Cowabungaa said:
Losing weight is dead-simple; burn more calories than you take in. Keeping that weight off is just as simple but still the part where many people go wrong. What you need to do to keep yourself on a healthy weight is change your entire lifestyle. While they're simple, neither are easy, and that's the important distinction.
It's been said many times in this thread, but this is probably the most eloquent phrasing of it.
Here's one trick I've learned that may help you. It hasn't been mentioned yet, so I thought I'd share it since it's given me some success:
It's been shown time and time again that your stomach is stupid, and takes a really long time to signal your brain that it is full and content. As a result, people will keep eating until they feel full, at which point it's too late and they've already [significantly] overeaten. I overcame this by planning out my meals in advance and not listening to my stomach.
Say I planned a meal of ~700 calories*. I'd eat that meal and then stop once I'm done, no matter how I felt. In an hour, I'd evaluate my hunger level. If I was still hungry, I'd grab something small, like a fruit or some vegetables. More often than not, though, I was finding that even though I wasn't
quite satisfied at the end of my meal, I'd feel perfectly fine and content 30-60 minutes later.
After a couple weeks of this, you should be able to dial in on exactly how much you need per day to live comfortably, and then you can just guesstimate meals with pretty good accuracy. I found out that I was eating 500-800 more calories per day than I really needed. As an added bonus, I don't need to visit the grocery store nearly as often!
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TLDR: Don't eat until you're full. Eat until you're not hungry, then stop. After 15-30 minutes, your stomach will do its thing and you'll feel content.
*While calories
are the primary factor in weight management, it's obviously not the only thing to consider for health value. In the interest of brevity, I'm going to assume that you can differentiate between 700 calories of healthy food and 700 calories of junk.
