3 square meals a day. No less. Maybe more.

A lot of people who grow frustrated with their weight go to desperate measures to lose it. They stop eating entirely.

For most people this fasting doesn’t last long. They get hungry and they eat…and give up on their diet altogether.

For some people – anorexics – they continue to starve themselves for months, even years, until they are skeletal and end up dying from multiple organ failure.

And it’s all so unnecessary.

If a person stops eating altogether, this doesn’t do any good in the short term, because the body thinks its in starvation conditions, and actually slows down its metabolism…so you don’t lose any weight at all! Then, when the body needs some nutrition, it starts taking energy from muscles first – not fat. Eventually, the body starts consuming itself.

So, don’t start fasting for long periods of times. (Sure, some people fast for a day to “cleanse themselves,” in some religions, which is okay, but don’t go without food for more than 24 hours.

There are two ways to eat. Eat three meals a day – breakfast, lunch and dinner. Typically in the US the dinner is the large meal. In other countries, the lunch is the meal of the day, and dinner is just something small to curb the appetite.

Or, you can try eating five small meals a day, and see how that handles your appetite (keeping track with your journal to see how this works for you.)

What you do not want to do is deprive yourself of the things you love. This always backfires. Instead of cutting out chocolate or sodapop altogether, simply cut back. (Although, truth to tell, if you can cut out sodapop altogether, you should do so. It’s nothing but liquid sugar, with no nutritional value whatsoever, and too much caffeine. Don’t replace it with diet pop, either, as that has chemicals in it that really isn’t healthy for you.)

However, I can personally state how hard it is to give up pop, after having drank it for 20 years! But when my metabolism changed in my 40s, I had to do so. I used to be able to drink 4 cans a day with relative impunity thanks to my active lifestyle. After I hit 40 my metabolism slowed down, as did my exercising, and I started gaining more weight, although I was eating the same portions of food and drink that I always had.

I bit the bullet and cut back to one Pepsi a day (buying those half cans so I could have one in the morning and one in the evening.) I was annoyed at having to do this – I cannot tell you how annoyed I was!, but it had to be done. And after cutting out those extra three cans of pop – and nothing else out of my diet, my weight returned to its easy-to-maintain self.