I’ve been reading for a little, since just before I started my own weight loss goals and started a blog too and I won’t offer any remedies for it but I too had a several years long headache. I strongly considered decapitation some days.

In 1998-99 I lost 43 pounds using the points system with WW and have maintained the weight loss. During my 7-month journey with WW, I didn’t do the exercise part. Now here I am 11 years later at the age of 64 and all my weight is in my midsection. I know I need to exercise, but never seem to be able to stick to it. Maybe I can do 10 minutes a day and build on it.

It seems he’s most interested in increasing relative muscle mass and doing other body tinkering that is beyond the scope of most work-a-day people. The Ultimate Diet 2.0, for example, has some pretty severe pre-requisites in terms of nutritional requirements and accumulated time spent in body building prior to starting the diet. For the day-to-day maintainer, he’s not our guy. If he says anything about the cravings/impulses we’ve been discussing here, especially as experienced by radical weight-loss maintainers, I couldn’t find it in my scan.

She says she still has to limit her calories in order to maintain her lower weight, and that she does not always enjoy doing so! She says she’d “rather eat chocolate all day”! (What she does is allow a small treat last thing at night. She says it helps her to stick to her diet during the day knowing there’s a treat coming.)

I had wicked cravings even when I was thin. It was a long time before I gained weight, but when I did, the cravings certainly contributed to it!

The first time I read the chapter, I thought it had been written by someone who had never had a craving, or at least not a strong one (bite me too, bitch!)! But she has probably worked with people who have them. She says that you often need to try 5 or 6 different distractions from a craving before it works, so she does recognize that distracting yourself from a craving is not easy.

I’m still skeptical that my cravings will go away completely as I keep doing this, but the only way to find out is to give the techniques in the book my *best* shot, so that’s what I’m doing.

I forgot to mention that exercise can help control the hyperinsulinemia situation and of course, a low carb diet. But until body fat is reduced, the cravings will continue, even if you’re on a diet and exercising.

For the record, my cravings last for 3 hours at a time. It is very difficult to wait out a craving for that amount of time. I would be interested to see how long cravings last for other people.