I’m pretty proud of the fact that I’ve lost over 30 pounds in about three months. There’s nothing all that complicated about how I did it. Using the iPhone ‘Lose It!’ application, I simply counted my caloric intake and ate within my assigned limitation. If it looked like I was going over, I walked on the treadmill for an hour to bring me back in the zone. No special cabbage diets or carb limiting, though knowing the calories involved in certain foods did help me learn what I should try to avoid or at least limit.
I no longer use the ‘Lose It!’ app, since I’m pretty good at sensing what I’m consuming and burning; I’ll write up something in the future about my experiences using it. If there’s one thing I’ve taken from following this diet regimen it would be: eat slower and follow portion control. OK, that’s two things, but they go hand in hand. To help keep in check with those, I present to you the chopsticks diet.
It’s already been mentioned elsewhere that eating slowly can help you lose weight. One reason for this is food expansion once it’s begun being digested in the stomach. In particular, rice and other carbs like pasta will tend to fill you up or give you the sensation of filling you up, though some time has to pass. This is why sometimes, when you’re really hungry and you hoarf down a plate of pasta quickly, you’ll get to the point of feeling full … and then, without eating more, you’ll feel too full. “Oh why didn’t I just stop earlier?!”
The chopsticks diet helps control the rate of food you shovel down at a meal. For bloaty foods like pasta and rice, you can only handle so much in one bite with chopsticks. I consider myself pretty skilled at using chopsticks (no flies caught yet, though), and there’s a bit more time involved between attempting to pick up rice or pasta with chopsticks and putting it to your mouth, versus stabbing or scooping it up with a fork or spoon. Simply put, you can down a lot more rice and pasta and other things with a fork or spoon in a much shorter amount of time than with chopsticks. Same with pretty much any food, for that matter.
Try it out sometime, and don’t give up and switch to some other utensil partway through your meal! Try it with anything that doesn’t require a spoon (soup, etc.) — salads, meats, veggies. Keep at it, and you’ll find you’re fuller on the meal earlier, and hence you’ve eaten less.
Clacked by Keith McDuffee 
on May 07, 2009 @ 14:00 EST5EDT
