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i am hungry all the time and i really watch what i eat...i am gaining..i've put on about 15 lbs in a very short time. i eat veggies, grains, tofu smoothies, whole wheat bread and am vigilant against "fatty" foods...but i still gain........

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I hope this isn't a thread-jacking....

There is a massive misconception, truly of mythical proportions, which has been propogated and disseminated through every possible path....

The Food Pyramid is a myth. It is an artifact of an agricultural lobby group's advertising, to try and deal with massive grain surpluses in the late 50's and early 60's. Following the Second World War, the powers that be determined that America would never be dependent on outside sources for food....the Green Revolution turned out to a miraculous success. But what to do with all that grain?

Answer: Feed it to people. Not enough critters on farms to eat it all, so they promoted feeding it to people. That's where the Food Pyramid comes from.

Question: Animals being fattened for slaughter are fed what sort of food? Answer: Grain.

We eat grain, we get fat. It's genetically encoded. Bacteria and yeast have the same genes, also activated by complex carbohydrates. If there is the slightest surplus of carb calories ingested over calories consumed, it all goes straight to fat, via an enzymatic process called de novo lipogenis (new fat creation).

One of the triggers to activate this process is fructose. If high levels of fructose are circulating in the blood (on a relative or comparative basis), while any carb of any sort is also at relatively high concentrations, the enzymes to produce fat from carb are turned on.

Fructose consumption alone virtually totally explains the explosion in Type II diabetes. It near totally explains the obesity epidemic.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q..._uids=15113714

Where's the fructose coming from? Why, it's coming from all that corn that's surplus. It's now become an industrial raw material, for the production of corn sweeteners....fructose-glucose syrups, and the like. Government policy has virtually halted the import of sugar-cane based sweeteners, and a whole industry has grown up around corn sweeteners. That's a powerful lobby group, the industrial food companies.

When we feed lab animals high-fructose diets, their blood lipids (that's tricglycerides) sky-rocket. As do VLDL cholesterol (Very Low Density Lipoproteins). Their insulin resistance goes way up. And their adipocytes (glands which store fat) go into overdrive.

Human experiments haven't given clear answers, probably because there are still too many uncontrolled variables in human diets, and dietary histories.

Geez.....I guess I'm getting way off track, from what started me spewing forth......

Appetite is tightly regulated by protein intake. If you don't get enough protein in at least one meal per day, your hunger will not abate.

Fat does not inevitably make you fat. It matters, and it matters very much, which type of fat you ingest. Omega-3 fatty acids, the long-chain ones only found in fish oil or algae-base DHA supps, work to control the dysregulated triglyceride synthesis induced by fructose. (I don't want to get distracted into fatty acid metabolism here.... A guy has to control his ranting.)

So, read those labels. If it says fructose in there, avoid it. Unless you want to develop Metabolic Syndrome (syndrome X) and Type II diabetes.

Going low-fat often leads to going low protein. Your body will crave those other macronutrients if it's only getting carbs. You can try too hard.

I like to think of things in an evolutionary perspective, from our days as hunter-gatherers, pre-agriculture.

Grains were a seasonal component of diet. Available for maybe 6 or 8 weeks. Grain harvest seems to coincidentally fall about the same time as fruits are most available. Being genetically predisposed to store those carbs (from grain) as fat, triggered by fructose (from fruits), would seem to confer a survival advantage. Fat for a good "harvest season" gets you through the winter.

We aren't subject to feast or famine environmental influences any longer, but our genes don't know that. They're still planning for that winter starvation period that never comes. We're on a never ending "harvest season" dietary pattern.

Anyway, grain-based diets are promoters of obesity, in my view. They're too restrictive in macronutrient content.

Sorry for the hijack.

Lar