> If you need four meals a day to keep the hunger pangs away, you're on the road to type 2 diabetes.
That's...a bit of an extreme way of looking at it.
Four small, low-calorie, healthy meals. Snacks, more like. For example, a day could look like:
- Breakfast: x2 small boiled eggs, cup of green tea, 1 teaspoon sugar
- Mid-morning: Banana, cup of coffee
- Dinner: Chicken and pasta meal (brown pasta)
- Evening snack: toasted ham and cheese sandwich (wholemeal bread)
This will comfortably last me the day without hunger pangs. I won't necessarily strictly follow this every single day, this is a rough guide. The overall point is regularly spaced out meals, before I get ravenous and eat crap food, with as little processed food and sugar as possible.
> Study after study says that calorie counting diets work great for the first several months, up to a year.
And then by year five, only a tiny fraction of people are still doing it, and the rest have gained back all their weight and then some.
Maybe you will beat the odds. I do think that many HN readers are more likely than the general population to succeed this way -- geeks are better at living inside number-based systems of rules. Good luck.
I don't think of it as a calorie counting diet. The whole point of calorie counting is a temporary measure (perhaps for a month or two total), more as a mental trick to make me realise the shit I was shovelling absently mindedly into my body every day. After a few weeks, I'll be able to roughly gauge the calories simply by memory, and hopefully be in a good habit of small regular healthy meals by then.