Hopefully you’ve heard about the
dangers of diet pills—pulmonary hypertension, heart valve damage, and insomnia
are a few of the many side effects. As an alternative, many people come to rely
on coffee and cigarettes with the mistaken notion that these things will help
them lose weight . Let’s take a moment to discuss why that method is no way to
get healthy.

Cigarettes are bad for you. Period. Period . Some people will argue that
smoking will help you lose weight, some will even swear by it, but the only
things you can count on losing through smoking are your good health and your
money. The reason smoking helps some people tame their appetite is because it
satisfies a craving. The excess eating we do is driven by want, not need, so
smokers use smoking to sublimate that urge. Smoking gives them the chance to
put something in their mouth without consuming calories. Other people say that
cigarettes relax them and dull taste buds, which curbs their urge to eat. In turn,
many smokers admit not being able to enjoy the taste of food as much when they
do eat. If a cigarette is a meal, it comes with any number of sides—cancer,
heart disease, emphysema

. Personally I’d rather have a leafy green salad.

Coffee works in a similar way. As far
as your health is concerned, coffee is a much more reasonable vice. But to use
it in place of food can make you nauseous, shaky, and leave a bitter taste in
your mouth. That taste, like the taste of a cigarette, can make it easier to
pass up food simply because it will take on that stale coffee flavor. And while
black coffee doesn’t contain calories, by adding cream, sugar, and flavored
syrups to every cup you can really rake in the calories

Eventually your appetite will catch
up with you, and it will nag more persistently. Calorie shifting requires that
you eat throughout the day in order to hasten metabolism and burn fat quickly.
No matter what you use to suppress your appetite, sooner or later your
metabolic rate will slow to a snail’s pace if you skip meals. While your body
will alert you when it needs to be fed, cravings are largely mental, and there
are plenty of healthy ways to diminish their power over you.

The best way to differentiate hunger
from craving is to evaluate the degree of your urge to eat. It can be helpful
to visualize a scale of one to five in your mind, or even put it down on paper.
One can represent the inclination to eat out of boredom or the desire to taste
something without really feeling hungry. Two through four can represent levels
of hunger, from the initial pangs, to stomach rumbling and lack of energy. Five
will represent extreme hunger. If you pay attention to this scale, and eat only
when you are at a level three or four, you won’t overeat and will never have to
rely on artificial appetite suppressors . Of course, knowing when to stop eating
is important, too. So eat slowly, enjoy your food, and stop as you begin to
become satisfied. You’ll feel a whole lot better once you do the mental work of
tuning in to your body’s signals. After all, calorie shifting is about teaching
your body, not tricking it.