary life for various reasons. Thus we have to watch what and how much we eat and bring our appetite in line with the requirement of our body. The idea of exercise, while important in the scheme of things, is a separate issue for the purposes of this discussion. So we go back to the thin man to find out how he thinks in order to learn how to think thin. One thing I learned about skinny people is that they watch little or no commercial television. If you watch enough TV you will get hungry because the images of people eating appetizing foods in commercials and on shows are both explicit and sublime. Another thing is that the lean people I have interviewed keep themselves busy with projects and stay away from sound images and people who stimulate the desire to eat.
Ultimately, the whole idea of losing weight is a matter of avoiding temptation. Trying to resist the temptation to eat more than you need is like trying to stop a rampaging elephant because we are in a constant battle with our inner beast and hunger is one of the big three urges. The animal does not know how to count calories and does not care about the unintended consequences of eating. So avoiding temptation is the only solution. We can get around this avoidance behavior by staying away from commercial TV and taking an interest in projects that don’t involve a lot of luncheons and cocktail parties. Finally, it would be helpful to approach the thin people in your life and learn more about how their relationship with food differs from yours. Then we can work on learning to say “no” to food.
Source by Moshe Sharon
