Hi,

While I was doing my daily surf through the articles on the msn homepage, I came across this MSNBC news week article.

It's about a diet called Volumetrics where instead of looking for the smallest portion, you look at the Energy Density of foods. This is determined by dividing the calories by the weight in grams. Foods with ED's less than 1 are more filling for their calories then ones that are higher. Anyway, it's all explained in the article.

I was wondering if anyone has used this technique or read the book or anything.

Thanks

From what I can see, it turns out that much of the healthiest food for you also has the highest "energy density" -- fruits, vegetables, leaner meats, etc. So it may be a convenient way to get you to eat healthier food, and because you can eat more of it, you tend to be more satisfied.

For example, for my morning snack, I often have a bunch of broccoli and hummus. It's a large volume snack with hardly any calories, and very healthy stuff.

Hi Tom,

Yeah, that's kind of what I thought about it.

I find my biggest problem during the day is that I eat a healthy lunch and I'm still hungry even though I've eaten a reasonable amount. And then it drive me nuts as I sit at work thinking about food, and end up eating a snack. I bring extra food with me, which might be a bad thing, except if I didn't have food with me, then I'd eat from "snack canyon" a little snack thing in our office where you can buy chips and chocolate bars and stuff for a dollar. Which is worse then eating something I could bring from home.

Evenings are often worse as once I get home, I don't seem to have enough to do to distract me and then my mind soon falls to food. I know part of this is mental, and I'm trying to work over that.

I definitely like the idea of being able to sit down with a fairly large portioned dinner that's not big in calories so I can also "see" that I'm eating a lot and hopefully that will also translate into how I feel.

I don't like the idea of being on a strict diet plan where you have to really watch every single morsel you eat and that limits various foods. I know for myself to be sucessful, I need to learn to eat healthy and hopefully that will translate into better portion sizes. But at the same time I want to be able to go out with friends, or home or to someones house and not be all uptight about what I'm being served.

I'm lucky in the sense that in high school I put on a lot of weight and was up to size 14 pants. Over four years of university, without doing any huge excerise changes or anything (I still didn't really do anything for the first year, then started adding in rollerblading in the second, the third I had to walk to the Uni every day, and the fourth I took up climbing). I graduated last fall and am now working full time. I have managed to get myself down to a size 6/8 (depending on the store and style ). My family tells me I look great, etc, etc, but I don't see it myself, and that is what I'm working for now.

However, my problem seems to be that I have a short attention span. I get hooked on some idea (counting calories), rollerblading every day, climbing 3 times a week, whatever it is and I manage to keep it up for a month or so and then for some reason I miss a day, and then it becomes 2, then 3 and so on. But that's what traineo is going to help with, I hope.