Hungry - why do we sometimes get the munchies?

I had the serious munchies yesterday.

I had them all day, and it played hell with my will power and my ability to stick to my diet.

I have done very well over the past few weeks, and have lost around a stone in weight. I have roughly another stone to go, and I am feeling relatively confident that I can make it. Munchies aside of course.

What is it about some days that you simply feel starving all day regardless of the amount you eat? I blame my hormones (well I am the right age and I might as well, they have such a bad reputation any way) but surely other people feel like this and they can’t all be hormonal?

My chosen diet at the moment does as much as it can to help by providing a daily snack which you are supposed to save up for your ‘weak’ time of day and by permitting you two daily fruit snacks as well. Yesterday, I had my breakfast, my morning fruit, my lunch with permitted soup plus an allowed bread roll and a yoghurt, my afternoon fruit and my savoury snack and by late afternoon I was still starving! It was ages until dinner, and I am was in serious danger of buckling under the smell of the fast food as I entered Victoria station tonight. I almost had to go home with a peg on the end of my nose!

I am using a diet from a company called Diet Chef, which is essentially a fully catered diet using old fashioned calorie counting as its basis. And it works. You get an allowance of 1200 calories a day of which they provide approximately 800 in a pre prepared breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack. You make up the remainder by plenty of fruit and vegetables and a small amount of carbohydrate. There is plenty of choice (you get to pick your month’s meal selection yourself from a set of drop down choices) and without exception everything I have eaten so far has been tasty. The portions are smaller than you would cook yourself, but reasonably filling. You can have the odd night off (for instance if you are out with friends for dinner) as long as you don’t do it too regularly. All in all, I am quite impressed. It’s just as well, because I had to sign up for four months and it was expensive.

I have tried numerous other ways over the years from Atkins (which did make me lose weight but I got terrible wind, constipation and bad breath) to detoxing (which is just weird) through very odd pills which 'cleanse' your colon and stop you absorbing fat to Weight Watchers (where I was hungry ALL the time and which, judging from the lardy women that attend their meetings week after week, doesn’t work long term). None of them were terribly successful and all of them, in their own way, were unpleasant. I didn’t stick at anything longer than a month.

I have been doing this for almost seven weeks now, so my weight loss is averaging just over 2lb a week, which is the recommended amount if you want to keep the weight off long term. I have another two and a bit months to go (I can’t afford to do it for any longer) to get down to a goal weight I haven’t seen for about 15 years. If I can do it, I am promised a pair of Armani jeans by The Hubby.

Now that we have the dog of course, and now that she is old enough to go out for walks, I hope to accelerate the rate of loss by taking her out daily and for at least one long walk at the weekend. She is still a baby and can’t walk for hours, but an hour’s play in the field will be an hour longer than I would have done before. It should help me lose weight, tone up my thighs and calves, tighten up my belly muscles and improve my heart. A lot is riding on this, so it better bloody work!