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Obesity is one of the major health problems in our culture. Obese people are at great risk for diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Most obese people simply eat too much. But many also eat incorrectly. If you are tired of being over-fat you should consider, a major restructuring of your daily meal regimen.

You must commit yourself to eating three moderate meals a day starting with a nutritious breakfast, a low-fat lunch and dinner, and no in-between-meal snacking (with the possible exception of a nutritious snack between lunch and dinner). The trick is to never allow yourself to become hungry or starved because you missed a meal. And always leave a meal feeling satisfied—not full or stuffed.

If you are not obese, you probably don't have to make radical changes in your eating pattern. Just be on the look-out for ways to substitute foods you are presently eating for foods that will give you better energy and less fat. For instance, if you are eating large amounts of ice cream, meat, cheese, peanut butter, fast foods, restaurant cooking, fried or fatty foods, sweets, booze, coffee and soda pop, then you've got plenty to begin substituting.

The question is what will you put in the place of the foods you want to cut back on? Breakfast is a good place to think creatively. What can you have in place of the typical breakfast of coffee and eggs, or milk and dried cereal? Think of it this way: You owe it to yourself to have one orange per day. That's 365 per year! Oranges have Vitamin C. If you don't get enough of it, your teeth fall out. There are lots of vitamin C sources, but an orange will give you your daily requirement in one tasty package.

Try squeezing an orange into a bowl. Then chop a banana and half of a ripe pear into the bowl with papaya, and a garnish of granola, nuts and raisins. Notice how your body craves fruit for breakfast. It's different from eating sweets. Your body wants fruit; it doesn't want sweets. Fruit takes a while to digest, so it provides good energy through the morning. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. A good breakfast will raise your blood sugar level and keep it up naturally, without coffee, through most of the morning. If your energy begins to flag, have another banana.

Avoid the syndrome of eating little or nothing in the morning, feeling starved at noon, rapidly eating a large and fatty lunch, and feeling lethargic in the afternoon. The quick-fix coke or donut creates a surge of energy, but it runs out quickly leaving you feeling tired because your body has over-compensated in an effort to even out your blood sugar level. If you don't have a nutritious afternoon snack, by evening, you are starved again. If you overeat in the evening—or any time when your energy demands are low—excess calories will be turned to fat. Remember, your body interprets the time between large, infrequent meals as a period of "starvation." As a hedge against starvation, it slows down your metabolism and turns a greater proportion of your food to fat.

Being thin means eating before you are hungry or starved, and stopping before you are full or stuffed. This middle area is "being satisfied." If you can discipline yourself to feel satisfied after meals, you will lose weight if you need to, or maintain an ideal weight if you are there already.

Your body responds best to small and regularly spaced meals that give you just enough calories for the next few hours. The human body evolved on such "grazing" diets. So if you want to be healthy and slender, eat as pre-historic people did.