My over-eating is not going away, and I am still gaining small amounts of weight against an increasing amount of training. This is reversible, I know, if I could stick to a good diet. But it just shows how persistent cravings can be, even when you know what you’re doing, and are exercising enough to burn calories.

My own problem is partly portion control, partly too much bread, and partly eating the kids’ leftovers. I’m sympathetic to the idea that age is making it more difficult too. Am I insulin insensitive?

With the question of cravings in mind, Mark Sisson’s Daily Apple produced this very good checklist for those suffering hunger pangs for certain types of the bad stuff. There’s good news for chocolate-lovers, so do go investigate Mark’s site. There is a great post today about how pumpkin extract may prove to be a natural means to help reverse diabetes.

Another common fault of mine is eating at the wrong time. The New Scientist reported a couple of weeks ago on research led by Andrey Ptitsyn of Colorado State University, Fort Collins, showing how our genes are much more active over a 24-hour cycle than previously thought, and that the amount of light we experience may play a key role in regulating mood and the impact of our diet:-

The findings suggest that interfering with the body’s circadian rhythm could have profound effects, particularly on multi-gene traits such as mood, growth and immunity. “Everyone who diets knows you shouldn’t eat late, and now we are getting closer to understanding why,” Ptitsyn says. His team found daily oscillations in genes governed by the hormone leptin, which usually decreases appetite. He suggests the body’s response to food may depend on whether these genes are switched on when leptin is released. “This is perhaps a trivial example,” he says, but the effects could be important in every aspect of health.

He speculates that artificial light could be having hitherto unsuspected effects. “We have only had artificial lighting for maybe 100 years,” Ptitsyn points out, so this might have something to do with the recent rise in obesity.”

My Grandfather was speaking some truth then when he would say of sleep that “an hour before midnight is worth two after.” It did not seem to help him, unfortunately; he was a chronic smoker and died of lung cancer aged 57.

Welcome! If you enjoyed this article you might also like my interview with Black Swan author Nassim Taleb, who has been described as the hottest thinker in the world (by the way, the Knackered Hack is one of the few blogs Taleb links to from his own homepage). To stay in touch, feel free to sign up to the RSS feed or for regular email updates. You can follow me on Twitter by clicking here.

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