One more fad to add to your list of diets. But this one is different. First you learn about eating itself and then you do something about it.

Eating times and quantities at those times are different around the world. The American three meals a day is about the minimum number of times. But until recently countries with four, five or even six meals a day had less obesity than the US.

In the US a doctor will warn you off of snacking but in Britain that is what tea time is all about. In the US a doctor will tell you what you eat late at night will go right to fat but in Spain the largest meal of the day is late at night by American standards. Yet until recently those countries trailed the US in obesity.

The people in those countries will feel hungry will feel hungry right on schedule with their traditional meal times. Where Americans will feel hungry three times a day people in other countries will feel hungry four and five times a day. The lesson from this is, hunger is a habit.

It is easy to demonstrate. If you do not ordinarily snack in the evening start doing so, just a small sandwich or a cookie or two. Within a week you will feel hunger for that snack right on schedule. Clearly one path to decreased eating is breaking the habit of eating.

Not only does the number of meals vary but also the quantity and calorie content. The traditional American hearty breakfast started as the meal for farmers and factory workers but even office workers watching their weight indulge in several hundreds of calories of doughnuts and buns yet with a few days practice a breakfast of coffee only will suffice.

Forming new habits is just about as easily said as done. There are two components to hunger. The real one is depressed levels of blood sugar. The false one is Pavlovian, the stomach contracts and saliva becomes more abundant right at the time one expects to eat.

Not only will stomach contractions and salivation be right on schedule but they will be in proportion to the amount of food you expect to eat. So the trick becomes breaking the habit and that is possible with only a little practice. The secret is the outer stomach is a muscle.

Anyone can learn to relax their arms, legs and face completely on demand. Similarly anyone can learn to relax their stomach. Once that happens the primary cause of hunger goes away.

The usual approach of "will power" thinking about not eating only fixates the attention on food and you will likely get hungrier. Thinking about relaxing your stomach not only reduces the hunger pangs but gets your mind off of food.

Once you have learned to relax your stomach you need only remind yourself to do it as it will come naturally. After a week or two of relaxation you will also have broken the habit of being hungry on a particular schedule.

Now of course you need some number of calories a day depending upon your ideal body weight and your activity. One should not deceive one's self on the amount of their activity. A construction worker who is a backhoe operator needs little more calories than an office worker.

Other than losing weight which is a health benefit in itself you can work in other benefits. What you do not eat in calories in one meal can be consumed in another meal. So if you get your breakfast down to just coffee -- and your body will adapt -- you can add a real desert to dinner with the same total calories per day. If pizza is a forbidden item in your diet but if you avoided 600 calories of sweets at breakfast a couple slices of pizza at dinner won't set you back.

Personally I can not recommend a pure coffee breakfast as my experience is something for breakfast means less real hunger, low blood sugar hunger, towards noon. Rather take a suggestion from the Japanese and have a soup for breakfast. I use Raman noodles for breakfast. After a couple weeks of noodles a glazed doughnut for breakfast is a treat but it feels like too much to eat.

Do Raman noodles sound too bland? Use your spice rack with creativity. A few drops of Trinidad Habanero Sauce do a great job of helping you wake up. And after a few weeks you will be looking forward to them and you will end the high calorie breakfast habit. They may be called oriental noodles but they are pasta at heart.

Why do they have so many calories? They don't. Calories are measured per normal weight of food. The noodles come dry. The correct comparison is to the weight of cooked noodles. Dry weight to normal weight is about five to one.

If you have a habit of snacking in the evening there is no problem as long as your total calories for the day are the same. You have to find a way to establish the habits you wish. The real trick of this is to get your stomach off of time of day and quantity expectations.

While not possible for most people due to having a daily schedule, breaking all expectations is a desirable goal. But if you can manage to break all the habits you will become attuned to your blood sugar level. And once you have broken the habits your body will normally consume body fat for energy so the blood sugar needs will level out to your benefit.

With irregular eating habits it is essential to take vitamins which contain 100% of almost everything needed and maybe take two a day. There is no difference between natural and artificial vitamins and no one has found any difference by actually testing on people. When you make a radical change in your diet you don't know what is different without a detailed dietary analysis. Vitamins are a lot easier. As time goes on you can likely cut back or eliminate them all together.

What we eat is also a matter of habit and we do not have to go to other countries to see it. Right here in the US over the last thirty or so years the diets of men and women have diverged. While some part of the "lo cal" lunch restaurant offerings are due to women entering the workforce and eating out regularly, lunch portions were always smaller so there was not a real reason for low calorie lunches.