Teena,

Don't feel bad about venting, you could have picked those words right out of my brain a hundred times! I am also sick of it all. If you look for the deeper meaning in Schwarzbein's message, you will find that she doesn't believe in counting and measuring food ( only if you are insulin resistant does she make you count carbs). She actually said it is not something thin people do and discouraged it. You go by your hunger but if your hormones are off your hunger can be giving you false messages, so you have to count some. But her basic message is that dieting does not work and damages your metabolism. So, momto3boys, it might not be that people are predestined to be a certain size, but that the sum total of everything they do has damaged them and what they are told to do to get out of it damages them more. To believe running a marathon will result in you getting slim, you have to believe that the more exercise you do, the better. But Schwarzbein says that too much exercise will raise your cortisol and make you more insulin resistant because your body is trying not to let you use yourself up too fast. So now, I find that I expect people who follow dieting and exercise advice often end up being fat because they were the people who followed the advice in the first place.

I often think about thin people who eat whatever and they never give food a second thought. Do they always eat the healthiest things? I don't think so. I just think their body works to change what they eat into energy. Dieting is a work around for a body that is not changing food into energy. So if you look at it this way, Schwarzbein is right that you have to get healthy to lose weight, not lose weight to get healthy. But it is so much easier to say than to do.

I have been sick the last week and lost my ability to taste and smell. I then realized how much we eat for taste, even healthy food. With no taste you don't want food at all but you would still need it to be healthy. Having no taste tunes you into eating just for hunger. My problem has never been cravings, my problem is getting hungry at all. With no taste and no hunger, I have to force myself to eat, because using this as an excuse to diet is very tempting.

KSRT