What Our Body Thinks

The most obvious, but least understood, of all the rules of weight control is that to lose fat, you must burn more calories than you consume. This forces the body to use its fat stores for energy. It's as simple as that.

Where it gets more complicated is that the body resists giving up fat stores — fat stores are a survival trait — and slows down the metabolism in response to too few calories.

There are also other physiological conditions at work that contribute to the regulation of metabolism and, ultimately, the amount of fat you store. For instance, the thyroid is one of those tricky glands that can be off slightly and changes the equation. Another is the amount of testosterone in the bloodstream, which is effected by age and the amount of sleep in men.

Almost all of the mechanisms we know about are intended to slow down our ability to burn fat. This is to help us survive.

One Cookie A Day

If you happen to achieve the perfect balance between calorie consumption and calorie burning, you'd maintain your current amount of fat stores on your body. But if you consume just one or two hundred extra calories — about the amount in a single cookie — you would slowly begin to gain weight.

One extra cookie a day (250 calories worth) would add a pound to your fat stores every two weeks. More to the point, you'd add one half pound every single week. If you weighed yourself every single week, you might notice the change but, more likely, you would not notice the change. You would think everything is fine, and you would not take the time to consider where that extra one half pound came from. You would continue to eat a cookie every day in the afternoon with coffee, or perhaps after dinner, for what harm is there in a single cookie?

And that is one of the easiest ways to gain weight, because you are not even aware of the change.

One Lousy, Little Cookie?

Yes, one lousy, little cookie. Even if your grandmother baked it. Even if it's broken, which some people believe makes it calorie free, it still might have enough calories to push you over for the day.

So Should You Never Eat Another Cookie?

Not at all. You need only be aware of the amount of fuel that your body needs, and then avoid the urges to eat more than that. This one cookie thing is just one of about seventeen things we all need to do correctly in order to eat a healthy combination and amount of food.

In modern America, that is one of our greatest health challenges because our product driven culture encourages us to eat diet versions of every food, and I believe those only lead to more confusion.

There really are a number of sound, respected practices that we all are aware of, but have trouble practicing. To review those practices, keep reading.