"Ideal weight is an individual thing, but it is harder to lose muscle than fat, so once the fat is off your body, your weight will stabilize. Stabilization at a thin, muscular weight occurs because your body gives you strong signals to eat, signals that I call “true hunger.” True hunger maintains your muscle reserve, not your fat.

TRUE HUNGER
Once your body gets to a certain level of better health, you begin to feel the difference between true hunger and just eating due to desire, appetite, or withdrawal symptoms. Your body is healthier at this stage and you won’t experience the withdrawal symptoms such as weakness, headaches, lightheadedness, etc., that most people associate with hunger. It is our unhealthy tendency to eat without experiencing true hunger that contributed to our becoming overweight to begin with.

In other words, to have become overweight in the first place, appetite, food cravings, and other addictive drives that induce eating have come into play. Poor nutrition induces these cravings (addictive drives), and nutritional excellence helps normalize or remove them.

My experience with thousands of patients following my healthful, high-nutrient eating plan is that most of these people no longer get the discomfort that they formerly mistook for hunger. Even when they delay eating and get very hungry, they no longer experience stomach cramps, headaches, or fatigue accompanying their falling blood sugar. They merely get hungry and they enjoy this new sensation of hunger in the mouth and throat, which makes food taste better than ever. Many of my patients have told me they enjoy this new sensation; they like being able to be in touch with true hunger and the pleasure of satisfying it."

"You can break the addiction only if you give your body a fair chance. Do not say you will give it a try. Do not try; instead, make a commitment to do it right.

When you get married, does the religious figure or justice of the peace ask, “Do you swear to give this person a try?” When people tell me they will give it a try, I say don’t bother, you have already decided to fail. It takes more than a try to quit addictions; it takes a commitment. A commitment is a promise that you stick with, no matter what.

Without that commitment, you are doomed to fail. Give yourself the chance to really succeed this time. If you commit to just six weeks on this program, you will change your life forever and turning back becomes much more difficult.

Make a clear choice between success and failure. It takes only three simple steps. One, buy the book; two, read the book; three, make the commitment."

So for me, still overweight, I am going to try and get this commitment thing sorted out. I have a lot of reading to do now.

And even though my fasting has kick started me, I found it easy to drift - especially when you have not fasted for some time. My weight has gone up. Christmas food didn't help...

Nowhere near to danger levels, but still I have lost all what I achieved on the last fast. And that was just through eating out, being a bit casual, the odd pizza and Christmas. It's so easy.

As Fuhrman says:

"After following my health-and-weight-loss formula, they shed the weight they always dreamed of losing, and they kept it off. For the first time in their lives, these patients had a diet plan that didn’t require them to be hungry all the time"

I think fasting would work too, and if this doesn't work I will go back to fasting, because I know that works to get the weight off, but I figure that I am going to need to eat properly anyway to keep the weight off, so I may as well try this sooner rather than later. If what he says is true, it looks as if it can be just as good as a fast, if not better, because I will have the energy to get fit and my metabolic rate will stay up as well. We shall see. I like the idea of not having to worry about how much I eat, that is what appeals to me.

What puzzles me though is that IF his true hunger and the fast to completion hunger are the same, then does that mean that slim and healthy people can't fast, or their fast will be very brief? That doesn't seem right to me. Maybe yours truly will find out one day, because I will be fasting again in the not too distant future.

So now I have some reading to do. I will also try and get Fasting and Eating for Health in Mobipocket format.