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I am normal weight, however, it is a constant ( minute by minute) battle against hunger. Seriously, it is exhausting. 1,200 calories a day is my limit. One crumb more and I gain weight ( literally). I am a very disciplined person and that's what it takes. Screaming discipline to shout down the constant and unrelenting hunger.

I didn't always have this problem. It didn't start until my mid-thirties, so I do know the difference between normal and abnormal. Abnormal sucks!

Honestly....If food is needed in heaven, I am leaving. Hell couldn't be worse.

It might help to adjust your intestinal flora.

While there are between 300-1000 different kinds of intestinal bacteria, 30-40 kinds take up almost all of the physical space. And this group is dominated by two phylum of bacteria, the Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes.

The Firmicutes are evolutionarily newer, are aerobic, and they are very capable of digesting what you eat to provide you with a lot of nutrition. When people consume “probiotics” it means almost exclusively Firmicutes. Most carbohydrates are digested by them.

The Bacteroidetes are evolutionarily much older, are anaaerobic, and exist in the lower bowel and colon, where they mostly digest resistant starch and fiber. They do not provide much nutrition to us while doing so.

Importantly, the Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes exist in an about 75:25% ratio. If you have more Firmicutes in the ratio, your nutrition is better and you tend to gain weight. If you have more Bacteroidetes in the ratio, you do not get as much nutrition from your food and tend to lose weight. But there are many twists and turns to this.

Most people also have a kind of “Archaea” in them, that sort of looks like a bacteria, but isn’t, so much that it is evolutionarily closer to us than to bacteria. Importantly, Archaea eat things that bacteria don’t, especially hydrogen gas, a waste product of bacteria. The Archaea convert it to methane.

This matters, because bacteria digestion is limited by the hydrogen it produces, which poisons the bacteria. Since the Archaea consumes this hydrogen, the bacteria can digest more and for longer. Providing more nutrition to their host.

A bacterial villain is a genus of bacteria called Enterobacter, that is strongly associated with obesity, to the point that when it is put into slim test animals they become obese. In an obese person, they so dominate all the other bacteria that they take up as much as 1/3rd of the space.

More information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmicutes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteroidetes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterobacter

Archaea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanobrevibacter_smithii

Identical twins are nature's clones. They are true clones, like a double-yolk egg. I have brothers who are so "identical" that one has a cowlick that makes his hair fall to the left, and the other has a cowlick that makes his hair fall to the right.

Now they're in their 60s. When we were kids and young adults, both of them had those 4000-cals-a-day-and-never-gain-weight metabolisms, human sea otters who need to consume three times their body weight a day in food.

One of them got married and his wife took him the direction of what most people think is "eating smart," except that it's all wrong. It's screwed up six ways to Sunday. It tells them to avoid fat, especially animal fat. It tells them to eat contrived man-made substitutes such as Crisco instead of lard, and margarine instead of butter. It tells them to eat way way way more starches and carbs than proper proportion for protein and vegetables. The average American food choice is loaded with wheat, as well as heavily processed wheat, like flour. It frowns on eggs, or at least the yolks, one of nature's rare food sources of vitamin D, so "healthy" folks eat just the white! *rolls eyes* Cooking is dominated by olive and other seed oils, like coconut. It attempts to replace animal protein with estrogen-rich vegetable Soy protein, and all kinds of bad things happen.

So that brother, who eats what is called "smart" by convention, got downright beefy at one point, but now has it mostly under control, but it's a chore. The other brother, who remained a bachelor, eats super-simply. And he has retained that metabolism, because he can sure put it away; you have to see it to believe it. When these two were teens, they each burned through a gallon of whole milk a day. They had cloned metabolisms. So to say one is still skinny because of genetics while the other isn't, is clearly in error. They're clones.

So I'm skeptical of what "healthy" is. I know what works in people I see, and it indicates that conventional medicine has it pretty well wrong much of the way.

Also ... I'd been drinking non-fat milk for 35 years, thinking it healthier. Mom (wise mom) suggested I switch back to whole milk. I did, and almost immediately lost four pounds, and it has stayed off. So I am now thinking dairy fat is probably okay, especially hard-cheese and buttermilk dairy fat.

I have a real weakness for sugar, and will ingest a thousand calories easy in a moment of weakness!!! Curse Brach's spice drops!!!!! Believe me, if I didn't burn it off, I'd be a walrus. I try to avoid it and am a lot better at resisting than I used to be.

I do see guys like John Travolta and Val Kilmer, and think, "leave em alone, they're built that way" -- some body types are meant to be heftier and heavier. I think we have standards of "obesity" that are insane. I don't consider many people "fat," that others do.