Q: I'm so hungry by the time I get home, it's been really hard

Q: I'm so hungry by the time I get home, it's been really hard to stay on the diet.

A: That is simple - you're not eating enough during your meals.  We are conditioned to believe that eating too much (or enough) is the root of all evil when trying to lose weight (or, more accurately, eating a lot along with eating fat).  This just isn't true.  It's not quantity, it's quality.  In fact, to be more precise, you need high quantity of high quality.  Drop one of those two, and you have problems.

Tim Ferriss discusses this a few times.  The way he sees it - and I totally agree - is that you aren't eating enough during your meals if you find yourself hungry or needing to snack.  He isn't a subscriber of the "3 meal + 2 snack" approach, and would recommend bigger meals instead.  Having stuck a subcutaneous glucose monitor in himself for a month or so, he saw that you don't actually need the snacks to keep metabolism going the way people say you go.  Since snacking is not valuable for stimulating metabolism, Tim sees hunger that drives snacking more as sign of your fuel intake being far too low to cover your work effort.  He reminds readers that their new diet is lower in energy than their old one, so they need to ramp up volumes - a cup of kale doesn't have the same fuel as a cup of oatmeal.

For me, I follow a 3-4 meal approach (depending on how much time and access to good food I have during the 3 meals, I'll add a fourth), but I also listen to my body if I'm hungry, and adjust my meal intake or I do have a snack that's within the rules to get me to my next meal when the previous one wasn't sufficient.  In that next meal, I'll go overboard on the good stuff to be sure I'm good and full.

It's funny, I don't recall being so full so often in my life...and certainly never being so full on tasty food where I consistently lose weight and fat.

The good stuff to load up on are mainly cruciferous veggies - broccoli, spinach, kale, baby broccoli (which is a hybrid of kale and broccoli), chard, etc.  It all sautés nicely, goes well in soups, omelets, fritadas, etc. But throwing in an egg, or a cup (or two) of lentils is a fantastic idea. Lentils are amazing.  Super rich in protein, filling, and can be very tasty (they take seasoning well when cooking them).

A suggestion I'd make is to eat your 3 squares according to the rules, but for the first week or two, try adding a mid-afternoon salad.  A big salad.  Try getting a hard boiled egg in there.  I did this for the first two weeks, and it really helped.  And sprinkle some chia seeds on it.  Then, before bed, do what Tim suggests - have a tablespoon of almond butter or something similar to get some protein and fat in you to ride you through the night. You'll sleep better, and you may just find, like me, that your weight and fat are lower on mornings after doing that than on mornings when you don't.  I was shocked.

I started to figure out good recipes I'd want to eat that were totally within the rules and actually simple to make, which helped me make bigger meals I'd eat all of, and so now I tend to eat 3 meals instead of 4.  I'll share some in the future, but you can also download The Slow Carb Cookbook from our Resources page to get started.