>>>>>Now, now. Some of us are above our playing weight and spend almost nothing on food. A friend of mine lives about 150 miles from my house and works about 10 minutes from my house. So she comes into town on Monday and stays at my place until Friday when she heads home. She feels guilty (I've never figured out why) for breathing the air in my house or some such nonsense, so she (she calls it 'rent'), cooks up a storm on the weekend and brings food for the week. The problem is (though I have no proof), I think she must have been an army cook because she only seems to know how to cook for a large crowd. There are two people eating the food (she and I). I tend to try to make her feel validated by eating more than I should. So, it's not my fault.
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>>>>My wife is the same way. She loves to cook and tend to cook in huge quantities. Good thing we eat in small portions though.
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>>>A person can do that? Hmmm... maybe that's where I've gone wrong. But I have no more room in my freezer and I hate to throw away perfectly good food.
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>>>Yeah. That's it. I eat more than I should for economic and environmental reasons.
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>>>Actually I firmly believe that it almost doesn't matter how much you eat as long as you work it off, which is something about which, I'm afraid, I'm a tad lax.
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>>Amazingly enough, you can also gain weight from not eating enough. I've lost about 25 pounds since I started working again, mostly because I'm eating on a schedule again. I don't tend to do that when I'm not working because I hate to stop whatever I'm doing to eat something.
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>I think I'm giong to have to take some time to think about that one. Are you sure it's not a function of food quality and type rather than quantity? I know when I'm at home doing nothing, I also tend to eat less, but I snack a little, and what I snack on generally doesn't quite measure up to the quality of the meals she's prepared.

What happens is your body goes into 'starvation' mode and most of what you eat gets converted for storage. I don't really snack much and having spent most of my teens and 20's ignoring being hungry, I generally don't get hungry until I smell food or someone (generally my husband) points out that I haven't eaten in about 10 hours. So, basically, I would eat about 1 meal a day. Now, I'll admit that that meal tended to be larger than it probably needed to be - but that, along with a couple of (large) cups o'coffee and then water during the day would be my 'food' day.