I'm so glad to have found this New York Times article. Almost everything I had to learn by painful experience is in this article. The only thing missing is the most important tip to include a generous serving of green vegetables in every meal. Or once a day is enough for me in maintenance mode.
I found by accident that adding certain unexpected foods to a meal can greatly help win the fight with hunger/appetite. By adding a normal-size serving (about 40 calories worth) of kale or chard to a plate of potatoes or rice (300 calories) makes all the difference. You would think that a half cup of cooked chard would not have any stick-to-the-ribs power, but be surprised.
Adding some vegetables to your starch meal is backed with scientific-study.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019566631500197X
".....thylakoids found in green vegetables have previously are shown to increase postprandial release of the satiety hormone GLP-1,....Compared to placebo, intake of thylakoids significantly reduced hunger (21% reduction, p < 0.05), increased satiety (14% increase, p < 0.01),"
Dietician-Chef AJ has maintained her weight loss for 10+ years. She requires McDougall-dieters to eat green vegetables, with every meal, adding up to two pounds per day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iB0A2CPAq0
"If you want to lose weight, make sure that at least half your plate at every meal, yes even breakfast, is vegetables. That will dilute the overall caloric density of every meal. In addition, vegetables, especially the dark green leafy ones have compounds called thykaloids, which have been proven to turn off the hunger switch".
https://www.forksoverknives.com/how-tos/chef-aj-shares-her-secrets-for-healthy-plant-based-weight-loss/
Another helper with appetite control is nutritional yeast -- you would think all it could add is flavor. Just a sprinkling, 1 Tbls.) is all it takes. It must be the B vitamins... it's already scientific-study-backed that B6 helps with appetite control.
If I were to underline every important sentence in this article, I would be underlining practically the whole article. I have underlined a minimum of things that are too important.
And don't take diet advice from fat people or yo-yo's. Listen to Dr. John McDougall and his many colleagues who all teach the startch-based diet and all of them are time-tested slim & trim (and free from heart disease and type II diabetes).
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
EATING WELL; Carbohydrates Are Dieter's Best Friend
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/06/garden/eating-well-carbohydrates-are-dieter-s-best-friend.html
By Marian Burros
March 6, 1991
IN 1910, Americans got almost 60 percent of their calories from carbohydrates; by 1980 the figure had fallen to 43 percent. The gap has been filled in by fat.
If you add the fact that Americans get less exercise now than they did in 1910, you can easily understand why they grow fatter every year.
"It's gluttony and sloth," said Dr. Elliot Danforth Jr., director of the Clinical Research Center at the University of Vermont in Burlington, sounding more like a professor of Chaucerian literature than a medical doctor.
Or, to put it in 20th-century terms, the way to lose weight is to eat less, especially fat, and exercise more. Hardly new concepts. Most people have long since tired of hearing them.
But singling out fat as the No. 1 enemy provides a new twist on the old message. For years, Americans were led to believe that whether they limited their diets to 1,800 calories a day by eating pasta, rice and broccoli or by eating ice cream, brownies, potato chips and hollandaise sauce, the results would be the same. It was the number of calories eaten that was important, not where they came from. We know now that for most people, that is not true.
A diet high in complex carbohydrates is a better bet for losing weight than most other kinds of diets.
There are several reasons why fatty foods go directly to your hips and thighs and carbohydrates do not. For one thing, a gram of fat has nine calories whereas a gram of carbohydrate or protein has only four. So fat has more caloric density.
Though a calorie is a calorie from the point of view of the heat it produces, when fat, protein and carbohyrate calories enter the body they do not act the same way.
"Almost 97 percent of fat that is eaten goes into fat stores in minutes," said Ron Goor, who with his wife, Nancy, wrote "Choose to Lose" ( Houghton Mifflin , 1990). "Fat is very, very different from carbohydrates. There is a very limited capacity to store carbohydrates in the body." Carbohydrates can be stored as fat, but it takes a lot of them, much more than a person would ordinarily eat, for that conversion to take place.
The body gives a high priority to balancing the amount of protein and carbohydrate it takes in with the amount it uses. But the body does not control fat as well. The result is that "one is likely to make mistakes in the fat balance," said Dr. Jean-Pierre Flatt, professor of biochemistry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.
"The problem is to burn as much fat as we eat," he said. "When a diet has a lot of fat in it, it's more difficult to burn as much fat as one eats."
It's easy, as the Frusen Gladje commercial told us, to eat an entire pint of ice cream, all alone, in one sitting. It is just as true with a box of cookies, even a whole pie. Think how much easier it is to eat 1.5 ounces of potato chips than it is to eat 12 ounces of baked potato, which has the same number of calories. That's because eating large quantities of fat does not make you feel satisfied or full.
But eating carbohydrates does, particularly those found in grains, beans, fruits and vegetables, which differ from the carbohydrates found in refined sugars. Eating carbohydrates leaves one feeling satisfied or full in about 20 minutes.
This is not an open invitation to eat carbohydrates in unlimited quantities. To lose weight you still have to take in fewer calories than you expend in energy.
But one of the biggest problems with dieting is that most people have a limited tolerance for being hungry. They last a few weeks on a diet, maybe even lose the amount of weight they wanted, and then their willpower evaporates. They go back to eating as they did before the diet.
"If you start out at 180 pounds and reduce to 150 pounds, you are going to have to live the rest of your life eating as a 150-pound person," said Paul Moe, a research leader at the United States Department of Agriculture's Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center in Maryland. "If you eat again as a 180-pound person, you will become a 180-person again. People have this mystical idea that after they stop dieting they can go back to whatever they were eating before."
Dr. Flatt of the University of Massachusetts said: "Dieting quickly is a very different situation from reasonable weight maintenance." In a crash diet, "you have to figure out how to beat the appetite in order to lose weight quickly, in spite of being hungry." For weight maintenance, "you have to make hunger and appetite part of the system."
"In the long run," he said, "people are very influenced by hunger. You can't use willpower all the time."
So if you choose a diet with fewer calories than you usually eat, but one that is high in complex carbohydrates, you are likely to feel more satisfied than if you choose a diet with the same number of calories but low in carbohydrates. This makes maintaining the diet easier. It is no longer a contest between willpower and hunger: you won't be hungry.
Dr. Olaf Mickelsen, a professor of nutrition at Michigan State University, proved this theory in 1975, but no one was paying attention. He found that slightly overweight young men lost weight painlessly when they included 12 slices of bread a day with their meals. One group ate low-fiber bread, another ate high-fiber bread. Each group lost weight, but the group that ate the high-fiber bread lost more.
It is even easier to lose weight if you do a little aerobic exercise. That does not necessarily mean jumping around in a gym or running around a track when it is 10 below.
Walking will do, slow walking. In fact, it will do even better than high-intensity exercise, Dr. Flatt said. The amount of calories burned by running three miles in 40 minutes is about the same as that burned by walking three miles in one hour, but the walker will burn a higher proportion of fat.
Even if high-carbohydrate, low-fat diets make it easier for most people to lose weight, they won't work for everyone. It is also true that not everyone gets fat from eating fat. All you have to do is look at your thin friends who eat just as much fat as your plumper friends to understand that life isn't fair. Genetics may well determine how well or how poorly your body handles fat.
But for the general population, a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet has many pluses and some of them have nothing to do with losing weight. A low-fat diet also reduces the risk of heart attacks, of gall bladder disease and of breast cancer. Dietary fat is the #1 enemy and cause of type II diabetic. The other enemy is excess protein which causes the other diseases including prostate enlargement, damage to kidneys/liver and other vital organs, auto-immune diseases, and many cancers.
