Eat just one pie, perhaps?

The same friend I mentioned the other day (who tried the non-absorption of fat pills) has been trying to lose weight for the past three years. He is my age, used to play a great deal of sport, mainly rugby and swimming, but once he got into his forties various factors put an end to that - work and family commitments, some joint trouble, that sort of thing - and he started to put on weight. A scare about the condition of his liver (at one time he'd drunk quite freely too) prompted him into dieting.

He does know all about healthy eating and he thinks he does eat pretty well (I don't), but I just can't get him to acknowledge how easy it is to add a vast amount of extra calories to what you eat for no extra goodness. For example, he says that he never buys mayonnaise. Well no, he buys prepared potato salad and coleslaw though, which is laden with the stuff - a little good quality mayo or salad dressing added at home is far better. If he goes to the supermarket on the way home from work, he snaps up the ready-prepared fresh meals, things like crispy pancakes. He points out that they are half-price. I tell him that cheap does not mean good value - besides, that sort of thing costs far more than the price of the ingredients.

He's tried appetite suppression pills, too, but what he does is to go as long as he possibly can without eating, then eat as little as possible. A dramatic weight loss results, but the effect of these pills diminishes with time, so by the time they aren't working and he stops taking them, he has done nothing about getting into a really good healthy eating pattern and weight creeps on again in a few weeks.

I do understand his problem with cooking meals, as he works long hours in a demanding job and lives alone, but yo-yo dieting is the worst of all for good health and, although he loves vegetables and healthy food generally, as well as the fatty German sausages and pork pies, his real weakness is eating just because the food is there. He is unable to leave food on his plate and he never turns down a second helping. He says that he wasn't allowed to leave food uneaten as a child and besides, sometimes there wasn't all that much of it - but when I said that knowing the root cause of a difficulty can show the way to overcoming it, he said that was too hard and he couldn't do it. The thing is, if he can't learn to stop eating when he is no longer hungry, he needs to be even more careful about what he puts on his plate.

I tried, I really did. I encouraged him and cooked food for him, I listened to him and was pleased for him when he lost weight. But I ran out of things to say in the end. I haven't run into him for some time - he has a girlfriend now so tends to spend weekends with her - and maybe she'll have more success.