Originally Posted by Carbonfiberboy

You are absolutely right about enjoying it more. You'll also like yourself more, which is important. Take advantage of that male ego thing and make it work for you. Pose.

I switched over to a ovo-lacto-pisco vegetarian diet when I got out of the army in '69. My wife and I got together in '73 and she already had this same diet. IOW we don't eat mammals or dinosaurs, though we do eat the eggs of the latter. That means eating mostly vegetables, which are quite filling and have a lower calorie content per cubic foot. This is also known as a DASH or Mediterranean Diet, with the meat reduced to zero. We don't eat snacks and make that easy by simply never having them in the house. If I feel the need, I'll put a slice of cheese on a piece of whole wheat toast, and I get an apple every afternoon, a couple hours before dinner.. As we've aged, our metabolisms have slowed, so that we now eat maybe 1/3 of what we ate for dinner in our twenties. The rest of the meals haven't changed that drastically, just a bit smaller, same stuff.

What happens is that your body very conveniently adjusts to what you do to it. It learns. The approach to the small dinner is to simply keep making it slightly smaller. If you feel hungry after, you're reducing it too quickly. The night snacking thing is an addiction and needs to be treated like one. One hit of smack and you're right back where you started. Same thing. The only cure is just don't. Easy to say, but it's the same thing.

It's good to have calories coming in during exercise. I always take a carb drink to the gym, and consume carbs on the bike. If one doesn't, one is likely to come home and clean out the fridge. Just keep the hunger at bay, barely. Everyone's different, so you'll have to feel you way along.

The most important thing to start is to switch over to lower calorie foods. Yes, we eat a lot of beans. There are many, many good vegetarian cookbooks. I'm not talking vegan. Because we're always training to some degree, we also supplement with whey protein isolate. Between us, we go through 5 lbs. of whey protein a month. We get 10g each with breakfast and dinner and another 10g when we do any sort of workout. That works for us.