What I've picked up on recently is that it isn't calories that's the problem.
It's ****e food that's the big problem.
Food in packets or tins is in general nutritionally poor compared with fresh food.
It also tends to have loads of preservatives, and man made chemicals, which make the food last longer (ie it doesn't spoil quickly), but these additives also screw up your body.
They also tend to be laden with carbohydrates which spike bloodsugar and long term leads to diabetes.
And try finding a processed food that doesn't contain wheat (which is a carbohydrate).
Wheat isn't very nutritious, but also increasingly is being asserted as having a huge role in all kinds of health issues.
So - if you want to lose weight, just avoid processed food.
Eat more healthy fats - don't be scared of full fat milk, cheese and butter, olive oil, or coconut oil, but steer clear of vegetable oils which tend to be very inflammatory.
Don't be scared of meat - just make sure that you eat plenty of veg - the odd bit of fruit here and there (but not such a huge amount), and you'll shed weight easy peasy, with little effort.
I lost a stone and a half easily by eating till I was satisfied, but only eating high quality, unprocessed food. I've about half a stone to lose to get to the same weight I was when I was 20.
These days, when I'm in the supermarket I spend about 90% of my time in the veg and fruit aisle, and the meat aisles - the odd visit to the sweet aisle for some high cocoa content chocolate but that's it.
Here's the thing - if you are overweight - just cutting calories won't help long term.
You need to get your body in the habit of burning fat, so it starts to get shot of those excess thousands of calories held in your fatty tissues. By eating a carbohydrate rich diet (like most people tend to do - and what generally leads to them being fat in the first place), all you do is keep topping up your fat reserves, as if you don't use up quickly bloodsugar produced by digested carbohydrate quite quickly, it tends to turn into fat.
One of the main reasons why people are fat is because their body's don't KNOW that they are fat. Hormones. Insulin, Leptin, Ghrelin. The hormonal signalling is screwed up. And that generally happens from eating food that produces inflammation.
Lack of sleep doesn't help either.
If people are so used to eating lots of carbs, their bodies tend to expect carbs every 3 or 4 hours. That's why you get hunger pangs so frequently, even though you are clearly overweight. Your body is hooked on glucose (which for the most part results from metabolised carbs).
But if you can become more reliant on fat as your main fuel source, you don't need to eat quite so much, or rather so often. Then it's just a case of topping up on essential vitamins and so on, and protein for muscle repair and growth, rather than energy.
Remember - if you are fat, the last thing you need is more stored energy.
What you need is a way to switch on the fat burning - and you do that by eating stuff that contains fat - rather than carbs.
Of course - you could adopt a method of calorie restriction in order to lose weight, but for the most part that isn't long lasting, and metabolically tends to screw you up.
The body goes into starvation mode, and the body goes into a mode where it prioritises essential processes, rather than working at optimum.
