I write again from this 12 oz coffee brew supplemented by a tablespoon of butter and another of coconut oil. I have been exploring it as a simple breakfast with enough fat to hold me over lunch...or so I intend—it may change as I worked out this morning and fully expect my body to ask for food payment. Yesterday, I tried taking out the butter and adding extra coconut oil in its place, but while they are similar in calories, it wasn't the same. Nevertheless, I'll readily admit one attempt a trial does not make!

I do it because I like the idea of a couple small meals with one large one to minimize insulin release, though there is the metabolic camp that thinks we need evenly spaced / evenly sized meals, not that I think that would be a practical application for our ancestors—unless they lived in a vineyard.

Honestly, all of this is dependent on hunger—that's my approach anyway. Oh, how often in past weightloss measures have I fought against it! Drink water they say...work out...swat your face with a flyswatter again and again—do ANYTHING to ignore hunger!

That's stupid.

Sure, it makes sense if a calories-in / calories-out deficit was true (it's not). Maybe what I find interesting is not why so many of us are fat, but why so many of us are relatively thin. I would suspect that not everyone tracks calories (and I've read where not even the foremost experts cannot accurately track daily calories to within 300 kcal)—for that matter a pound of fat does not equal 3500 lbs:

• 1 pound = 453.5924 grams
• 453.5924 * 9 kcal per fat gram = 4082.3316 kcal

Sooby Doo: "Ruh roh!"

More on this here, but let's go ahead and say that's a pound of fat in one person varies wildly from a pound of fat in another.

And so it follows, there's this whole business that a gram of fat in one thing to eat does not equal a gram of fat in another, further curtailing any expectations of accuracy.

And you can't tell me that BMR calculations have any basis on personal application—you can drive a bus through that margin for error!

My point is this: since many people, if not most, do not track their net calories and the ones that do cannot do so reliably, why are we relatively thin? Since there's all sorts of variety at all sorts of calorie amounts, should we not see all sorts of sizes from 100 to 1000 lbs? Instead, we all huddle around the same basic size, all collectively getting fatter as the decades pass since the early 1980s. If calories can vary so wildly, I would suspect weights would as well.

On a micro level, sure, I can drop weight like nobody's business on a low calorie diet; I've lost 40 lbs in six weeks routinely. I even went 116 days on a low calorie diet losing 85 lbs in that span. When I stopped the drive, what happened? You guessed it, I made the climb ALL the way back up to my starting point. It makes sense: in a low energy environment, the body adjusts to scarcity and when times are good, the body prepares accordingly.

The key of course is to get the body in a place where it releases fat to achieve balance, not to try to force it out of balance. And I am re-learning / de-educating myself that we do this by restricting sugars/carbs on a high fat diet. The food industry shoved us onto an intense ride of a high-to-low blood sugar rollercoaster causing insulin to course through our veins while blockheaded government bureaucrats parroted their dogma with charts of pyramids and plates promoting bread and pasta and low fat diets. Talk about dousing a fire with gasoline!

Much more can be said on this (and better documented, I might add), but lemme just say this: perhaps the key for my own weightloss, in a hitting-the-broadside-of-a-barn kind of away, is to avoid sugar and wheat; and eat when I'm hungry. And when hungry, eat lots of fat instead of the old fattening carbs I used to eat.