I come from a family of fat people.

I don't ever remember when Grandma wasn't half as wide as she was tall. Like her, my dad was short, only five-four. All my life he see-sawed between 250 and 300-plus pounds. The copy on advertising giveaways for his business often made a joke of his bulk by referring to him as "Slim Jim."

When my brother was dying of cancer, one Friday his doctor decided to do an MRI the following Monday. The scan would show where to focus radiation treatment to ease his pain. My brother's problem was that his weight exceeded the 400-pound limit of the MRI's patient platform. Having the scan on Monday required taking him home and starving him all weekend to get him down to that weight.

As a teen, I never expected weight to be a problem. While a high-school senior, I placed second in the mile run in the state track meet. When I graduated three weeks later, I tipped the scales at a scrawny 127 pounds. That, however, was the end of my being thin. In spite of jogging six miles every other day for years, my weight gradually but steadily crept up.

Over the next 50 years I went on successive diets. Twice I lost more than 30 pounds on one of America's best-known weight loss programs, only to gain it all back. On another nationally advertised dieting program I took weekly vitamin injections and lost nearly 70 pounds. Again, all the pounds piled back on in the following months.

I'm not a weak-willed person. As a young father, I got to the point of smoking more than two packs of cigarettes per day. One day I decided that for my wife's and sons' sakes I had to quit, and did—cold turkey. That was 40 years ago, and I've never had a cigarette since. So willpower wasn't the solution.

With two master's degrees and a doctorate, neither am I a stupid person. So I asked myself, what's the problem? I realized that my weight issue was that I'm addicted to eating delicious food, and not satisfied until I feel stuffed. I've been trying to change for 50 years and haven't succeeded, and at close to 70 I'm not likely to change.

Five years ago I reached my zenith of corpulence—269 pounds. No diet had any lasting effect. I thought, If I don't do something, I'm going to end up like Grandma, Dad, and my brother. Today, five years after seeing 269 on my scales, they read 209. My solution was calculating how to eat good-tasting, filling food while not gaining weight.

That's what this article outlines: how to make food that's full of delicious flavor and aroma and comes in large, filling servings while being low in fat and calories. It's not a perfect weight-loss plan, but it worked for me. Maybe it would for you.

Creating taste
The first step in weight loss for big eaters is creating food that tastes good. Three factors contribute to making food mouthwatering instead of just edible—flavor, aroma, and texture.

Flavor comes from five basic tastes: sweetness, bitterness, sourness, saltiness, and spiciness. Contrasting these flavors accounts for the appeal of many popular dishes such as Chinese hot-and-sour soup, bittersweet chocolate, and sweet-and-sour pork.

Aroma is the most distinctive feature of many foods. What happens if you step through your front door and smell sugar cookies just out of the oven, fried chicken browning in the skillet, or homemade spaghetti sauce bubbling gently in a stewing pan? Whatever you were thinking outside, suddenly all you think is that something smells good and your mouth is watering.

Texture increases food's appeal. A good example is the popular Chinese-American dish moo goo gai pan. All its flavors are mild. What tantalizes the palate is the chewiness of the broccoli, the softness of sliced chicken and straw mushrooms, the crunchiness of water chestnuts, the slippery feel of broccoli leaves, and the fibery toughness of sliced bamboo shoots.

Texture can be increased in many soup recipes by not pureeing the vegetables. One of my favorite soups includes three carrots that are supposed to be pureed; I cook them into the soup sliced thinly, which gives the soup greater body and makes it more filling. Instead of plain spaghetti, pasta's textural appeal increases when you mix one-third each of a thin pasta such as capellini, a wider variety such as fettuccini, and a bulkier type such as raditori or rotini.

Filling up
The second step in weight loss for chronic overeaters is creating recipes that fill up a big eater. The secret here is using ingredients that have healthy body. The more fiber in food, the more filling it is. Many types of vegetables add both bulk and flavor with very little fat or calories. Onions, celery, cabbage, fennel, and bell peppers are good examples. A one-cup serving of sweet-and-sour stewed cabbage has less than 50 calories and no fat. The same is true of fruits such as peaches and plums, with only 35 to 40 calories, and an apple or a whole grapefruit, with no more than 80.

The more vegetables you can add to recipes, the larger and more filling the servings become. Browning heightens the flavor of meats such as pork tenderloin or chicken, but also of many vegetables such as onions, celery, and bell peppers. Adding a small amount of water releases that flavor to penetrate the meat and blend with it. A small amount of sauce can make a flavorful, filling meal of a stir-fry dish that is mostly vegetables and a small amount of meat over a half-cup of fragrant basmati rice.

Besides vegetables, the more flavored liquid you put in a dish, the more filling a serving becomes. Many soups are transformed into stews by thickening the liquid with a couple tablespoons of tapioca starch or cornstarch, which adds only another 50 calories.

Increase the spices, decrease the meat by half but brown it, thicken the liquid, and increase the vegetables by half, and you increase both the flavor and the serving size. That makes your dish more filling.

Tamping down fat and calories
The third step in weight loss for big eaters is creating food that is also low in fat and calories. I've already mentioned that generally the more vegetables in your food, the fewer calories. Vegetables also have small amounts of fat and calories compared to meat products or even milk. All fat—animal or vegetable oil—has at least 120 calories for every tablespoon. If a recipe lists one-fourth cup (or more likely, one-half cup) of vegetable oil as its first ingredient, that's 500 to 1,000 calories! Instead, use non-stick cookware and non-stick cooking spray to brown meat or vegetables in place of butter or any type of oil. The main ingredient to look for in cooking spray is lethicin (no calories). There are also lots of flavorful recipes for "oven-fried" chicken that use egg whites to hold the breading.

I also buy low-fat or no-fat yogurt, cream cheese, or sour cream, and low-fat egg substitute for cooking. Examine the fat and calorie content on any product you buy. Regular smoked sausage or kielbasa have 50 percent more calories than their low-fat counterparts. The red lentil, carrot, and sausage or creamy Italian sausage stews I make with them are just as rich, with far fewer calories.

I've found several good calorie-free sweeteners with aspartame, such as Equal; sucralose, such as Splenda; and saccharin, such as Sweet'n Low. Each has its advantages and drawbacks. You can use sucralose and saccharine in cooked or baked goods, but aspertame loses its sweetness in stewed or baked dishes. Most sucralose says it measures the same as sugar, but in my experience I have to measure twice as much to achieve the same degree of sweetness. In cold dishes, aspertane works just as well for me as sucralose.

My grandkids love Grandpa's French toast at breakfast. When I was fatter, I served it sprinkled with powdered sugar. Now I sprinkle on sucralose, which isn't quite as fine but works well.
I have found no studies that confirm any negative effects of artificial sweeteners except for persons with specific medical conditions. Sucralose is FDA-approved for use in over 6,000 products, and aspartame has been approved for use in over 100 countries. (For reports on medical studies of sucralose and aspartame, see medicinenet.com, and of stevia, see www.ehow.com.)

My experience is that big eaters—overeaters like me—can lose weight if they follow these three principles:

• Make sure what you cook tastes good to you.
  
• Increase ingredients that make food more filling.
  
• Use substitutes that reduce fat and calories in food without reducing how good it tastes or how well it fills you up.

Do those three things and you'll lose weight and keep it off. I'm no slim chicken, but for the first time since high school, I've lost weight and kept it off.