[squillion]

Take a look at these books:

- David Ludwig, Always Hungry?

- Mark Hyman, The Blood Sugar Solution

The first one is very accessible, the second one very posh. But the underlying approach is the same: no calorie counting, just good food in the right proportions.

[adrian_b]

Good food in the right proportions is necessary, but not sufficient. The total amount of food is at least as important.

I eat only good food in the right proportions. However, it would be enough to double the amount of the food that I eat at one meal, for the next day to see a few hundred grams of additional weight.

I must plan the amount of food to be eaten before starting to eat. Otherwise, I could eat effortlessly not only the double of the amount that I have planned, but even the triple amount or more, with a corresponding increase in the weight gain.

Perhaps there are people who might stop automatically from eating, before ingesting too much, but I am not one of them and looking around I have never met one of those people.

For myself and for most people that I have seen (with the extremely rare exceptions of those people who remain thin despite claiming to eat as much as they can, and who may actually have impaired food digestion or absorption) hoping to stop naturally before overeating does not work. The only thing that works is deciding how much to eat before starting to eat, then never eating more than that. For planning how much to eat, calorie counting works fine.

[squillion]

Well, I simplified.

I said "no calorie counting", not "eat as much as you please". And by "right proportions" in those books they mean something specific: roughly 50% fat, 25% proteins, 25% carbs, plus a balanced mix of different fats, slow carbs, etc.

The laws of thermodynamics obviously hold for nutrition as for any other phenomena. In order to lose wait you have to eat less, no question about that. But the idea is that it's much easier to directly control what you eat than how much you eat. And by following those diets it's allegedly easier to eat the right amount.

I absolutely believe your method works. As for me, I've experienced that since I changed my diet as per the above recommendations, I'm not hungry two hours after each meal anymore.

tayo42 asked for something less tedious than counting calories, so I suggested they take a look at an alternative approach which has benefited me, and in my opinion is well argued.

[adrian_b]

I agree that calorie counting in the strict meaning is not necessary.

What is necessary is to measure your food, either by mass or by volume, before starting to eat it. For any food that you eat, you should decide some standard portion size that you find by experiment to be suitable for you and you must always eat the standard portion, not random quantities at your whim.

Then, after seeing that you have gained weight after eating 5 spoons of food X, you should decrease the amount to 4 spoons, and so on until you reach amounts of food that keep your weight constant.

What is also important is that for this adjustment you should not decrease or increase the amounts for food items that provide proteins, essential fatty substances, vitamins and minerals, but only the amounts for food items that provide mostly energy, i.e. carbohydrates or non-essential fats.

This is much easier to do when you cook the food yourself, so you control the amounts for each ingredient, than when you buy industrially-produced food, where they have the incentive of mixing every beneficial food ingredient with other ingredients that provide only energy (e.g. starch, sugar, cheap vegetable oils), because the latter are much cheaper than the ingredients that provide essential nutrients, while being tasty or even addictive.