I decided to get serious about losing weight. So I bought a digital scale. I've been recording my weight twice a day for about a year now. I lost about twenty pounds and gained about ten back. It's a net loss of ten so I shouldn't be disappointed.

One thing I've noticed though is that I tend to blow my diet whenever I get hungry. So I did some research on how to lose weight without going hungry. I found an interesting article by Dr. David Ludwig. He's a physician, nutrition researcher and author of Always Hungry.

After years of research, he concluded that the conventional way of dieting is misguided. The idea of that you can lose weight by eating fewer calories than you consume just doesn't work.

Our low-fat/high-carbohydrate diet (along with other unhealthy aspects of our lifestyle) has triggered our fat cells to hoard too many calories for themselves, leaving too few for the rest of the body. So we get hungry and metabolism slows. Cutting back calories only makes this situation worse, creating a battle between mind and metabolism we’re destined to lose.

Dr. Ludwig says that the calorie balancing model fails because the human body is not a machine. “The fundamental problem isn’t having too many calories in fat cells, but too few in the blood stream and available to fuel the brain and other organs.”

He offers a solution by addressing weight loss at the very source — “fat cells stuck in calorie storage overdrive.”

With a diet designed to lower insulin levels and calm chronic inflammation, fat cells can be retrained to release their excess calories back into the body. When that happens, cravings vanish and metabolism speeds up, leading to weight loss without the struggle. And because this approach works with rather than against biology, you get to eat until satisfied, snack when hungry, and never count calories again.

His diet focuses on what you eat, not how much you eat. You should reduce your carbohydrate intake and increase your consumption of good fats. It's advice I hope to follow and lose some more weight without going hungry.

These core ideas are also the framework for BodyReboot, a book available free as of the writing of this post.