If you want dieting success, you have to change the way you eat. As cliché as it sounds, you are what you eat. Let me just give you an example. I could eat 1,900 calories a day and exercise for two hours a day and weight 140 pounds and have 12% body fat. Or, I could eat 1,900 calories a day, exercise for two hours a day and weight 165 pounds and have 27% body fat.
How is it possible? You may have heard comments from respected authors like Debra Waterhouse, who has written, “No food will cause weight gain as long as you eat it when you are hungry and don’t overeat it. And any food will cause weight gain if you eat it when you are not hungry and you overeat it.” Let me tell you now that this is not necessarily so. For instance, protein will fill you up faster than carbohydrate.
Fat coupled with carbohydrate is more filling than carbohydrate by itself.
Let me illustrate, a skinless baked chicken breast has about 180 calories and a cup of plain pasta has roughly 105 calories.
A small bag of chips has 300 to 500 calories. Which will you eat until you are full, chicken and pasta or a bag of chips? Both have about the same amount of calories but definitely not the same ratio of protein, carbohydrates and fats per serving.
This is how I got fat on the eat-whatever-whenever-I-was-hungry diet. Five hundred calories is not five hundred calories. Food composition is critical, just like timing of your meals.