3. Adjust your eating habits for maximum energy.
Your goal at this stage in your life is to keep yourself feeling full without succumbing to the temptation to eat like you could at age 20. One strategy recommended by internist Julie Taw, MD, of Englewood, New Jersey, is to eat more frequently but to consume less at each sitting. An added benefit of eating this way is that it's easier to keep your blood sugar steady, so you don't have the peaks and valleys that contribute to fatigue.
Here's the rule: Try eating five to six small meals a day, and don't go more than three or four hours without eating. For example, you might eat a healthy breakfast before you leave for work, then have a nonfat yogurt in the late morning. Then instead of eating a big pasta lunch and spending the afternoon in a stupor, eat a light lunch and spend the rest of your lunch break taking a brisk walk. An afternoon snack of trail mix and an apple keeps you from needing the 4 p.m. sweet treat and makes it easier to avoid overeating at dinner.
Your goal is the opposite of the starvation approach to dieting -- you want to trick your body into feeling satisfied and well-fed at all times, though the total amount you're eating is less.
4. Time your eating to take advantage of your body's natural rhythms.
Experts are sure of one thing: Snack (or eat dinner) after 9 p.m., and whatever you eat goes straight to your hips and stomach. Happily, the opposite is also true -- what you eat in the mornings, when your metabolism is revved up to its optimum operating speed, is much more likely to be expended efficiently.
Don't like to eat breakfast? Sorry, but there's no way around this one; eating a good breakfast is one of the key habits experts have identified that keeps thin people thin. When members of the National Weight Control Registry (people who have maintained a weight loss of 30 pounds for between one and six years) were surveyed, 78 percent reported eating breakfast every day and almost 90 percent reported eating breakfast at least five days a week. This was one of the only factors researchers identified that those in the registry had in common!
