A couple of months ago, I set my mind on getting lean, or dare I say athletic.

I tried calorie counting, but after 2 months I didn’t really see any improvement (I didn’t measure though, so perhaps it was so gradual that I didn’t notice). Now I have a personal coach at the local gym to try something different. I found his advice to be insightful:

• Decrease calorie density – vegetables are great for this. Be careful not to let yourself be hungry though.
• Stop salting foods – salt makes the body greedy and tricks it into eating more of the salted food.
• Don’t vary foods – not sure how reliable this is, but the hypothesis is that less variety leads to less consumption.
• Eat raw – the pot is a second stomach, by eating raw you spend more energy digesting and take longer to grow hunger again.
• Mind food sequence – components of a meal should be a sorted list, sorted by increasing calorie density.