Learn how to be a thin person

Here's a test to find out if you are at heart a fat person or a thin person. Do you know the meaning of 'full'? Do you know the meaning of 'too much'? If you're staying at the Pritikin Longevity Centre, the answer to these questions is probably 'No'.

One of the educational goals of the programme is to inculcate the distinction in its overweight clients between being 'not hungry' (satiety) and being full. The issue is psychological and existential; Pritikin treats it strictly as a strategic nutritional problem. "Hungry people are simply not good at eating less," Jay Kenny, one of the resident nutritionists and something of a sardonic swami, said in his lecture on 'Calorie Density and the Biology of Weight Control' which is the cornerstone of the Pritikin approach of not starving or stuffing yourself.

"Cravings are learned food circumstances.

Nobody needs chocolate. They want it, but they don't need it." At one point, when Kenny got onto the vexing issue of calorie-dense olive oil ("If you're putting three teaspoons on your salad, you might as well put on a scoop of ice cream"), a stroppy Liverpudlian woman chimed in: "There's such a thing as pleasure to life!" Kenny, who is bean pole thin, shrugged his bony shoulders. "I feel like I'm talking to a bunch of crack-heads," he smiled.

The Pritikin weight control system comes down to this: calories in, calories out. Without doing anything, in each day's business of existing, the body naturally burns a certain amount of calories. This is called Resting Metabolic Rate - a crucial number which, for a small charge, Pritikin will measure for each guest. (Mens' rates tend to be higher than women's; mine was 1,640 calories per day). If you add exercising calories to the RMR - say 560 for an hour on the treadmill - you have 2,200 calories or less to eat that day; if you don't exercise, you have to keep your caloric intake below the RMR in order not to gain