Two links I found helpful this week

[WouldYouEva]

The first is to an article I read on my way to work this week:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-k ... oe_to.htm with this quote:

The major differences in caloric intake aren't due to larger meals. (In fact, there's some evidence that we're eating less at dinner than we used to.) The problem is we're taking in more calories between meals, a direct consequence of technological innovation spurring the production of calorie-dense, long-lasting, shelf-stable foods. In 1977, Americans reported eating about 186 calories between meals. By 1994, that had rocketed to 346 calories. That difference alone is enough to explain the changes in our national waistline.

A century ago, getting dinner was a pretty simple affair: The wife cooked and the rest of the family ate. Those dinners, like today's, were often big. But before the rise of vending machines and food preservation technology, snacks were harder to come by. If you wanted potato chips, you had to make them at home. No one had time for that, so fairly few people ate potato chips. The same went for many other foods. You ate what you made, or what a restaurant's kitchen made. So you tended to eat at mealtimes.

And there's more, but that's the relevant section.

The other is this blog: http://fatnutritionist.com/

Where she says useful things like: (PG-13 for language)

Here’s what I believe: human diets (meaning in this case not “weight loss diets†but “everything one eatsâ€) in their natural, un-fucked-up state are pretty chaotic. We eat a little one day, and a whole shit-ton another day. Using examples from my own life: we might eat a quart of strawberries per week in June, and then drink a quart of homemade Irish Cream in December.

The bottom line? If you’re not messed up around food in some way, it balances out over time.

And from a GOOD HOUSEKEEPING diet ad from 1935:

My second thought was — “a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch…and then a sensible dinner!†And this is from 1935, when, apparently, a sensible low-fat dinner consisted of 900 calories. Holy shit.

I mean, my breakfast this morning was likely 900 calories, but that was greasy-spoon diner breakfast. I can only imagine the volume of food required to make up a low-fat 900 calorie meal.

Her thinking pretty much follows mine in terms of letting your body choose what size it needs to be, and helping that along by not junking it up 75% of the time with sweets, snacks, and seconds.

And being able to do that 75% of the time because you're NOT doing that 25% of the time. Thus the genius of No-S.

[clarinetgal]

All of those excerpts make perfect sense. Since starting No S, I have gotten 1,000 times better about not snacking between meals. I don't count calories nearly as often anymore, but my plates tend to be around 600 calories or more now, because I'm trying to get the most 'bang for my buck', so to speak, by filling my plate with foods that will keep me satisfied for 5-6 hours at a time.

[reinhard]

This is straight from the Culter article I'm constantly citing.

http://home.uchicago.edu/~jmshapir/obesity.pdf

Great to see that word about this research is spreading! For a while I seemed to be the only non-academic referencing it.

Reinhard